On 12/9/2013 12:44 AM, LizR wrote:
On 9 December 2013 20:56, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>>
wrote:
On 12/8/2013 4:36 PM, LizR wrote:
On 9 December 2013 07:41, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com
<mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com
<mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> Determinism is far from "well established".
> It's a basic assumption in almost every scientific theory.
In the most important theory in physics, Quantum Mechanics, no such
assumption
is made, and despite a century of trying no experiment has ever been
performed
that even hinted such a deterministic assumption should be added in.
I believe the two-slit experiment hints that QM is deterministic by
implying the
existence of a multiverse.
Wasn't it you, Liz, that pointed out this was circular. Everett assumes a
multiverse
in order to make QM determinsitic.
I did say something like that, didn't I? [insert embarrassed emoticon here].
I think I was saying that it was too strong to say that QM "follows the principle of
determinism" (or something like that) because it appears to be indeterminate and only
becomes deterministic thanks to Everett. However, the two-slit experiment does
/suggest/ the multiverse as a valid explanation, in that any other explanation requires
other principles to be violated (causality, locality...)
I think I was attempting to position myself between John and Jason - to say that
determinism is reasonably well established, but only as a result of a long and winding
process of experiment, conjecture and so on.
But it isn't. As Roland Omnes says, quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory so it
predicts probabilities - what did you expect? Among apostles of Everett there's a lot of
trashing of Copenhagen. But Bohr's idea was that the classical world, where things
happened and results were recorded, was *logically* prior to the quantum mechanics. QM
was a way of making predictions about what could done and observed. Today what might be
termed neo-Copenhagen is advocated by Chris Fuchs and maybe Scott Aronson. I highly
recommend Scott's book "Quantum Computing Since Democritus". It's kind of heavy going in
the middle, but if you're just interested in the philosophical implications you can skip
to the last chapters. Violation of Bell's inequality can be used to guarantee the
randomness of numbers, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0911.3427v3.pdf, assuming only locality.
Brent
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