On 18 Sep 2009, at 10:46, Flammarion wrote:
> > > > On 16 Sep, 18:52, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 16 Sep 2009, at 17:25, Flammarion wrote: >> >> >> >>> On 16 Sep, 15:51, "m.a." <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> the ocean of virtual particles which may give >>>> rise to all "real" particles exists somewhere between matter and >>>> thought. >> >>> I see no reason to believe that >> >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle >> >> You are quite quick on this. >> >> There is a tradition in quantum mechanics , with von Neumann, Wigner, >> Walker, Penrose, and in a sense Heisenberg, Pauli, Fuchs, ... to >> ascribe to consciousness the ability to collapse the wave, in this >> case field superpostion of number operator states (in the vaccuum, >> say). >> This made essentially the (universal) state function into a >> (relative) >> knowledge state. > > > It is not a view in much favour nowadays, and it is not > a view that has much to do with recent developments. > It goes back to Bohr's writings which predate virtual particles, whcih > arrived with Dirac's and Feynmans's work some decades later. I was not saying you were wrong, but only that you were quick. The views accepted nowadays, is the same, except that they are using an intuitive version of comp for defining the observer, so that consciousness is no more required to collapse the wave, but only to select the universe from the multiverse, like self-localization after a self-duplicating experiment. Now, my point is that such view leads to the reversal physics/psychology, or physics/theology. There is still an important resistance in physics, even against the multiverse, and they are searching and defending a psychological interpretation of the wave function (see the work by Christopher Fuchs on arXiv.org). Comp, when taken seriously, marries the two views. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
