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Bassi then wrote Schrödinger’s equation on the board — quantum theory’s upgrade to “F = ma,” a moderately more complicated combination of letters and numbers that still applies to baseballs and the rest, but also to molecules and atoms.

Ghirardi and his colleagues arrived at objective collapse models by performing a delicate conceptual transplant that excised quantum theory’s references to observation and replaced them with a new mathematical term added to Schrödinger’s equation.

“If you were to watch me by day, you would see me sitting at my desk solving Schrödinger’s equation...exactly like my colleagues,” says Sir Anthony Leggett, a Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in superfluidity.

Scientists are nearly all reductionists in the sense that they feel confident that everything, however complex, is a solution of Schrodinger’s equation – unlike the “vitalists” of earlier eras, who thought that living things were infused with some special “essence.”

Even if they had a hypercomputer that could solve Schrodinger’s equation for the flow, atom by atom, the resultant simulation wouldn’t provide any insight into how waves break, or what makes a flow go turbulent.