On 12/10/2013 1:22 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
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 effectsThat's non-local hidden variable - which is exactly what a parallel universe is.What is non local here?A whole world is duplicated - including remote parts. No decoherence is spread through the environment at light speed.
But if the EPR particles are measured at spacelike intervals there are two light cones of decoherence spreading through the environment - BUT they are coherent so that only two constructively interfere. There result only two worlds, instead of four.
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