> On 1 Dec 2019, at 09:51, Philip Thrift <cloudver...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On Sunday, December 1, 2019 at 2:12:38 AM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote: > > It seems like a simple question aching for an answer. Why do physicists, many > of them at least, prefer a baffling unintelligible interpretation of > superposition, say in the case of a radioactive source, when the obvious > non-contradictory one stares them in their collective faces? AG > > > > > The fundamental and psychological problem many physicists have is that they > take some mathematics (in some particular theory) and assign physical > realities to its mathematical entities.
That is the interesting problem. We use a mathematical formalism, but any simple relation between that formalism and reality, to be correct, needs to NOT make the superposed terms disappearing (indeed the quantum computation exploits typically different terms of the superposition, like already the two slits). De Broglie defended the idea that quantum mechanics was false on distance bigger than an atom, and predicted that the EPR influence is absent on any macroscopic distance, advocating your idea that the formalism should not be taken literally; but eventually Bell has shown this to be testable, and Nature has confirmed the formalism (Aspect and followers). So, it is just false to NOT attribute a physical reality to all terms in the wave. We would lost the interference effect. The problem of how to interpret the wave is not solved by distantiation with the wave formalism, as Nature confirms the weirdness imposed to the formalism. > Most of them do not understand the nature of mathematics: It's a language (or > collection of languages) about mathematical entities - which are thought of > differently depending on one's philosophy of mathematics. (It is best to say > they are fictions.) This is especially true when probability theory (as > defined in mathematics) is involved. With QM, the problem is that the amplitude of probability do interfere. In arithmetic too, and for a mechanist, the conceptual problems are solved in a radical way, as there is no time, nor space, only correlated minds. The fiction is not in the math, but in the assumption that “physical” means ontological. > This hopping between physical realities and mathematical entities leads them > to them being unable to distinguish between them, or to communicate to the > public the true nature of physics. I would say that the problem comes from the materialists who mostly seem unable to understand that the assumption of an ontological physical universe is a very BIG assumption, without any evidences to sustain it, beyond the natural instinctive extrapolation from simple experiences. When doing metaphysics with the scientific method, it is important to be agnostic on this, as it is the very subject of the research. Bruno > > @philipthrift > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > <mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/80acd639-93ba-4689-97ae-475af5ac63b4%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/80acd639-93ba-4689-97ae-475af5ac63b4%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/B2A6A503-3860-4CC5-8F20-BC161151711D%40ulb.ac.be.
