My problems with Quantum Mechanics

I've often struggled with Quantum Mechanics, like many I never really accepted it into my world view because the conclusions of to contradicted with my everyday experience. More than that though I used to reject relativity because again it contradicted my world view. It's important to say that I'm not saying that they were wrong, just that they were too weird to be right.
To be fair it's normally a good measure of the validity of a theory, at least in the rest of life that it if it feels right then it is probably good. Just like a fast race car normally looks nice, and a good engine sounds good. (or is that just because we have trained ourselves to look for the right structures? That's another discussion though).

Anyway I'll stay on relativity for the moment, I was taught it by any number of thought experiments. The man running on top of a train, the spaceship to the next start system with a clock on each. In each one of these they reached a set of conclusions about the way that things had to work and from this concluded that the speed of light must be constant and that all frames of reference are equally valid. This left me cold and not believing it. This is let's not argue a question of belief because i could never experience them and because it didn't match my existing world view I discarded the new belief.
Now where I think this was wrong was that I missed the first bit. What I should have done is started from the "let's pretend that we had a world where the speed of light is constant for all viewers and all reference frames are equally vaild. Now how would this world have to behave if you were to push the limits of the rules..." From that you then discuss all these relativity thought experiments. Now if you'd happened to say that 'actually if we do this real world experiment then this ties in with this thought experiment'. etc etc.. Unfortunatly that never happened and it took a long time for me to tie up the loose ends by myself.
At the same time I was going through this with Quantum Mechanics. I was smugly superior that there must have been something deeper. What I hadn't realised was that I had come up with the hidden variable theory. Had wikipedia existed at this point or had I actually been studying physics I might have come across this, but I didn't. Of course the outcome of this is that there are experiments possible to determine if QMs probabilities are real or if there are some hidden variables. They of course did them and QM stands. This blew my mind.

Now let's fast forward slightly I'm trying to defend QM specifically and science in general on a random discussion board and this whole thing comes back around again so here is a somewhat re-written version of what I posted.

There's a difference between science and religion, or at least religion as it is often practised. I admit that science can be seen to be a religion to many looking at it, but all that can happen is that people try and explain their point of view and hopefully the truth will become evident. I guess that is at the end of the day the view of all rational parties on both sides: that if they could just find a way to explain themselves properly then the other side will come around. So let me try for the side of science.
Science doesn't care what you think, it doesn't care about your past it just cares if you are correct, or at least interesting. This is not to say that there are not those in authority. If Richard Feynman were to say "You know I've been thinking about it and maybe the maths behind electron behaviour is a bit wrong" then people would probably listen. If some random user on a web forum says the same thing then there would be much more scepticism. This is the right way for things to be though; there are many more insufficiently educated people who don't understand enough of the relevant field than there are experts or even well informed outsiders with a valuable perspective to offer. The outsider is not to know that most things have already been considered by thousands of others previously and the chances are that they have made a error someone has made before. They might not have even made an error, they just may not be aware of certain experimental evidence. At first glance (to me) the hidden variable theory makes much more sense than QM, but reality nor the scientific community doesn't care what you think or what makes sense if it doesn't match experiments and only once you have proved you are aware of the vast range of experimental data can you start to question those who are.

Taking a step back, many before have commented on how Newton was wrong, Einstein could/must be wrong.
Well no, let me use a bad analogy that I find reassuring: Suppose you grew up in the Yorkshire Dales. Let's say you had never left Skipton. As far as you're concerned, water falls from the sky, when there's a lot of it you get a river. When it gets cold it freezes, then you leave it in a cup it evaporates. From this you could determine many properties of water. You could maybe even work out the basics of the water cycle and predict huge amounts of its behaviour. But could you predict deserts? Or would you reject it as just not possible because almost every other day if not every single day water falls from the sky. What about oceans? Salty water would be ludicrous to you. While you might be able to get what they were thinking when someone told you about it, water that you couldn't drink might be just impossible for you to accept.
I think the same applies for QM and relativity, that I can't accept that the world could be governed by probability, that all of this highly predictable world I am used to could be the result of lots of randomness. I can do that maths and use it, but I don't really accept it because it is outside my experience. Who was it who said that you don't understand $advanced_science you just get used to it.

The post would end here but I came across something the other say that blew my mind again. As I understand it, edge effects on a 2d plane could cause the behaviour of the universe as we observe it. I really like this, i could accept that as part of my world view, not because it is complex, but because it is complexity from something very simple; and that really appeals to my aesthetic.
Then again we could all be living in a simulation and the more I learn about string theory the more that seems probable. Although AFAIAC the simulation argument is the new Godwin's law of physics discussions so on that note...

Wormhole Ponderings

For a bit of Sci-Fi I was writing i was developing a set of pretend physics that would allow the story to happen. As I carried on developing this idea I realised it was quite self consistent, and so even though I don't publish my stories, I thought I would publish my ideas behind this for criticism. Yes I have stolen a few ideas from bad pop-science, but at least this might explain a bit more than others bother to.

Consider that the fabric of the universe, the ether if you will, is actually a mass of subatomic size wormholes. Everywhere there is a sea of wormholes their entrances and exits right next to each other, but still a finite distance apart.
A photon would enter the wormhole and a finite time later emerge a finite distance away.
Other particles (such as a proton) interact with the event horizon of the wormhole and thus require an amount of time proportional to the energy of the particle to enter/exit the wormhole. The more energy the particle has the faster it is able to overcome the wormhole's event horizon and thus the sooner it exits. However because energy has to be transferred to the wormhole's entrance event horizon and then returned at the exit, a particle that interacts with the event horizon can only reach the speed of a photon by posessing an infinite ammount of energy.
So far so good, this would give a "reason" behind Relativity's requirement for an infinite amount of energy for light speed.

Then it occured to me that this could explain gravity, because suppose a particle is in the process of passing into the wormhole and another one comes along; having 2 particles interacting with the same event horizon would mean that the particles find it easier to enter and exit the wormhole because they are both overcomming the field together. The effect of this would be that distances seem closer together because they can move throught the wormholes easier, it would be the effect of compressing distances in space that the space-time distortion of Relativity is based upon.

So that's all very nice, but what predictions can you make from this? What tests can you do to support or disprove this?
That's my problem, none that I'm aware of...
Damn useful for a Sci-Fi story though where I need some way to allow wormholes to exist and eventually allow FTL (remembering that FTL means that we have to have time travel)...