Mike, James, Alex, and anybody who claims that GPT is a dependable source of information,
Analogies are very useful for abduction (Peirce's word for educated guesses). They must be checked for internal consistency by deduction, and they must be tested for consistency with the subject matter by deduction from currently established theories, and induction with observations that are not adequately explained by current theories.
The best that can be said about comparing quantum mechanics to pointilism is that that it is a clever idea that supports some interesting comparisons. But there is an enormous amount of work required to develop a detailed mathematical theory of that comparison, check it for internal consistency of the parts of the theory and external consistency with the well established theories of QM. If both of those checks are OK, the idea would be an interesting example for teaching QM.
But those checks would not add anything to existing theory. They just add new ways of talking about it. It those ways lead to simpler math and better teaching methods, then they would be a very useful addition to current explanations of QM.
But to make new contributions to QM. the new theory must make further predictions that go beyond current theories. That requires induction to test the applicability of the theory beyond what is already known.
From the current evidence, the pointillist theory hasn't yet reached the first step. It's possible that it might be developed into a good teaching tool for current QM, but there's a huge amount of work to be done.
As far as the new theory leading to totally new discoveries, that is an enormously difficult issue. Since over a century of research by the best physicists in the world have gone into the current theories, I strongly doubt that the new version would go beyond what is currently known.
Note that the above comments are written by somebody (me) who took some courses in QM and advanced QM theories and applications in the 1970s. I have done a fair amount of reading of popular source, such as the Scientific American since then. But I have not done any detailed R & D on QM since them. But note that I was able to give a far more detailed analysis of the issues than anything that GPT could produce.
Conclusion: Wikipedia (which is updated by leading professionals in every branch of science) is a far, far better source for answers (with reliable references for further study) than anything produced by GPT. If you're searching for solid advice on an advanced topic in any field, Wikipedia (and more advanced reference documents on the WWW) are much, much more trustworthy than anything you get from GPT.
And that is true of every advanced topic in any branch of science, philosophy, engineering, etc. Don't trust anything generated by generative AI without doing at least a Wikipedia search.
John
From: "Alex Shkotin" <alex.shkotin@gmail.com>
See also, from https://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/quantum-science-explained/ask-expert-quantum/quantum-gravity-adhikari-zurek
Sometimes I think about the quantum world as a pointillism painting. When you look at the painting from a distance, of course, it just looks like an ordinary painting. But as you start to zoom in to it on smaller and smaller scales, you start to notice that there's more structure there. And, in fact, rather than it being a continuous object, you start to notice that it's actually made up of individual points. And as you zoom in further and further, you can see the individual points, the quanta, that make up that painting. And that's what we do in particle physics. We're zooming in on smaller and smaller structures, smaller and smaller scales.
James Davenport
Hebron & Medlock Professor of Information Technology, University of Bath
National Teaching Fellow 2014; DSc (honoris causa) UVT
Former Fulbright CyberSecurity Scholar (at New York University)
Former Vice-President and Academy Chair, British Computer Society