On 5/12/2012 11:21 PM, scerir wrote:
H. Kragh ("Dirac: a Scientific Biography", Cambridge U.P., 1990) reports a 1927 discussion between Dirac, Heisenberg and Born, about what actually gives rise to the so called "collapse" (reduction of waves packet). Dirac said that it is 'Nature' that makes the choice (of measurement outcome). Born agreed. Heisenberg however maintained that, behind the collapse, and the choice of which 'branch' the wavefunction would be followed, there was "the free-will of the human observer". -scerir I don't think this does justice to Born's views. He was not a realist about the wave function nor about its collapse. His position was that the classical world was *logically* prior and necessary for shared knowledge to exist. Without it there could be no measured values and no records. Brent Brent, maybe so, but Born wrote the following: "The question of whether the waves are something "real" or a function to describe and predict phenomena in a convenient way is a matter of taste. I personally like to regard a probability wave, even in 3N-dimensional space, as a real thing, certainly as more than a tool for mathematical calculations ... Quite generally, how could we rely on probability predictions if by this notion we do not refer to something real and objective?" (Max Born, Dover publ., 1964, "Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance", p. 107)
I stand corrected. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.