On 7/30/2018 9:58 AM, John Clark wrote:
> /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.
That's not true. "The mathematics" originally included the Born rule as part of the axiomatic structure of QM.
Most of all they want to know what exactly is a "measurement" and why it so mysterious.
The problem with the Born rule was that its application was ambiguous: Where was the Heisenberg cut? Why was "the needle basis" preferred? But decoherence theory has given answers (at least partially) to those questions. Given those answers, one can just replace "collapse" with "discard", i.e. discard all the predicted possible results except the one observed. Is there really any difference between saying those other predictions of the wf are in orthogonal, inaccessible "worlds" and saying they just didn't happen. That seems to be Omnes approach. He writes, "Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory, so it only predicts probabilities."
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