On 12/9/2013 12:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:57 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 12/9/2013 12:44 AM, LizR wrote:
On 9 December 2013 20:56, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 12/8/2013 4:36 PM, LizR wrote:
On 9 December 2013 07:41, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com
<mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com
<mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> Determinism is far from "well established".
> It's a basic assumption in almost every scientific theory.
In the most important theory in physics, Quantum Mechanics, no such
assumption is made, and despite a century of trying no experiment
has ever
been performed that even hinted such a deterministic assumption
should be
added in.
I believe the two-slit experiment hints that QM is deterministic by
implying
the existence of a multiverse.
Wasn't it you, Liz, that pointed out this was circular. Everett
assumes a
multiverse in order to make QM determinsitic.
I did say something like that, didn't I? [insert embarrassed emoticon here].
I think I was saying that it was too strong to say that QM "follows the
principle
of determinism" (or something like that) because it appears to be
indeterminate and
only becomes deterministic thanks to Everett. However, the two-slit
experiment does
/suggest/ the multiverse as a valid explanation, in that any other
explanation
requires other principles to be violated (causality, locality...)
I think I was attempting to position myself between John and Jason - to say
that
determinism is reasonably well established, but only as a result of a long
and
winding process of experiment, conjecture and so on.
But it isn't. As Roland Omnes says, quantum mechanics is a probabilistic
theory so
it predicts probabilities - what did you expect? Among apostles of Everett
there's
a lot of trashing of Copenhagen. But Bohr's idea was that the classical
world,
where things happened and results were recorded, was *logically* prior to
the
quantum mechanics. QM was a way of making predictions about what could
done and
observed. Today what might be termed neo-Copenhagen is advocated by Chris
Fuchs and
maybe Scott Aronson. I highly recommend Scott's book "Quantum Computing
Since
Democritus". It's kind of heavy going in the middle, but if you're just
interested
in the philosophical implications you can skip to the last chapters.
Violation of
Bell's inequality can be used to guarantee the randomness of numbers,
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0911.3427v3.pdf, assuming only locality.
Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two
remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox:
1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects
That's non-local hidden variable - which is exactly what a parallel universe is.
Brent
2. Measurements have more than one outcome
In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or many-world's
is true.
Jason
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