On 2/10/2025 1:39 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 2:17 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
/>>> I think you think MWI is correct simply because you
don't know of any alternatives. /
*>>Guilty as charged.I've said more than once that Many Worlds is
the least bad explanation for quantum weirdness that I know of,
if somebody comes up with something better I'll drop it like a
hot potato.
*
/> So did you read any of the papers I cited?/
*Yes I did but I'm still a Many Worlds fan.Two of the papers you
citedwere written by the same people and were talking about Objective
Collapse, as I've said before, if Many Worlds turns out to be untrue
I'd switch over to that view. Another paperwas also talking about
Objective Collapse but modified things a bit so that the collapse
was a continuous evolution rather than a sudden jump, that's nice but
doesn't change things fundamentally. *
*And the Steven Weinberg paper suggests that we could stop using
Schrodinger's wave equation entirely and switch over to something that
was mathematically equivalent, something that was similar to Werner
Heisenberg's matrix approach which strictly insisted that only
observable quantities be used. Both methods provided the right answer
but Schrodinger's approach proved much more popular because it was
easier to use and gave a better (although still not very good)
intuitive understanding about what was going on. Can you honestly say
that after reading Weinberg's paper thanks to those matrices you are
able to form a better mental image about what's happening at the most
fundamental level of the very weird quantum world? I sure can't!
*
Both Weinberg's and Pearle's papers suggest that the density matrix
should be regarded as fundamental instead of a Hilbert space vector.
That's not at all the same as Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, which is
strictly equivalent to Schrodinger's equation. Pearle's paper, which is
the more worked out of the two, is not concerned only with observation
but also assumes unobserved "collapse" of the wave function. I put
collapse in scare quotes because Pearle provides a mathematical
mechanism that achieves the collapse probabilistically but smoothly. I
find it easier to visualize than innumerable, expanding, overlapping
spheres of space containing UP and DWN results in equal number but
carrying along "weights" to give them different probabilities. Barandes
paper doesn't eliminate multiple-worlds but just reduces them to an
optional way looking at the problem, which he compares to a choice of gauge.
Brent
*
*
*John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
sib
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