What part of quantum physics do you think isn’t understood? Quantum mechanics is the foundation of modern physics so much so that it seems very mundane by the time you're done with grad school. It's not only the relevant to what's going on in physics-y things like colliders and quantim computers but it's the basis of our understanding of the properties of materials, chemical reactions, MRI, transistors, and geckos' feet.
There are two pieces of quantum mechanics that don't quite mesh with other things we know about reality. The first is quantum gravity, which the physics community thought was just around the corner for decades, and which now I think most people feel we aren’t going to definitively answer until we can probe significantly higher enery scales to be certain which of the possible approaches is correct. Most people don't really expect this to change what we understand about the way quantum mechanics works (which you can derivce from classical physics plus the uncertainty principle). I fully do not believe that quantum gravity will be figured out by 2050, because it hasn't happened in the last 80 years, and we've been stuck at the "maybe string theory?" stage for about 50.
The second "missing piece" is related to decoherence and wave function collapse. It's weird the extent to which certain parts of the community think this is a solved problem by just hand-waving it all as decoherence. But a diagonal density matrix isn't the same as picking one specific outcome, and so you need something like many worlds (which actually has a significant problem in that probabilities don't emerge correctly, which is generally also ignored) to ensure everone only sees one outcome.
I don't expect this to be solved by 2050 either because A) vanishingly few people seem to care B) the answer doesn’t affect much of anything C) most hypothetical sutions are untestable even in principal (some involve non linearities or relationships between mass and collapse rate that are testable in principal, but I think most of those have been ruled out).
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What part of quantum physics do you think isn’t understood? Quantum mechanics is the foundation of modern physics so much so that it seems very mundane by the time you're done with grad school. It's not only the relevant to what's going on in physics-y things like colliders and quantim computers but it's the basis of our understanding of the properties of materials, chemical reactions, MRI, transistors, and geckos' feet.
There are two pieces of quantum mechanics that don't quite mesh with other things we know about reality. The first is quantum gravity, which the physics community thought was just around the corner for decades, and which now I think most people feel we aren’t going to definitively answer until we can probe significantly higher enery scales to be certain which of the possible approaches is correct. Most people don't really expect this to change what we understand about the way quantum mechanics works (which you can derivce from classical physics plus the uncertainty principle). I fully do not believe that quantum gravity will be figured out by 2050, because it hasn't happened in the last 80 years, and we've been stuck at the "maybe string theory?" stage for about 50.
The second "missing piece" is related to decoherence and wave function collapse. It's weird the extent to which certain parts of the community think this is a solved problem by just hand-waving it all as decoherence. But a diagonal density matrix isn't the same as picking one specific outcome, and so you need something like many worlds (which actually has a significant problem in that probabilities don't emerge correctly, which is generally also ignored) to ensure everone only sees one outcome.
I don't expect this to be solved by 2050 either because A) vanishingly few people seem to care B) the answer doesn’t affect much of anything C) most hypothetical sutions are untestable even in principal (some involve non linearities or relationships between mass and collapse rate that are testable in principal, but I think most of those have been ruled out).
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