Jacob Barandes is a professor of physics at Harvard (not a crank).
He recently did a great podcast with Kurt Jaimungal [1]. In the interview he explains that every year he searches for a good way to introduce his students to quantum mechanics, and every year he's ended up being unsatisfied with the approach and started again.
One year he decided to attempt describing systems with traditional mechanics, using probabilities (stochastic mechanics). He worked at it and worked at it, assuming that he would eventually have to take some leap to cross the chasm into the world of gauge theory, Lie Groups, and Hilbert spaces. What he found is, to his surprise, the math just seemed to fit together at some point. That is, he found a mapping, just as the path integral is a mapping into the math of the wave function, and it just kind of worked. He had been under the assumption that it shouldn't.
It turns out, that in doing his stochastic mechanics, he had used mathematical descriptions that were indivisible. That is once a given process began, it could not be sliced into smaller and smaller time slices. It had to complete and yield a result. This was what he called a non-Markov stochastic process. Apparently all previous attempts at this used Markov processes, which are divisible like Hilbert vector calculations or the path integral.
It turns out that things like "collapse" of the wave function, and all the quantum weirdness arose from how the math worked with the wave function and Hilbert space, not from anything intrinsic to the mechanics of the universe (at least that's what his equivalent math was telling him). So in his stochastic non-Markov model, there is no collapse, just decoherence. There is always a result, and the intermediate states (where all the quantum oddities live) aren't real.
He mentions being really disappointed at seeing all the magic of quantum mechanics just kind of vanish. From what he could tell, it was just a trick of the wrong kind of math.
Mathematicians, even from prestigious universities, have been wrong before. It's the danger of a discipline that doesn't yet have machine-checkable proofs.
I'm not saying he's correct because he's from Harvard, but he's not some crank outside the system to be lightly dismissed. He's firmly in the mainstream of physics and foundations of physics and seems to have gotten a new result. Time will tell.
He recently did a great podcast with Kurt Jaimungal [1]. In the interview he explains that every year he searches for a good way to introduce his students to quantum mechanics, and every year he's ended up being unsatisfied with the approach and started again.
One year he decided to attempt describing systems with traditional mechanics, using probabilities (stochastic mechanics). He worked at it and worked at it, assuming that he would eventually have to take some leap to cross the chasm into the world of gauge theory, Lie Groups, and Hilbert spaces. What he found is, to his surprise, the math just seemed to fit together at some point. That is, he found a mapping, just as the path integral is a mapping into the math of the wave function, and it just kind of worked. He had been under the assumption that it shouldn't.
It turns out, that in doing his stochastic mechanics, he had used mathematical descriptions that were indivisible. That is once a given process began, it could not be sliced into smaller and smaller time slices. It had to complete and yield a result. This was what he called a non-Markov stochastic process. Apparently all previous attempts at this used Markov processes, which are divisible like Hilbert vector calculations or the path integral.
It turns out that things like "collapse" of the wave function, and all the quantum weirdness arose from how the math worked with the wave function and Hilbert space, not from anything intrinsic to the mechanics of the universe (at least that's what his equivalent math was telling him). So in his stochastic non-Markov model, there is no collapse, just decoherence. There is always a result, and the intermediate states (where all the quantum oddities live) aren't real.
He mentions being really disappointed at seeing all the magic of quantum mechanics just kind of vanish. From what he could tell, it was just a trick of the wrong kind of math.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/7oWip00iXbo