On 7/2/2021 5:54 AM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
On Friday, July 2, 2021 at 4:01:35 AM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 5:13 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> /why do you think a probability amplitude wave would not
produce a discreet spot? Do you imagine it should produce
smear werever it is greater than 10% or 1% or what? /
Probability must be about something and that something had to
either have happened or have not happened; so it should produce a
smear if and only if the probability is greater than 0% but less
than 100%. That's why if you place a detector near one of the
slits so you know which one the electron went through you see no
interference pattern, but as soon as you remove that detector you do.
>> the complex wave function, which contains the square root
of -1 in it, is NOT an observable quantity,
/> Right, only the amplified and decohered effect of the
probabilistic event is observable. That's why Bohr insisted
that a classical world was necessary in order that science be
possible, since only classical observables could be
objectively agreed upon./
Bohr was a great scientist but a lousy philosopher. If Bohr's
philosophy requires classical physics then obviously Bohr's
philosophy is wrong because classical physics is a theory known
to be incorrect. As Richard Feynman said "Nature is quantum dammit!"
> /there's a disconnect between the mechanism of decoherence and
the assignment of probabilities to different worlds, as Bruce
has pointed out. There has to be a separate axiom that says
there is this splitting into worlds that is probabilistic. /
There is nothing in Schrodinger's equation that says anything
about the wave collapsing,so Everettsimply says it doesn't
collapse and that means you've got many worlds; it's bare-bones
quantum mechanics that contains everything that is required and
not one more thing. If you don't like all those worlds and want to
get rid of them you've got to stick on some additional bells and
whistles to the equation that, other than get rid of those many
worlds, do nothing but make the equation more difficult to solve.
There are two main schools of thought on the wave function collapse;
the wave function collapse is real or it is not. The GRW
interpretation states there is with any quantum wave a fundamental
phenomenon of collapse. The collapse occurs fundamentally by a
stochastic rule. A large number of quantum states with some measure of
entanglement then has a far greater probability in any interval of
time of a collapse. The classical state is a sort of constant
collapsing condition. The other view is that quantum wave function
collapse is an illusion and that fundamentally there is no collapse.
The MWI is an instance of that, where there is a splitting of the
world according to different quantum amplitudes and an observer
records data along two or more tracks. The observer enters into an
entanglement with the system and what the observer records is in a
sense "frame dragged" along each of those branches.
You left out a third school of thought, that the wave function is just a
mathematical tool and it's "collapse" is just a matter of one updating
knowledge of the system. This includes the QBist, path-integral, and
consistent histories approaches.
And I'm not sure where you place the transactional approach of Cramer in
which there is a real, probabilistic collapse but not spontaneous.
Brent
In both of these perspectives there is an unknown mechanism. How the
GRW spontaneous collapse occurs is not defined or presented as due to
a physical process. Similarly, MWI has this splitting of worlds, where
on the global level nothing really changes, but locally to an observer
a change does happen. There is no mechanism for this splitting.
Quantum mechanics by itself has no collapse process, whether real or
some sort of subjective observation of phenomenology. The Yggdrasil
tree of bifurcating worlds in MWI occurs for no discernible reason and
globally it is not real. With GRW objective collapse there is again no
fundamental mechanism behind this collapse. This may point to some
further underlying physics. If there is such physics it must have some
conservation or symmetry principle. If it does not have such then in
effect it really is not physics. We might then appeal to conservation
of information, information sharing an equivalency with a form of
entropy by Shannon-von Neumann formula, or quantum complexity. Which
ever of these quantum interpretations fits best into such an
understanding is not clear to see at this time.
LC
/> Self-locating uncertainty was invented to explain this, but
it seems incoherent in that it supposes there is some "self"
that could be here or there, independent of the physical being
which is both places.
/
There is absolutely nothing more certain than the existence of the
self, but there is nothing mystical about that; it's just that
it's not a noun. The self is what the brain does, not what the
brain is, so "self" must be an adjective. I would define the
particular self called John K Clark recursively, he is whoever
remembers being John K Clark yesterday. If Everett is right and
every change no matter how small causes the universe to split,
then there must be some changes to my brain that are so small (one
neutron in one neuron moving one Planck length to the left ) that
they cause no change in conscious experience and do not degrade
the memory of being John K Clark yesterday. Therefore there must
be an astronomical number to an astronomical power of John K
Clarks all living in different,very very slightly different,
worlds. The number would be HUGE but it would still be finite, so
the number of John K Clarks that see you flip a fair coin and come
up heads 5 times in a row must be twice as large as the number of
times he sees you do it 6 times, but there would still be a few
that see him do it 100 times, maybe 1000 or even more.
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
mxc2
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