On Monday, December 2, 2019 at 3:26:44 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 1 Dec 2019, at 09:51, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > On Sunday, December 1, 2019 at 2:12:38 AM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote: >> >> >> It seems like a simple question aching for an answer. Why do physicists, >> many of them at least, prefer a baffling unintelligible interpretation of >> superposition, say in the case of a radioactive source, when the obvious >> non-contradictory one stares them in their collective faces? AG >> > > > > > The fundamental and psychological problem many physicists have is that > they take some mathematics (in some particular theory) and assign physical > realities to its mathematical entities. > > > That is the interesting problem. We use a mathematical formalism, but any > simple relation between that formalism and reality, to be correct, needs to > NOT make the superposed terms disappearing (indeed the quantum computation > exploits typically different terms of the superposition, like already the > two slits). > > De Broglie defended the idea that quantum mechanics was false on distance > bigger than an atom, and predicted that the EPR influence is absent on any > macroscopic distance, advocating your idea that the formalism should not be > taken literally; but eventually Bell has shown this to be testable, and > Nature has confirmed the formalism (Aspect and followers). > > So, it is just false to NOT attribute a physical reality to all terms in > the wave. We would lost the interference effect. The problem of how to > interpret the wave is not solved by distantiation with the wave formalism, > as Nature confirms the weirdness imposed to the formalism. > > > > > Most of them do not understand the nature of mathematics: It's a language > (or collection of languages) about mathematical entities - which are > thought of differently depending on one's philosophy of mathematics. (It is > best to say they are *fictions*.) This is especially true when > probability theory (as defined in mathematics) is involved. > > > With QM, the problem is that the amplitude of probability do interfere. In > arithmetic too, and for a mechanist, the conceptual problems are solved in > a radical way, as there is no time, nor space, only correlated minds. The > fiction is not in the math, but in the assumption that “physical” means > ontological. > > > > This hopping between physical realities and mathematical entities leads > them to them being unable to distinguish between them, or to communicate to > the public the true nature of physics. > > > > I would say that the problem comes from the materialists who mostly seem > unable to understand that the assumption of an ontological physical > universe is a very BIG assumption, without any evidences to sustain it, > beyond the natural instinctive extrapolation from simple experiences. When > doing metaphysics with the scientific method, it is important to be > agnostic on this, as it is the very subject of the research. > > Bruno > > > > "So, it is just false to NOT attribute a physical reality to all terms in the wave."
There are formulations without the wave function, so - until there is more that can be found out about what's "below" the quantum phenomena we've observed so far - the wave function can be done without. All these formulations (with or without wave functions) give the same probabilities to match to experiments, but "Counterfactual indefiniteness" <https://codicalist.wordpress.com/2019/11/27/quantum-concurrent-prolog/> remains @philipthrift -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d237f0a3-c671-4995-85b2-409ce9643bb7%40googlegroups.com.
