New Greene Videos spread Quantum Misinformation

Physicist Brian Greene, known mainly for overhyping string theory, has new interviews of Elise Crull and Sean Carroll on quantum entanglement and related topics.

You should know to be suspicious when they say the Nobel Prize committee got something wrong. Carroll complains that they gave a prize for disproving hidden variables, even though Einstein, Bohm, and Bell believed in hidden variables.

Yes, the prize was for doing experiments to prove them wrong.

Greene lets Carroll plug his favorite, many-worlds theory. They claim it is somehow simpler to assume zillions of unobservale worlds.

They do put their finger on the heart of the problem -- the theory requires rejecting probabilities.

Usually, when a theory assigns a probability to an event, it is an estimate of the likelihood. of the event occurring versus not occurring. Carroll has to reject that whole way of thinking. He has to say all events occur, and deny that probabilities mean anything.

He admits that many-worlds does not match our real-world experience, but says we need more research on the foundations of Physics to figure it out.

He complains that universities do not want people like Bohm and Bell who are concerned with this stuff. Actually he admits that they did not want Bohm because he was a Commie, and got his degree under the Commie J. R. Oppenheimer.

They all give misleading descriptions of nonlocality. There is no quantum nonlocality in the sense that doing something in one place has an immediate effect on a distant place.

There has been no Nobel Prize for quantum nonlocality. They also complain that the textbooks do not explain quantum mechanics adequately. This should make you suspicious. How is it that these guys have some profound quantum insights that are not recognized by the Nobel committee or the textbooks?

I am afraid that people watch these videos and think that they are learning something. No, they are getting some fringe ideas that mainstream physicists say is wrong.

Update: Carroll says:

just say we have a wave function and not only the electron has a wave function but you and I are part of the wave 11:14 function of the universe and we just ask what would be predicted by the [Schroedinger] equation if if we went back to the has a wave function but you and I are part of the wave 11:21 classical Paradigm where we just have stuff and an equation yeah what would happen and the answer is that that part 11:28 of the wave function let's say that has the electrons spin up and spin down it doesn't disappear when you do a 11:34` measurement a measurement is clearly defined in this picture as a physical interaction between the Observer and the 11:40 system and the decoherence part is also important and what happens is you end up in a 11:46 superposition of the electron was spin up and I saw it spin up plus the 11:51 electron was spin down and I saw it spin down and ever's entire contribution was to say and that's okay and ... yeah it's the leanest and meanest version of quantum mechanics it's just there's a wave function and an equation everything else pops

This is a little hard to follow, but he says classical mechanics uses equations to make predictions, and many-worlds is just doing the same thing to use the Schroedinger equation to make predictions.

But the equations of classical mechanics can also be used to predict probabilities. When you do, and make an observation that rules out some possibilites, then the appropriate state functions are updated accordingly. No one says that the equations create parallel worlds. So classical and quantum mechanics are essentially the same in this respect.

Carroll would say that hte difference is that the probabilities are real and fundamental in quantum mechanics, but not classical mechanics. But that is just his personal philosophical opinion.