This letter was published in the Nov. 2008 issue of AJP, written by N. G. van Kampen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He was responding to an article published earlier in the same journal by Hrvoje Nikolić titled "Would Bohr be born if
Bohm were born before Born?".
I wouldn't say that van Kampen's views on this is exactly like mine, but I think I can concur with him at the minor annoyance at the continued problems among physicists at reconciling that the "quantum world" may not be anywhere similar to the "classical world", and that all of these conceptual difficulties could be entirely due to us using classical concepts and forcing it to work in the quantum regime. For example, he wrote this:
The difficulty is that the authors are unable to adjust their way of thinking—and speaking—to the fact that phenomena on the microscopic scale look different from what we are accustomed to in ordinary life. That two electrons far apart may be entangled seems strange to someone who still thinks of electrons as individual particles rather than as manifestations of a wave function.
This is what I mean by forcing our classical concepts into the quantum world. There's nothing a priori that indicates that such an exercise is meaningful, or even valid. We simply do it because we are familiar with the classical world, not that we know the classical concept works in the quantum regime. Thus, we still use the concepts of classical particle, energy, position, momentum, etc... in extracting information from the classical regime, mainly because we don't have anything else to use, but we shouldn't fool ourselves that these concepts are meaningful there.
van Kempen went on to tackle quickly the issue of the double-slit experiment, the "measurement problem", and possibly the "Schrodinger Cat".
If you access to AJP, this might be something you want to read.
Zz.
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