On 09 Dec 2013, at 23:28, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/9/2013 12:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:57 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net>
wrote:
On 12/9/2013 12:44 AM, LizR wrote:
On 9 December 2013 20:56, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 12/8/2013 4:36 PM, LizR wrote:
On 9 December 2013 07:41, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Jason Resch
<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.
Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible
which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR
paradox:
1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects
That's non-local hidden variable - which is exactly what a parallel
universe is.
What is non local here?
2. Measurements have more than one outcome
In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or
many-world's is true.
I agree with Jason.
Bruno
Jason
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