On Saturday, June 23, 2018 at 11:57:09 AM UTC, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>
> On Friday, June 22, 2018 at 5:13:22 PM UTC-5, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Friday, June 22, 2018 at 10:13:37 AM UTC, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thursday, June 21, 2018 at 6:48:53 PM UTC-5, agrays...@gmail.com
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thursday, June 21, 2018 at 11:18:25 PM UTC, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> The emergent nuclear interaction occurs on a time scale of
>>>>> 10^{-22}seconds. The superposition of a decayed and nondecayed nucleus
>>>>> occurs in that time before decoherence.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Is that calculated / postulated if the radioactive source interacts
>>>> with its environment? Can't it be isolated for a longer duration? If so,
>>>> what does that imply about being in the pure states mentioned above? AG
>>>>
>>>
>>> Quantum physics experiments on nonlocality are done usually with optical
>>> and IR energy photons. The reason is that techniques exist for making these
>>> sort of measurements and materials are such that one can pass photons
>>> through beam splitters or hold photons in entanglements in mirrored
>>> cavities and the rest. At higher energy up into the X-ray domain such
>>> physics becomes very difficult. At intermediate energy where you have
>>> nuclear physics of nucleons and mesons and further at higher energy of
>>> elementary particles things become impossible. This is why in QFT there are
>>> procedures for constructing operators that have nontrivial commutations on
>>> and in the light cone so nonlocal physics does not intrude into
>>> phenomenology. Such physics is relevant on a tiny scale compared to the
>>> geometry of your detectors.
>>>
>>> LC
>>>
>>
>> *I've been struggling lately with how to interpret a superposition of
>> states when it is ostensibly unintelligible, e.g., a cat alive and dead
>> simultaneously, or a radioactive source decayed and undecayed
>> simultaneously. If we go back to the vector space consisting of those
>> "little pointing things", it follows that any vector which is a sum of
>> other vectors, simultaneously shares the properties of the components in
>> its sum. This is simple and obvious. I therefore surmise that since a
>> Hilbert space is a linear vector space, this interpretation took hold as a
>> natural interpretation of superpositions in quantum mechanics, and led to
>> Schroedinger's cat paradox. I don't accept the explanation of decoherence
>> theory, that we never see these unintelligible superpositions because of
>> virtually instantaneous entanglements with the environment. Decoherence
>> doesn't explain why certain bases are stable; others not, even though,
>> apriori, all bases in a linear vector space are equivalent. These
>> considerations lead me to the conclusion that a quantum superposition of
>> states is just a calculational tool, and when the superposition consists of
>> orthogonal component states, it allows us to calculate the probabilities of
>> the measured system transitioning to the state of any component. In this
>> interpretation, essentially the CI, there remains the unsolved problem of
>> providing a mechanism for the transition from the SWE, to the collapse to
>> one of the eigenfunctions when the the measurement occurs. I prefer to
>> leave that as an unsolved problem, than accept the extravagance of the MWI,
>> or decoherence theory, which IMO doesn't explain the paradoxes referred to
>> above, but rather executes what amounts to a punt, claiming the paradoxes
>> exist for short times so can be viewed as nonexistent, or solved. AG. *
>>
>
> You seem to have backed yourself into an intellectual corner. What you say
> is a bit like creationists who say they "just can't imagine ... ."
>
> LC
>
*My pov has no relation to, or anything in common with creationism. I don't
believe Joe the Plumber can do a simple quantum experiment and create Many
Worlds, each with a copy of himself, some with uncountable copies. Do you?
I don't believe there are preferred bases in linear Hilbert vector spaces.
Do you? But that's the claim of decoherence theory. My questions aren't
rhetorical. I look forward to your answers. AG*
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