> On 31 Jul 2018, at 02:57, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 7/30/2018 4:11 PM, John Clark wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 4:27 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> 
>> >> 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.  
>> 
>> 
>>  A axiom is supposed to be simple and self evidently true, the Born rule is 
>> neither; and it wasn't derived from first principles
> 
> ??  You think matix mechanics was "derived from first principles"??  What 
> "first principles"?  Have you gone platonic on us?
> 
>> it was picked for reasons that were were empirical and practical, for some 
>> strange reason the damn thing works.
> 
> Well, maybe it works because the Born rule is the only consistent way to put 
> a probability measure on Hilbert space.  Born just inuitited the rule (and 
> actually got it wrong and corrected it in a footnote); but Gleason proved it 
> in 1957.  So the Born rule comes a lot closer to being "derived from first 
> principles" than does Schroedinger's equation or matrix mechanics. 


Yes. But we can suspect that Everett needs a form of mechanism, and with Church 
thesis, along with “yes doctor” that makes mandatory to derive matrix mechanics 
from first principle, like the FPI perhaps, and certainly something like at 
least one universal machinery, like elementary arithmetic or the combinators.



> 
> The catch is that Born had assume a probability interpretation; which nobody 
> liked at the time because they could only think of probability as ignorance 
> about ensembles and there were no ensembles...until Dewitt.

I like very much Dewitt, but Dewitt is the one who better understood Everett 
(after mocking him if I remember well).



> 
>> Also, the square of the absolute value of the complex wave produces a 
>> probability which collapses into a certainty when a observation is made, but 
>> the mathematics can't say when that happens because it doesn't say what a 
>> observation is.
> 
> Mathematics never includes the interpretation that allows you to apply it.  

That is wrong. Indeed Gödel’s incompleteness is already a case where 
mathematics includes interpretations of mathematical theories (set of beliefs). 
Like Everett embeds the physicists in physics, mathematical logic embeds the 
mathematician in mathematics, and if mechanism is correct, there is not much 
choice left in the matter.

Bruno




> 
> Brent
> 
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