Sunday, December 16, 2018

How to stop Copenhagen collapses

A philosophy of science article says:
In the science fiction novel Quarantine, Greg Egan imagines a universe where interactions with human observers collapse quantum wavefunctions. Aliens, unable to collapse wavefunctions, tire of being slaughtered by these collapses. In response they erect an impenetrable shield around the solar system, protecting the rest of the universe from human interference and locking humanity into a starless Bubble.
This is funny. This would be the logical conclusion of some explanations of the Copenhagen interpretation.

With no humans to make observations, space aliens might happily live in Schroedinger cat states, where they are half-alive and half-dead.

This sort of thought experiment drives a lot of cosmologists to reject Copenhagen, and believe in many-worlds or some other nonsense.

Another web paper says:
In popular articles about quantum computing it’s common to describe qubits as having the ability to “be in both |0>|0> and |1>|1> states at once”, and to say things like “quantum computers get their power because they can simultaneously be in exponentially many quantum states!”

I must confess, I don’t understand what such articles are talking about.
Those explanations are common because of that stupid Schroedinger cat story, so bits can be on and off at the same time.

Scott Aaronson is a believer in quantum computing, but he often explains that it is a false myth that quantum computers get their power from qubits being in two states at the same time.

So where do quantum computers get their alleged power? That is never convincingly explained. Aaronson has tried many times, and I think that he is writing another book on the subject. Sometimes he says it is from negative probabilities or some other obscure quantum technicality. He has never been able to get his point across to science journalists, so he has quit talking to them.

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