Ode to the Weekend That Overthrew Quantum Mechanics

Come, sing of the Saturday scholar, Whose laptop, courageous and bright, Destroyed a century’s physics Between supper and Sunday night. For Feynman, poor ignorant fellow, Had puzzled and lectured in vain; Till Gemini entered the parlour And Python abolished his pain. No Copenhagen! No mystery! No troublesome complex affair! Just parameters fed to a programme And—Christ!—there was reality there. One hundred point zero percent conserved! The particles all remained whole! A triumph—provided one quietly forgets That conservation was never the bloody goal.

For counting the actors at curtain Does not tell us why they took shape; A simulation preserving its objects Is not Nature caught making escape. Yet onward rides Structural Realism, With banners magnificently unfurled: “I coded the answer this weekend— Therefore I have corrected the world.” No wavefunctions darken the doorway, No amplitudes clutter the screen; We simply removed the mathematics And declared what remained more serene. How elegant! How wonderfully simple! How free from institutional sin! The model produces the pattern That the model was written to put in.

For there is a charming distinction, Which revolutions sometimes forget: To reproduce a graph by assumption Is not to explain the experiment yet. A trajectory may dance very prettily, A field metric may bow and perform; But Nature is not obliged to surrender Because Python has executed without warning. And poor old Feynman lies conquered, His lectures reduced to debris, By a weekend, a chatbot, a GitHub, And one exceptionally confident README. So download it, gentlemen, test it! Red-team every glorious line! For open code is excellent practice—

But it does not make metaphysics divine. A model is judged by prediction, By novelty, constraint, and test; Not merely because its equations Have been aesthetically put out to rest. Bring new numbers no rival predicted. Let experiment choose who is wrong. Let RealQM risk execution Where orthodox physics stands strong. Then physicists may pay attention, And textbooks may genuinely shake; For science adores a rebellion—

When the rebellion survives a mistake. Until then, spare us the funeral For quantum mechanics just yet; A century is awkward to bury Because your Python returned no exception set. So here’s to the independent thinker, To scepticism, code, and good cheer; But overturning the foundations of physics Takes rather more than a fucking weekend, my dear.