[breadAndWater]

  The basic principle of the technique was 
  proposed almost 50 years ago by the physicist 
  Walter Hoppe, who reasoned that there should 
  be enough information in the diffraction data 
  to work backwards to produce an image of the 
  diffracting object.

This kind of statement just absolutely cracks me up, because it's a clear reveal that between this sort of awareness of diffraction principles, and concepts like pilot wave theory, that double slit experiments and entanglement haven't been mysterious for decades.

It's all just media manipulation. There are very firmly understood concepts backing all the mechanics of quantum effects, and the journalists that push the ambiguities are simply trolling would-be amateurs for to fan the flames of confusion as a sort of outsider performance art.

[ISL]

There is enough information, should one be able to retain the phase; getting it from intensity is much more challenging.

I'm familiar with the work of one of the authors; he is a world expert on diffraction inverse problems in physical context. From a quick skim of the paper, it would appear that they're simply being careful and clever.

[moh_maya]

I'm not sure I completely understand your comment. Are you suggesting this is not a significant advance in the field?

I am not an EM expert; but the fact that its been through peer review & gotten published in Nature seems to suggest scientists in the field think it is a significant advance. And from what I do know of microscopy, it is still not trivial to image (sub?) atomic size structures.

Extending the quoted paragraph:

"The basic principle of the technique was proposed almost 50 years ago by the physicist Walter Hoppe, who reasoned that there should be enough information in the diffraction data to work backwards to produce an image of the diffracting object.

However, it was many years before computer algorithms were developed that could do this reverse calculation easily and reliably. The pictures produced by ptychographic methods are generated using a computer from a vast amount of indirect scattering data."

The news & views article does not claim that this is a basic sciences advance; they are claiming its an engineering / methodology / procedural advance. And those are as important, IMO.

Unless you are suggesting that, once the basic sciences are known, any engineering advance is trivial. If so, then you & I have very a different impression of how easy / difficult it is to build new "things" :)

[breadAndWater]

None of the things you've mentioned are anything close to what I'm bringing up.

The point I'm making is that popular discussion of quantum effects are so wildly off-base, and have muddied the waters of even trying to understand what happens between photons and electrons, by casually reading about it.

But you see something like this emerge, and it's really obvious that solutions to these problems were on the right track even as far back as the early 1900's, only to be derailed by academics emerging in the 1940's.

Principles such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi... had it right very early.

So, was there an ulterior motive to all the complex obfuscation of math, and inaccurate scientific reporting throughout the later 20th century? Or has it all been one big, innocent misunderstanding, among aloof egg heads distracted by their gigantic precious particle colliders?

One wonders.

[lixtra]

> It's all just media manipulation.

Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. [Hanlon]

[kurthr]

Actually, I don't think it's stupidity... it's greed. Telling stories that sound good is unrelated to truth, but declaring them science or news (when you don't know) is deceptive.

[amelius]

The problem with this razor is that malicious people will happily incorporate it into their evil plans.

[colordrops]

Thank you, for once Hanlon's razor is used properly.

[carapace]

I'm just reading "What is Real?" by Adam Becker (a history of QM published this year) and boy do the Copenhagenists look foolish. Even Bohr comes off as a saintly buffoon.

With experimental confirmation that the universe is non-local and "spooky action at a distance" is real, the pilot wave theory "wins" and there's no measurement problem.

(It isn't journalists though, it's the physicists themselves that muddied the waters by permitting herd mentality to overwhelm science. Also, von Neumann got a proof wrong! Folks can be forgiven for not suspecting that. But once it was noticed then the "orthodoxy" should have paid attention.)

[Luc]

“What Is Real” is an opinionated book, to put it mildly.