Sunday, October 7, 2018

Claiming quantum mechanics is inconsistent

These is whole industry of physicists working in quantum foundations who make various arguments that quantum mechanics doesn't make any sense. They can't deny that quantum mechanics correctly predicts experiments, and yet they keep coming up with clever sleight-of-hand thought experiments and paradoxes that supposedly show that the theory does not work.

The whole enterprise is foolish. If there were really such contradictions, then there would be some failure to predict experiments.

Scott Aaronson pauses from his agony of being a Jewish leftist Trump-hating professor in a red state to explain:
So: a bunch of people asked for my reaction to the new Nature Communications paper by Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner, provocatively titled “Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself.” Here’s the abstract:
Quantum theory provides an extremely accurate description of fundamental processes in physics. It thus seems likely that the theory is applicable beyond the, mostly microscopic, domain in which it has been tested experimentally. Here, we propose a Gedankenexperiment to investigate the question whether quantum theory can, in principle, have universal validity. The idea is that, if the answer was yes, it must be possible to employ quantum theory to model complex systems that include agents who are themselves using quantum theory. Analysing the experiment under this presumption, we find that one agent, upon observing a particular measurement outcome, must conclude that another agent has predicted the opposite outcome with certainty. The agents’ conclusions, although all derived within quantum theory, are thus inconsistent. This indicates that quantum theory cannot be extrapolated to complex systems, at least not in a straightforward manner.
The paper authors separately argue that this proves the many-world interpretation.

That conclusion should be enuf to dispose of the argument. The MWI does not predict any experimental outcomes. There is nothing scientific about it. It is like some solipsist saying anything can happen in his imagination.

Aaronson explains the errors in more detail. So does Lubos Motl. Somehow this paper got published in a Nature journal. It has become respectable to trash quantum mechanics with silly arguments.

2 comments:

  1. Simple question,
    Why is energy quantized?

    It certainly isn't because 'math', or 'probability', or any other pseudo explanation (because 'science'!) that pretends non-physical heuristical solutions are actual mechanics, as clearly, there are no mechanics at all in Quantum Mechanics, only statistically fitted math that resorts to hocus pocus to be useful at all (arbitrary truncation of infinities is wishful thinking and magic at best, not mathematical rigor or physics, renormalization is pretty much a dippy-hocus-pocus-pseudo process, Feynman even admitted as much when he was being honest).

    Energy is quantized because of an underlying discrete structure we still don't understand, but we should assume it isn't based on magic, reified abstraction (probability), math, or sleight of hand if we ever want to have a single hope in hell of understanding it. Nothing appears or disappears into the ether unless you are scientifically lazy and want to claim spontaneous success despite having no cause.

    When you can't find your left sock, and it later turns up in the sofa cushions, you don't assume it got there because of quantum tunneling, or time travel, or probability or ad nausea complicated and untestable multiverse mumbo jumbo...unless you really have no interest in finding out how it got there.

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  2. Quantum mechanics isn't inconsistent but it certainly is superficial. Most people that talk about QM know nothing of field theory because their education is caught in the 1930s.

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