On Tue, Oct 1, 2024 at 9:19 PM Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
*> But when we ask what this means physically we are faced with a problem > the distributive law applied to the tensor product of the initial > superposition and the environment means that the original environment must > be duplicated before any interaction takes place. It is very hard to make > physical sense of this.* > *In Quantum Mechanics "measurement" is a non-commutative operator, the order in which measurements are performed can profoundly affect the outcome. And you're right, it is indeed hard to make physical sense out of that, it's weird but it's a fact, and physicists have been trying to figure it out for about a century now and there is still no consensus. It's especially hard for the Copenhagen people because, although it's an extremely important concept in their theory, they can't tell you exactly what a "measurement" is, nor can they explain why Quantum Mechanics doesn't seem to work on people or their measuring equipment and only works for the things that they're measuring. * *Pilot Wave theory does a little better but at the price of greatly increase complexity, in addition to Schrödinger's Equation it also needs another equation called the Pilot Wave Equation that is non-local and very complex and does nothing but go around erasing all those other annoying worlds that Schrodinger's Equation says is there. That's why some call the pilot wave interpretation Many Worlds theory in denial. It's also very odd that the pilot wave can affect an electron's motion but the electron has absolutely no effect on the wave. Nothing else in physics is like that. For everything else in the universe if X effects Y then Y is going to have at least some effect on X, but not if X is a pilot wave.* > > *What causes the environment to duplicate? How can this even be > possible? * > *From the Many Worlds point of view, that's equivalent to asking why is there something rather than nothing, and no theory can give an entirely satisfactory answer to that question, at least not yet. Many Worlds is bare bones no nonsense Quantum Mechanics with no silly bells and whistles attached, such as the pilot wave equation. All Many Worlds says is that everything always obeys Schrodinger's Wave Equation, it never collapses, and the sum total of reality is the Universal Wave Function. The multitude of worlds that some people find so upsetting is just a consequence of that, if you want to get rid of them you're going to have to invent a disappearing worlds theory such as pilot wave or objective collapse theory, but that would enormously complicate things and personally I think quantum mechanics is complicated enough as it is.* John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> 5vv > -- 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/CAJPayv1X-8ttkZ_rWBiUut6A3s9B5crovijLaDMXE8Cr%3DJb4QQ%40mail.gmail.com.
