On 11/16/2019 11:39 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 4:45:56 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:
On 11/16/2019 2:38 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 10:54:06 AM UTC-6, Brent wrote:
The epistemic interpretation just says the wf is our
mathematical representation of what we know about reality.
If that is the definition of epistemic, then any mathematical
physics is epistemic ("ur mathematical representation of what we
know"):
It is the definition of epistemic. And it is in contrast to the
ontic interpretation of QM which says that the wave function is
real and changing it due to a measurement must be described a some
physical process, not just taking the measurement into account to
update our knowledge.
Brent
From an applied mathematics perspective, it seems that *Schrödinger
equation*, *Einstein equations*, *Maxwell's equations*, ... are all
tools for making predictions about measurements, whether those
measurements are made by lab instruments or telescopes.
I don't see where a philosophically metaphysical and esoteric term
like "knowledge" comes in in any of those equations.
It comes into QM because it's probabilistic. If you wrote Maxwell's
equations for the field produced by charged particles whose position was
only given by a probability density function you would get a
probabilistic prediction and when you measured the field at a few points
and got definite answers, you would change you prediction of the field
so that it matched the measurements at those points. Your knowledge of
the field would still not be definite but it would have changed due to
the measurement. Schrodinger's equation only predicts probabilistic
measurement results, so it's always like that.
Brent
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