On 6/23/2018 12:02 AM, [email protected] wrote:
On Saturday, June 23, 2018 at 6:25:38 AM UTC, Brent wrote: On 6/22/2018 3:13 PM, [email protected] <javascript:> wrote:*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. *If you're willing to take QM as simply a calculational tool, then QBism solve the problem of wf collapse. BrentThanks. I'll check it out. Is QBism a plausible theory? Do some professional "heavies" accept it? AG
Asher Peres started it and he was a "heavy weight". Chris Fuchs has been the main advocate, but he's kind of strange. The interpretation is not widely liked because it's the extreme end of instrumentalism.
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