Thanks Bert and Bo;
Very interesting … I really don't know the answer to this question myself, so I really appreciate everyone's views on it.
It just seems to me that it is frequently said that a system is 'fundamentally behaving in a quantum mechanical way', because we cannot understand it with a classical model.
But perhaps QM kind of soaked up what might have been missing from the assumptions about single particle behaviours, which were kind of 'missed out' when classical mechanics was developed ?
There seems to be an inordinate amount of time and energy expended trying to "unite the two worlds" into a common 'framework' and yet, it kind of occurs that maybe the 'gap' (or discontinuities) which everyone is focussing on, may actually simply be more about, (for want of a better term), 'finger-pointing', aimed at highlighting the errors originally made by expecting single particles to behave in ways, they basically never did in the first place … and, perhaps it is simply 'expectations' that are in error.
For example, the double slit experiments seem to end up being described as 'fundamentally quantum mechanical', because the interference patterns can't be explained when we 'imagine' the way we think a single particle could possibly behave. Perhaps this is purely because our 'imaginings' about how particles behave, simply weren't accurate in the first place, and we were missing something fundamental in the classical descriptions of how particles in nature
really behave (??)
Is any of this saying anything fundamental about nature/the system, or is it saying something about our models ?
Are there any physical behaviours of a quantum system which don't depend on an expectation of how we think classical particles behave ?
Cheers