On 01-02-2021 07:16, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 4:10 PM smitra <[email protected]> wrote:
The core disagreement with Bruce is the following. He wrote:
"However, I have not made any appeal to Copenhagen or any other
particular interpretation. I am simply pointing to a physical result
that must be explainable by whatever interpretation or theory you
adopt."
While you can do this, you then cannot draw the conclusion that the
MWI
is wrong. For that you must analyze the situation according to the
MWI,
and if there are problems see if these are due to a formalism that
simplifies things too much that can be repaired or if the problem is
fundamentally unrepairable. Only in the latter case can you draw the
conclusion that the MWI must necessarily be wrong.
You are saying that only if MWI can be shown to be internally
inconsistent can it be claimed that it is wrong. This is not true. If
one can demonstrate that MWI does not give results that correspond to
the physical reality, then one can conclude that MWI is inadequate as
a physical theory.
I agree that internal consistency is not good enough, it can, of course
be falsified.
So I have adopted a neutral position on the truth
or falsity of MWI and shown that it does not give an adequate account
of the irreversibility of most quantum interactions. Not that any
other quantum theory necessarily does either, but it does show a
weakness in the theories that can only be remedied by the addition of
a genuine stochastic element into those theories -- something that
will recognize the reality of the transition from a pure state to an
improper mixture, which is what the entanglement interactions do.
By not strictly assuming MWI you smuggle in elements that are
inconsistent with the MWI in your analysis. It's then not clear that the
problem you arrive at is something that is due to the MWI, or if it is
an artifact of the additional assumptions you made.
MWI
insists that only the view of the whole universe makes sense. But that
does not capture the physical fact that the process is irreversible in
principle, so MWI is inadequate to the task of explaining the physics.
In fact, this necessary irreversibility of quantum interactions is a
strong reason for preferring genuinely stochastic theories, such as
the relativistic GRW theory.
There is only a practical irreversibility, but the MWI does not imply
anything different. The MWI does not prevent you from working with
reduced density matrices either. There is really no problem here.
Saibal
Previously, you were also dismissive of "quantum non-equilibrium" in
the
context of Bohm theory. If Bohm theory is true, then this is a
possibility, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. You can't dismiss
it
out of hand and then analyze a problem and then conclude that Bohm
theory must be false, as that would be a straw man argument.
I do not think I ever claimed that Bohm's theory is false. Quantum
equilibrium or non-equilibrium is a concept that has relevance only to
Bohm's theory, and the reliability of that concept can be analysed
independently. If quantum non-equilibrium is found to occur, then that
has consequences for Bohm, but if the concept is found to be
irrelevant to the physics, then it has no consequences for Bohm. It is
perfectly possible to simply add the Born rule to Bohmian mechanics as
an additional postulate, as it is added in conventional Copenhagen
interpretations, for instance. If one does not insist on trying to
derive the Born rule from Bohmian mechanics, then the question of
quantum equilibrium becomes otiose.
Bruce
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