On Sun, Jul 29, 2018 at 5:16 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: *>Why obsess about the alleged FTL collapse of the wf?*
FTL is not the problem, every experimental result and every quantum interpretation I've ever heard of says information can not travel faster than light because that is the top speed of causation. > > > > *Forget collapse.* Many, perhaps most, physicists do exactly that because they believe in the "Shut Up And Calculate" quantum interpretation and are only interested in predicting how far to the right a indicator needle on a meter moves in a particular experiment. But for some of us that feels unsatisfying and would like to have a deeper understanding about what's going on at the quantum level and wonder why there is nothing in the mathematics that says anything about a wave collapsing. Most of all they want to know what exactly is a "measurement" and why it so mysterious. > *> **Interpret the superposition as offering information only, just like > knowing the probability of winning some slot machine. The only difference > is the use of complex amplitudes.* If the universe acted like a slot machine physicists would not be so worried and Everett would have never felt the need to dream up anything as strange as the Many Worlds idea, but it doesn't. If I'm playing 2 slot machines at the same time then the probability of me winning increases, but if they were quantum slot machines the probability of winning don't add up in the same way they do in our normal macro world, in certain circumstances the probability of winning could decrease or even drop to zero if I played 2 machines at once. Quantum probabilities don't add together in the same way that slot machine probabilities do, and the reason for that is that probability must always be a real number between zero and one, but Schrodinger's wave function deals with complex numbers. So a way must be found to go from the complex function which we can calculate but not observe to probabilities which we can observe but not calculate without the help of complex numbers, and that is the Born Rule. The square of the magnitude of a particle's complex wavefunction at a point is always a positive real number, and the Born rule says that is the probability of finding that particle at that point. The square of the absolute value of the wavefunction can give us a Real number that is a probability, but because Schrodinger's function contains complex numbers 2 very different wave functions can produce the exact same probability of finding a particle at a point. So if you measure a particle at a point you know where it is but you still don't know what its unique wave function was at that point, so you don't know what the wave would have evolved into at some other point if you had not observed it and collapsed the wave. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
