What strikes me when thinking about these two supposedly very different points of view on quantum mechanics is that I’m having trouble seeing why they are actually any different at all.To the extent that they are just interpretations, there is no substantive difference. With disputes about the definitions, this is not so clear.
Here are a couple of the better comments:
They difference is in the part that you don’t want to discuss, which is that Everettians postulate the other worlds are real, while Copenhagenists refuses to say anything about what cannot be observed.Woit goes on to review Sean M. Carroll's new book, which is a 368-page argument for the Many World Theory of quantum behavior.
Good old books inform that the same issue had been fiercely debated around 1926, when Schroedinger/Einstein wanted to describe everything via a deterministic local equation, getting rid of quantum jumps. Heisenberg/Bohr explained that it’s not possible because we see particles as events. Decoherence and all modern stuff allow to understand better but don’t change the key point: we need probabilities. So the Schroedinger equation is just a tool for computing probabilities in configuration space.
Woit says Carroll is a good writer and explainer, but the Many Worlds stuff is the babbling of a crackpot. They theory is so silly it is hard to take anyone seriously who pushes Many Worlds.
when I saw the headline, I was thinking, "Lewis Carroll?"
ReplyDeleteScience should say nothing definitive about what it can't measure, and by measure I don't mean you pulled a purely speculative number out of your over-credentialed butt about something you can't possibly quantify sans a shred of actual data, or know if it can even be quantified even if you had the data. As with ALL computer programs, simulations, and mathematics: garbage in garbage out. No exceptions, not even for Sean Carroll.
ReplyDeleteMr. Carroll is a garden variety hypocrite who likes to sneer at those who believe in god, proclaiming how there is no observable evidence for these beliefs, and then promptly falls off his very own sciency wagon by invoking MWI to explain things he can't explain with no observable evidence.
When your math looks like this "theorem = and then a miracle occurs = solution" IT'S WRONG.