In 2013 Hobson published a paper in the American Journal of Physics in 2013 entitled "There Are No Particles, There Are Only Fields," reminiscent of Schrödinger's similar 1952 papers - Are There Quantum Jumps?, Part I and Part II. >p/> The point of the paper is to show that every" quantum" (every quantum object such as an electron or photon) is an indefinitely-spatially-extended object. As Louis de Broglie described it in 1924, each electron (or other quantum) "fills all space"!

In 2017 Hobson published Tales of the Quantum, a remarkable book that tries to clarify the many disagreements about the interpretation of quantum mechanics among physicists, as well as between philosophers of science and "pseudoscientists" who have written financially very successful books that exploit the apparent mysteries in quantum mechanics.

The book aims to clarify the relationship between the wave and particle aspects of quantum objects (wave-particle duality), to defend the fundamental randomness in quantum processes (ontological chance), explain how something can be in two places at the same time, and to understand quantum jumps (which Erwin Schrödinger famously denied along with the existence of spatially localized point particles).

In Tales, Hobson also discusses the problem of measurement from the decoherence point of view, in which "nothing ever happens" without a "collapse" of the universal wave function. Decoherentists sometimes describe the problem of measurement as "never seeing any macroscopic superpositions."

Hobson tackles the difficult problem of macroscopic irreversibility (the increase in global entropy demanded by the second law of thermodynamics) with the assumed microscopic reversibility of atomic and molecular collisions.

The book has several excellent illustrations to explain the puzzling experimental observations. Hobson covers the full range of important quantum processes with this highly readable and non-mathematical account.

Also in 2017, Hobson used the diabolical "Schrödinger's Cat" experiment to explain "measurement" as well as the "superposition principle" that underlies "being in two places at the same time."

Like Schrödinger (and Einstein), Hobson decides in the "particles or fields" debate on the side of fields only. This is of course Einstein's dream of a "unified field theory "and Steven Weinberg's "dream of a final theory" (of fields). Particles are "singularities" that only appear to be discrete objects in what is actually a continuous field.

Hobson reflects on Einstein's concern in the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox that physics should describe an objective local reality, rather than the "nonlocality" found in the experimental confirmation in recent decades of what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." Entangled particles apparently show faster-than-light influences between one experiment and a second experiment in a distant "spacelike" separation. Einstein's 1905 special relativity showed that no "causal" effects can connect events outside one another's light cones.

More recently, Hobson proposes to resolve the quantum "measurement" problem. He puts "measurement" in quotes because it is often taken to require a "measurer" or a "conscious observer" who "collapses the wave function," namely a physicist working in the lab who makes the measurement. Hobson says correctly that measurement is everywhere; it's the link between the quantum and the macroscopic [classical] world." (p.191.)

In 2024, Hobson published the book "Fields and their Quanta: Making Sense of Quantum Foundations." In his preface, he writes...

Questions surrounding the reality and meaning of the wave function, and wave-particle duality, are resolved by taking our more accurate and inclusive theory - quantum field theory - seriously as a description of the overarching reality. Quantum field theory stands behind the many successes of the Standard Model of high-energy physics. Standard quantum physics is simply the low-energy limit of this theory. Our thinking about quantum foundations must take the larger theory seriously: The universe is a set of quantized fields. The quanta of these fields are not "particles." As de Broglie put it, each electron, in principle, fills the entire universe... All quanta are simply excitations or waves in underlying universal fields.

Fields, p.viii

In the low-energy, non-relativistic limit of quantum field theory, Hobson's field is de Broglie's wave, or the modern wave-function Ψ, wherever there is a non-zero probability of finding the associated "particle," or as Hobson says, the "quantum" of the field.

In chapter 9 on Entanglement, Nonlocality, and Special Relativity, Hobson says that nonlocality "follows immediately from the unity of the individual quantum and is written all over QP [quantum physics]." "nonlocal correlations were baked into QP when Max Planck proposed energy quantization in 1900." (Fields, p.158)

The canonical example of nonlocality is two entangled photons that travel to be detected by Alice and Bob. Hobson writes

Alice, who presides over a laboratory housing detector A1/A2, detects the entangled photon A. Bob, in a distant laboratory housing detector B1/B2, detects photon B. Theoretically, Alice and Bob could reside in distant galaxies...

Entanglement enables Alice to instantly collapse Bob's photon simply by detecting her own photon. Furthermore, she can instantly alter the correlations between her outcomes and Bob's outcomes...So, there is real action, instantaneously, across an arbitrary distance. This raises an obvious question: Does quantum nonlocality violate SR's prohibition on instantaneous signaling?...

Fields, p.163

No Particles, Only Fields

Response to Nico van Kampen

Schrödinger's Cat

Entanglement and the Measurement Problem