On Thursday, April 3, 2014 1:24:28 AM UTC+1, Liz R wrote: > > gbhibbsa, I'm getting a bit confused here. All I said is that wavefunction > collapse isn't an observed fact, which seems to me a fairly reasonable > statement, because we can't observe entities like wavefunctions directly, > and we certainly can't observe their collapse directly. Some people would > say we can't observe *anything* directly, but under the normally > understood meaning of "observe" it seems reasonable to say that we observe > the images on our retinas, and hence that we can observe the dots on a > screen, and we can also be reasonably said to be able to observe the > pattern they make. I'm not saying anything about the MWI or Copenhagen or > whatever here, merely that (in normal usage of "observe") we can observe > dots on a screen, and we can't observe abstract theoretical entities like > wavefunctions, or their collapse. > I apologize for the extensive subset of my much more extensive range of shortcomings causing up to all of that confusion. May I try again...this time boiling it all down to a single request? Based on what was at the time the widely accepted proxy for the more problematic meaning of 'observation', what was observed that gave rise in the first place to the widely perceived, arguably urgent, need for an Interpretation of what it meant? Hopefully you're good-to-go answering the question on those terms. Or to say what you need additional clarification about that then you would be, that is linked to somethiing tangible for me...like a particular word or phrase.
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