Modern physics agrees that quantum waves aren’t observable:
“The full quantum wave function of an electron itself is not directly observable…” (Lederman & Hill, 2004), p240.
Nature’s firewall separates us from quantum reality, as any attempt to observe it gives a physical event, so quantum theory describes what can’t be observed. Is it then really scientific? The doctrine that only “…what impinges on us directly is real” (Mermin, 2009), p9, suggests that it isn’t, because:
1. Science is about reality, not imaginary things like fairies.
2. Reality is only what we can physically observe.
3. Thus a theory describing what we can’t observe is about imaginary things, so it isn’t scientific.
By this logic, quantum theory isn’t scientific because it describes what can’t be observed, so why is it the most successful theory in the history of physics? The flaw in the argument is the second statement, that reality is only what we see, which is materialism. If materialism is true, quantum theory isn’t scientific, but materialism isn’t, and never has been, a requirement of science.
For example, the theory of gravity is scientific, but we don’t have to observe gravity, just its effects. Science is actually based on Locke and Hume’s empiricism, that scientific theories must be physically testable. Scientific theories have never needed to describe physical events, just predict them, so quantum theory is scientific because it does that, regardless of what it describes.
The belief that science must describe physical things is called logical positivism, a philosophical movement that began in the 1920s, before quantum theory developed. It is the naive realism that only what we observe exists, so science should reference nothing else. As well as dismissing most of mathematics, it requires sciences like music, fashion, painting, psychology, and linguistics to be about physical events like notes, clothes, brush strokes, behavior, and words, respectively.
Yet positivism has failed every discipline that tried it. Behaviorism tried to reduce all psychology to behavior until Chomsky proved it failed for language, and applying positivism to computing ignores the human and social aspects of socio-technical systems like Twitter. Physics is now the last bastion of logical positivism but even there, it is failing, because physical events can’t, for example, explain what light does, as we have seen. Essentially, logical positivism is materialism masquerading as an axiom of science when it isn’t, so quantum theory is just as scientific as any other theory.
According to logical positivism, physical reality exists whether its observed or not, so removing the observer redues bias. According to quantum theory, physical events are triggered by observation, so the observer is inherent to our reality. If quantum theory is true, we live in a participative universe based on observer-observed interactions, so to ignore the observer is to ignore half of reality. Attempts to ban the observer from science then fail because even in physics, quantum theory needs an observer to trigger quantum collapse and relativity needs an observer frame of reference.
If we accept that quantum theory is scientific, then science doesn’t have to describe physical things. After all, we can’t see a ray of light from the side, only head-on, but that doesn’t make it not exist, so quantum waves could exist even though we can’t see them. Quantum science says that physical events arise when an observer interrogates quantum reality, just as a click creates a view in a game, so the long-sought boundary between the classical and quantum worlds is the click of observation. However this conclusion then produces what physics calls the measurement problem.