100 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics. ... With technologies such as quantum computers, we stand at the cusp of a revolution that promises to bring the quantum world into many aspects of our lives.There is mostly a consensus on Copenhagen, and that is responsible for all the semiconductors, lasers, and all the other quantum devices you are probably using right now.Yet there is still no consensus about what it all means ... philosophers of physics are needed to come to conceptual grips ...
The standard explanation makes use of the Copenhagen interpretation ...
Over the decades, alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics have been proposed that remove reference to measurements or observers from the fundamental description of the quantum world. .... And the many-worlds interpretation, initially proposed4 by the physicist Hugh Everett in his PhD dissertation at Princeton University in New Jersey in the mid-1950s, suggests that observers do not collapse the wave function at the point of measurement. Instead, they pass into one of several parallel universes corresponding to the possible outcomes encoded in the wave function.She is playing word games here. The observer, in many-worlds theory, certainly does collapse the part of the wave function that is visible to him. The difference with Copenhagen is that the rest of the wave function is pushed off to a parallel universe.
She goes on to try to find a middle ground between Copenhagen and many-worlds theory. And she wants to know if there is a reality independent of our observations.
She mentions John Wheeler’s idea of a participatory universe, but avoids free will. Yes, if we have the free will to choose experiments, then we affect reality. Almost all quantum experiments have outcomes that depend on how the apparatus was set up.
If you believe in many-worlds, then everything happens, and there is no free will or any ability to influence anything.
Philosophers should not characterize Bohr, Wheeler and their intellectual descendants as instrumentalists who do not think that quantum mechanics describes the deep nature of reality. A better way to interpret their ideas is that they demand a new conception of what ‘real’ means.I think nearly all scientists believe that they are learning the nature of reality. All except those on The Existential Crisis Iceberg, such as Sabine Hossenfelder, Sean M. Carroll, and Michio Kaku.
No, I don't believe in Logical Positivism either. It too is an error. Too stupid an error, in fact.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's high time to highlight that one, too. Not just CI.
And, BTW, yes, Bohr too ruined physics. Though, mathematicians can't be expected to understand the issue. Any time any one gives them an internally self-consistent but implications-wise rich system, they become that one's अंधभक्त.
--Ajit
I place a rock on a table.
ReplyDeleteThe first person enters the room, and is entirely blind, they use their walking stick and tap their way around the table and out the door on the other side. No rock was noticed.
The second person walks into the room, but was angered seeing the rock, since he had claimed there was no such thing as rocks, and had just published a paper about it, and so...no rock was acknowledged since it couldn't exist...but they might just write a paper about the male social construct of rocks and how they relate to the gender fluidity of toxic colonial patriarchal imposed reality.
The third person enters the room but was on their cell phone looking at tik tok videos. No Rock, no table, and pretty much no room was noticed, before they crashed into the door on the other side of the room before remembering how to use a doorknob.
You reenter the room, notice the rock on the table is still there, take pictures, a couple of videos, take some notes, and weigh the rock, before picking it back up and putting it in your pocket.
The next day you report your finding of the rock to the other people who walked through the room. None of them claim to have noticed the rock, or just defer to someone else, and one of them accuses you making up rocks...Whereupon you pull the rock out of your pocket, then throw your 'made up social construct' at him and bean him on the forehead, whereupon you say: 'How about that?, I've just hit you with a figment of my imagination you claim doesn't objectively exist. Why don't you write a paper about how much you imagined it hurt.'
Either scientists will acknowledge there is an objective reality, or they can shut the frack up and quit their jobs instead of pretending to be measuring things they don't want to believe in.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Upton Sinclair