Folks, Just for the sake of balance, let me refer to one school of thought which has been quite under-represented so far. That is the probabilistic interpretation and formulation of QM grounded upon chance events instead of ignorance on the part of the observer. An example is a photographic emulsion consisting of grains of silver halide suspended in gelatin. When a photon hits a grain in the emulsion, an electron-hole pair is generated in gelatin. This is equivalent to an enormous localization of the incident photon. When the incident photon is thought to be a plane wave as is most often the case, the wave front can be extended even towards an infinity in the configuration space as carrying a fixed momentum. The photon hitting the emulsion comes to break momentum conservation. This process, although certainly sound and physical, does not follow the Schroedinger equation of motion because in the latter, momentum conservation is strictly observed. Such spontaneous localization is both objective and stochastic.
Of course, the probability upon ignorance is quite useful from the engineering perspective since the extent of being ignorant can easily be manupilated at will externally. From the internalist perspective as Aleks refers to, on the other hand, the origin of chances resides in the objective transition from the progressive to the perfect tense as Loet may have concerned himself with. Cheers, Koichiro _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
