On 15 Nov 2014, at 17:02, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 4:54 PM, Richard Ruquist <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Along these lines of thought, the universe splitting or
differentiation in MWI is said to be irreversible
even though the equation of QM are time reversible.
The Many Worlds split is not necessarily irreversible, but like
thermodynamics it usually is. When the electron approaches the 2
slits the universe splits, but when it hits the photographic plate
(or just a brick wall) the split is reversed; of course that is not
a typical situation, it was specifically set up by experimenters to
be as simple as possible, in most situations they never recombine
because so many things would have to conspire together it would be
astronomically unlikely.
> That might account for the arrow of time.
You don't need Many Worlds or even Quantum Mechanics to explain the
arrow of time, all you need is for things to start out in a low
entropy state and the fact that there are VASTLY more ways to be
disorganized than organized.
> Of course wave collapse is also irreversible and is similar to MWI
to that extent.
You keep talking as if the quantum wave function is a real physical
thing rather than just a calculating device like the lines of
longitude and latitude, but Quantum Mechanics can get along just
fine without Schrodinger's Wave Equation.
Latitudes and longitudes do not interfere.
In fact about 9 months BEFORE Schrodinger came out with his wave
equation Heisenberg had his own version of Quantum Mechanics that
had nothing to do with waves. In fact Heisenberg despised the
Schrodinger Wave Equation because he felt that "a good theory must
be based on directly observable magnitudes". And nobody can observe
a quantum wave function.
Heisenberg was influenced by the positivism of the time (The Vienna
circles, the young Wittgenstein, etc.). That was very bad philosophy,
and we can say that is is virtually abandoned. Positivism is easily
shown self-defeating or just an instrumentalism which abandon
fundamental research.
If you measure what a particle is doing at point X Heisenberg could
use matrix algebra to tell you what measurements you are likely to
get at point Y, and he could do it all without using a unobservable
wave, he only used measured quantities . Heisenberg's original
formulation of Quantum Mechanics works just as well as Schrodinger
and his Wave Equation, they are equivalent, and which one you use is
strictly a matter of taste.
The only advantage Schrodinger had is that it allowed human beings
to form a mental picture of what is going on, but Heisenberg felt
that the mental picture was wrong and the quantum world was so
strange that none was any better, so it would be best to just forget
about visualization and only worry about what you can measure.
Everett disagreed and thought that mental pictures were important
but agreed that Schrodinger's was wrong, however he believed that he
had found a better one and so do I.
? he agreed that Schroedinger was wrong when saying that he was sure
that the cat is definitely alive or dead. But Everett agrees with
schroedinger equation, and picture. But Deutsch and Hayden argues that
the many-world picture, and its locality, are more simply explained in
the Heisenberg picture. Those are different formalism for the same
theory (as long as we don't introduce the collapse, which is just a
magical trick to eliminate the "parallel realities". of course, with
computationalism, the "other realities" exists like numbers, so it is
just dishonest to make abstraction of them, without making precise
some selection principle (and the UDA shows that such a selection
principle is contradictory with the computationalist assumption).
Bruno
John K Clark
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