The multiverse is unscientific nonsense??

[John Clark]

I read an article called The multiverse is unscientific nonsense by Jacob Barandes, a lecturer in physics at Harvard University, and I wrote a letter to professor Barandes commenting on it. He responded with a very polite letter saying he read it and appreciated what I said but didn't have time to comment further. This is the letter I sent: 

===========

Hello Professor Barandes

I read your article The multiverse is unscientific nonsense with interest and I have a few comments:

Nobody is claiming that the existence of the multiverse is a proven fact, but I think the idea needs to be taken seriously because: 

1) Unlike Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, the Many Worlds theory is clear about what it's saying. 

2) It is self consistent and conforms with all known experimental results. 

3) It has no need to speculate about new physics as objective wave collapse theories like GRW do.

4) It doesn't have to explain what consciousness or a measurement is because they have nothing to do with it, all it needs is Schrodinger's equation.  

I don't see how you can explain counterfactual quantum reasoning and such things as the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester without making use of many worlds. Hugh Everett would say that by having a bomb in a universe we are not in explode we can tell if a bomb that is in the branch of the multiverse that we are in is a dud or is a live fully functional bomb.  You say that many worlds needs to account for probability and that's true, but then you say many worlds demands that some worlds have “higher probabilities than others" but that is incorrect. According to many worlds there is one and only one universe for every quantum state that is not forbidden by the laws of physics. So when you flip a coin the universe splits many more times than twice because there are a vast number, perhaps an infinite number, of places where a coin could land, but you are not interested in exactly where the coin lands, you're only interested if it lands heads or tails. And we've known for centuries how to obtain a useful probability between any two points on the continuous bell curve even though the continuous curve is made up of an unaccountably infinite number of points, all we need to do is perform a simple integration to figure out which part of the bell curve we're most likely on.

Yes, that's a lot of worlds, but you shouldn't object that the multiverse really couldn't be that big unless you are a stout defender of the idea that the universe must be finite, because even if many worlds turns out to be untrue the universe could still be infinite and an infinity plus an infinity is still the an infinity with the same Aleph number. Even if there is only one universe if it's infinite then a finite distance away there must be a doppelgänger of you because, although there are a huge number of quantum states your body could be in, that number is not infinite, but the universe is. 

And Occam's razor is about an economy of assumptions not an economy of results.  As for the "Tower of assumptions" many worlds is supposed to be based on, the only assumption that many worlds makes is that Schrodinger's equation means what it says, and it says nothing about the wave function collapsing. I would maintain that many worlds is bare-bones no-nonsense quantum mechanics with none of the silly bells and whistles that other theories stick on that do nothing but get rid of those  pesky other worlds that keep cropping up that they personally dislike for some reason. And since Everett's time other worlds do seem to keep popping up and in completely unrelated fields, such as string theory and inflationary cosmology.

You also ask what a “rational observer” is and how they ought to behave, and place bets on future events, given their self-locating uncertainty. I agree with David Hume who said that "ought" cannot be derived from "is", but "ought" can be derived from "want". So if an observer is a gambler that WANTS to make money but is irrational then he is absolutely guaranteed to lose all his money if he plays long enough, while a rational observer who knows how to make use of continuous probabilities is guaranteed to make money, or at least break even. Physicists WANT their ideas to be clear, have predictive power, and to conform with reality as described by experiment; therefore I think they OUGHT to embrace the many world's idea.  

And yes there is a version of you and me that flips a coin 1 million times and see heads every single time even though the coin is 100% fair, however it is extremely unlikely that we will find ourselves that far out on the bell curve, so I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that I will not see 1 million heads in a row.  You also say that "the Dirac-von Neumann axioms don’t support oft-heard statements that an atom can be in two places at once, or that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time", but there are only two possibilities, either there is an alive cat and a dead cat in two different places or there is a live/dead cat that instantly snaps into being either alive or dead by the act of "measurement" even though the standard textbook Copenhagen interpretation can't say exactly what a measurement is, or even approximately what it is for that matter. In many worlds a measurement is simply any change in a quantum system, it makes no difference if that quantum system is a human being or an unconscious brick wall. So in that sense many worlds is totalitarian because everything that is not forbidden by the laws of Quantum Physics and General Relativity must exist.  

You correctly point out that nobody has ever "seen an atom in two places at once, let alone a cat being both alive and dead", but nobody has ever seen infinite dimensional operators in Hilbert space that the Dirac-von Neumann axioms use either, all they've seen is ink on paper in mathematical books. And you can't get milk from the word "cow". 

I'll close by just saying although I believe there is considerable evidence in favor of the many worlds view I admit it falls far short of a proof, maybe tomorrow somebody will come up with a better idea but right now many worlds is the least bad quantum interpretation around. And speculation is not a dirty word, without it science would be moribund, Richard Feynman said science is imagination in a tight straight jacket and I agree with him. 

Best wishes

John K Clark

=========

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

lis

[Jason Resch]

That's kind of him to reply.

Aren't functional quantum computers proof that atoms can be in two places at once?

Jat

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2023 at 9:17 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That's kind of him to reply. Aren't functional quantum computers proof that atoms can be in two places at once?

I would say so but apparently he would not. And I'll be damned if I can understand why the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester works if there is no other world but this one. The Copenhagen interpretation people would say that I should just treat mathematics as a black box and accept the results of the calculation and not even try to understand what's actually going on. But I'd like to at least try.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

iws

 

lis

[Brent Meeker]

A good letter to Brandes, but I think you use Schroedinger's cat to much.  If one imagines a clock attached to the poison vial, then it's clear that on opening the box you will see an alive or dead cat and a running clock or one that marks the exact time in the past that the cat was killed.  So decoherence theory has answered the problem of why we don't see superpositions of alive and dead cats. 

Personally I'm just as happy (and unhappy) to say that all those worlds we don't see simply never exist and while exactly when they don't exist (as Everett would have it) is puzzling. it's less so than an infinity of worlds that sort of exist but in some orthogonal way that they can never have any effect.  The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester works because it has certain probability of working.  Are you so wedded to a frequentist interpretation of probability that you must imagine existing copies of it not working?

I notice that you never entertain QBism and seem to dismiss it as "just not an intuitively satisfying theory; it doesn't have pictures for my mind."  To which I think, "so what; did you have a picture of inertia in Newtonian mechanics?"  Intuition comes from use and familiarity.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2023 at 8:25 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A good letter to Brandes, but I think you use Schroedinger's cat to much.  If one imagines a clock attached to the poison vial, then it's clear that on opening the box you will see an alive or dead cat and a running clock or one that marks the exact time in the past that the cat was killed. 

The entire purpose of a thought experiment is to help you understand something, if you replace the radioactive decay of an atom, which according to quantum mechanics is supposed to be random, an event without a cause, with a mechanical clock then I don't see how your modification of Schrodinger's cat helps anybody understand anything.  

 

> So decoherence theory has answered the problem of why we don't see superpositions of alive and dead cats. 

 Decoherence theory is fine but it can't resolve  Schrodinger's cat paradox, at least not to my satisfaction.  

 

> I notice that you never entertain QBism and seem to dismiss it as "just not an intuitively satisfying theory;

 QBism certainly works, but I dismiss it because it's just "shut up and calculate" with a different name.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

wdn

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/19/2023 10:09 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Nov 18, 2023 at 8:25 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A good letter to Brandes, but I think you use Schroedinger's cat to much.  If one imagines a clock attached to the poison vial, then it's clear that on opening the box you will see an alive or dead cat and a running clock or one that marks the exact time in the past that the cat was killed. 

The entire purpose of a thought experiment is to help you understand something, if you replace the radioactive decay of an atom, which according to quantum mechanics is supposed to be random, an event without a cause, with a mechanical clock then I don't see how your modification of Schrodinger's cat helps anybody understand anything.  

I didn't replace the atom.  I connected a clock to the vial so there's a record or when it is broken.

 

> So decoherence theory has answered the problem of why we don't see superpositions of alive and dead cats. 

 Decoherence theory is fine but it can't resolve  Schrodinger's cat paradox, at least not to my satisfaction.  

 

> I notice that you never entertain QBism and seem to dismiss it as "just not an intuitively satisfying theory;

 QBism certainly works, but I dismiss it because it's just "shut up and calculate" with a different name. 

When calculate the impact of two boxcars do you refuse to use the concept of inertia becasue there's no storybook about where it comes from?  Familiarity breeds the illusion of understanding.

Brent

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

wdn

 

 

iws

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 6:58 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

I read an article called The multiverse is unscientific nonsense by Jacob Barandes, a lecturer in physics at Harvard University, and I wrote a letter to professor Barandes commenting on it. He responded with a very polite letter saying he read it and appreciated what I said but didn't have time to comment further. This is the letter I sent: 

===========

Hello Professor Barandes

I read your article The multiverse is unscientific nonsense with interest and I have a few comments:

Nobody is claiming that the existence of the multiverse is a proven fact, but I think the idea needs to be taken seriously because: 

1) Unlike Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, the Many Worlds theory is clear about what it's saying. 

2) It is self consistent and conforms with all known experimental results. 

3) It has no need to speculate about new physics as objective wave collapse theories like GRW do.

4) It doesn't have to explain what consciousness or a measurement is because they have nothing to do with it, all it needs is Schrodinger's equation.  

I don't see how you can explain counterfactual quantum reasoning and such things as the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester without making use of many worlds. Hugh Everett would say that by having a bomb in a universe we are not in explode we can tell if a bomb that is in the branch of the multiverse that we are in is a dud or is a live fully functional bomb.  You say that many worlds needs to account for probability and that's true, but then you say many worlds demands that some worlds have “higher probabilities than others" but that is incorrect. According to many worlds there is one and only one universe for every quantum state that is not forbidden by the laws of physics. So when you flip a coin the universe splits many more times than twice because there are a vast number, perhaps an infinite number, of places where a coin could land, but you are not interested in exactly where the coin lands, you're only interested if it lands heads or tails. And we've known for centuries how to obtain a useful probability between any two points on the continuous bell curve even though the continuous curve is made up of an unaccountably infinite number of points, all we need to do is perform a simple integration to figure out which part of the bell curve we're most likely on.

Yes, that's a lot of worlds, but you shouldn't object that the multiverse really couldn't be that big unless you are a stout defender of the idea that the universe must be finite, because even if many worlds turns out to be untrue the universe could still be infinite and an infinity plus an infinity is still the an infinity with the same Aleph number. Even if there is only one universe if it's infinite then a finite distance away there must be a doppelgänger of you because, although there are a huge number of quantum states your body could be in, that number is not infinite, but the universe is. 

And Occam's razor is about an economy of assumptions not an economy of results.  As for the "Tower of assumptions" many worlds is supposed to be based on, the only assumption that many worlds makes is that Schrodinger's equation means what it says, and it says nothing about the wave function collapsing. I would maintain that many worlds is bare-bones no-nonsense quantum mechanics with none of the silly bells and whistles that other theories stick on that do nothing but get rid of those  pesky other worlds that keep cropping up that they personally dislike for some reason. And since Everett's time other worlds do seem to keep popping up and in completely unrelated fields, such as string theory and inflationary cosmology.

You also ask what a “rational observer” is and how they ought to behave, and place bets on future events, given their self-locating uncertainty. I agree with David Hume who said that "ought" cannot be derived from "is", but "ought" can be derived from "want". So if an observer is a gambler that WANTS to make money but is irrational then he is absolutely guaranteed to lose all his money if he plays long enough, while a rational observer who knows how to make use of continuous probabilities is guaranteed to make money, or at least break even. Physicists WANT their ideas to be clear, have predictive power, and to conform with reality as described by experiment; therefore I think they OUGHT to embrace the many world's idea.  

And yes there is a version of you and me that flips a coin 1 million times and see heads every single time even though the coin is 100% fair, however it is extremely unlikely that we will find ourselves that far out on the bell curve, so I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that I will not see 1 million heads in a row.  You also say that "the Dirac-von Neumann axioms don’t support oft-heard statements that an atom can be in two places at once, or that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time", but there are only two possibilities, either there is an alive cat and a dead cat in two different places or there is a live/dead cat that instantly snaps into being either alive or dead by the act of "measurement" even though the standard textbook Copenhagen interpretation can't say exactly what a measurement is, or even approximately what it is for that matter. In many worlds a measurement is simply any change in a quantum system, it makes no difference if that quantum system is a human being or an unconscious brick wall. So in that sense many worlds is totalitarian because everything that is not forbidden by the laws of Quantum Physics and General Relativity must exist.  

You correctly point out that nobody has ever "seen an atom in two places at once, let alone a cat being both alive and dead", but nobody has ever seen infinite dimensional operators in Hilbert space that the Dirac-von Neumann axioms use either, all they've seen is ink on paper in mathematical books. And you can't get milk from the word "cow". 

I'll close by just saying although I believe there is considerable evidence in favor of the many worlds view I admit it falls far short of a proof, maybe tomorrow somebody will come up with a better idea but right now many worlds is the least bad quantum interpretation around. And speculation is not a dirty word, without it science would be moribund, Richard Feynman said science is imagination in a tight straight jacket and I agree with him. 

Best wishes

John K Clark

=========

lis

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2023 at 4:54 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> The entire purpose of a thought experiment is to help you understand something, if you replace the radioactive decay of an atom, which according to quantum mechanics is supposed to be random, an event without a cause, with a mechanical clock then I don't see how your modification of Schrodinger's cat helps anybody understand anything.  

 

> I didn't replace the atom.  I connected a clock to the vial so there's a record or when it is broken.

OK so now is the clock that exists in the 12:01 State, and the 12:02 and the 12:03 and the 12:04 and the... 12:59 state, and it doesn't snap into one particular state until you open the box. How was that better than the original experiment?   

 >> QBism certainly works, but I dismiss it because it's just "shut up and calculate" with a different name. 

>When calculate the impact of two boxcars do you refuse to use the concept of inertia becasue there's no storybook about where it comes from? 

No of course not, and I'm not saying people shouldn't use shut up and calculate or its pseudonym "QBism", I'm just saying it's not a bad thing if somebody wants to look a little deeper into the nature of inertia, because the discovery of the Higgs field and the Higgs particle partially solves the mystery of inertia, at least it explains why quarks have mass and can explain about 1% of the mass of macroscopic objects, and that's a start. If people just give up we will never find any answers.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

eqp

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[Lawrence Crowell]

The real problem is that anything involving the multiverse, say some quantum field signature from the earliest quantum cosmology, is stretched by inflation into a red-shifted spectrum beyond measurability. The multiverse is consistent with inflationary cosmology, which is supported by data, but information about the multiverse may never be detected.

LC 

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Sunday, November 19, 2023 at 4:15:10 PM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Nov 19, 2023 at 4:54 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> The entire purpose of a thought experiment is to help you understand something, if you replace the radioactive decay of an atom, which according to quantum mechanics is supposed to be random, an event without a cause, with a mechanical clock then I don't see how your modification of Schrodinger's cat helps anybody understand anything.  

 

> I didn't replace the atom.  I connected a clock to the vial so there's a record or when it is broken.

OK so now is the clock that exists in the 12:01 State, and the 12:02 and the 12:03 and the 12:04 and the... 12:59 state, and it doesn't snap into one particular state until you open the box. How was that better than the original experiment?   

 >> QBism certainly works, but I dismiss it because it's just "shut up and calculate" with a different name. 

>When calculate the impact of two boxcars do you refuse to use the concept of inertia becasue there's no storybook about where it comes from? 

No of course not, and I'm not saying people shouldn't use shut up and calculate or its pseudonym "QBism", I'm just saying it's not a bad thing if somebody wants to look a little deeper into the nature of inertia, because the discovery of the Higgs field and the Higgs particle partially solves the mystery of inertia, at least it explains why quarks have mass and can explain about 1% of the mass of macroscopic objects, and that's a start. If people just give up we will never find any answers.

I am not an upholder of quantum interpretations. QBism is though at least somewhat minimalist. 

LC

 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

eqpmsgid/everything-list/e4c9a0a2-e4f3-4e50-8dd4-e414f6488220%40gmail.com.

[Brent Meeker]

There seems to be a conflation between the multiple worlds of Everett and the eternal inflation of a multiverse.

Brent

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[Bruce Kellett]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 3:26 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

There seems to be a conflation between the multiple worlds of Everett and the eternal inflation of a multiverse.

It has been suggested that the cosmic multiverse and the quantum multiverse of Everett are the same thing. But I think that this idea is patently ridiculous.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2023 at 11:44 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It has been suggested that the cosmic multiverse and the quantum multiverse of Everett are the same thing. But I think that this idea is patently ridiculous.

Perhaps so, but is it ridiculous enough to be true?  Quantum mechanics itself seems pretty ridiculous to me, not paradoxical but ridiculous. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

wqr

 

 -

[John Clark]

In Einstein's 1935 EPR paper he thought he had found a consequence of quantum mechanics that was a Reductio Ad Absurdum proof that it couldn't be true. But he forgot that for such a proved to be valid you need to do more than prove that something is ridiculous, you need to prove that it's logically contradictory, because in the 1980s it was shown experimentally that such ridiculous things actually happen. Quantum mechanics is ridiculous but not logically contradictory. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

rpr

[Jesse Mazer]

Depends what you mean by "couldn't be true"--my understanding is that Einstein's EPR paper was just asserting that there must be additional elements of reality beyond the quantum description (for example, that correlations between distant particles could be explained in terms of extra unseen variables they carried with them from somewhere in the overlap of their past light cones, a correlation between distant facts A and B explained by common cause C rather than a causal influence between A and B), not that quantum predictions would necessarily turn out to be wrong. I don't think it was understood until Bell's analysis that QM predictions were fundamentally incompatible with a local realist "common cause" style explanation that makes use of additional variables besides those given by the quantum state description.

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 1:22 PM Jesse Mazer <laser...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Depends what you mean by "couldn't be true"--my understanding is that Einstein's EPR paper was just asserting that there must be additional elements of reality beyond the quantum description

Yes, Einstein thought he had proven that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because nature just couldn't be that ridiculous. But it turned out nature could be that ridiculous. The moral of the story is that being ridiculous is not necessarily the same thing as being wrong.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

brw

[Bruce Kellett]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 7:32 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 1:22 PM Jesse Mazer <laser...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Depends what you mean by "couldn't be true"--my understanding is that Einstein's EPR paper was just asserting that there must be additional elements of reality beyond the quantum description

Yes, Einstein thought he had proven that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because nature just couldn't be that ridiculous. But it turned out nature could be that ridiculous. The moral of the story is that being ridiculous is not necessarily the same thing as being wrong.

Nevertheless, being ridiculous is no indication that an idea is correct. Evidence matters, and there is no evidence that the multiverse of Everett has anything to do with cosmology. In fact, there is no direct evidence that the quantum multiverse even exists.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 5:32 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Einstein thought he had proven that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because nature just couldn't be that ridiculous. But it turned out nature could be that ridiculous. The moral of the story is that being ridiculous is not necessarily the same thing as being wrong.

> Nevertheless, being ridiculous is no indication that an idea is correct. Evidence matters, and there is no evidence that the multiverse of Everett has anything to do with cosmology. In fact, there is no direct evidence that the quantum multiverse even exists.

There is plenty of direct evidence that quantum weirdness exists, even the father of the Copenhagen Interpretation Niels Bohr admitted that "Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum theory does not understand it ". Something must be behind all that strangeness and whatever it is it must be odd, very very odd. Yes, many world's idea is ridiculous, but is it ridiculous enough to be true? If it's not then something even more ridiculous is. As for the Copenhagen interpretation, I don't think it's ridiculous, I think it's incoherent, and if you ask 10 adherents what it's saying you'll get 12 completely different answers, but they all boil down to "just give up, don't even try to figure out what's going on". But I think one must try.

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

7c2

 

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 3:32 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 1:22 PM Jesse Mazer <laser...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Depends what you mean by "couldn't be true"--my understanding is that Einstein's EPR paper was just asserting that there must be additional elements of reality beyond the quantum description

Yes, Einstein thought he had proven that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because nature just couldn't be that ridiculous. But it turned out nature could be that ridiculous. The moral of the story is that being ridiculous is not necessarily the same thing as being wrong.  

EPR was ultimately right. QM, as the understood was incomplete, for it wasn't acknowledged that there as an infinity of simultaneously existing states all of which persisted after measurement. It was assuming that measurement somehow changed things and made states disappear and do so faster than light which EPR authors couldn't swallow. Their intuition proved correct, there are no FTL influences.

Jason 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

brw

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[scerir]

Just an interesting quote.

“The idea that they [measurement outcomes] be not alternatives but *all* really happen simultaneously seems lunatic to him [the quantum theorist], just *impossible*. He thinks that if the laws of nature took *this* form for, let me say, a quarter of an hour, we should find our surroundings rapidly turning into a quagmire, or sort of a featureless jelly or plasma, all contours becoming blurred, we ourselves probably becoming jelly fish. It is strange that he should believe this. For I understand he grants that unobserved nature does behave this way – namely according to the wave equation. The aforesaid *alternatives* come into play only when we make an observation - which need, of course, not be a scientific observation. Still it would seem that, according to the quantum theorist, nature is prevented from rapid jellification only by our perceiving or observing it. [........] The compulsion to replace the "simultaneous* happenings, as indicated directly by the theory, by *alternatives*, of which the theory is supposed to indicate the respective *probabilities*, arises from the conviction that what we really observe are particles - that actual events always concern particles, not waves."

 

-Erwin Schroedinger, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Dublin Seminars (1949-1955) and Other Unpublished Essays (Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1995), pages 19-20.

 

 

 

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 11:17 AM 'scerir' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Just an interesting quote.

“The idea that they [measurement outcomes] be not alternatives but *all* really happen simultaneously seems lunatic to him [the quantum theorist], just *impossible*. He thinks that if the laws of nature took *this* form for, let me say, a quarter of an hour, we should find our surroundings rapidly turning into a quagmire, or sort of a featureless jelly or plasma, all contours becoming blurred, we ourselves probably becoming jelly fish. It is strange that he should believe this. For I understand he grants that unobserved nature does behave this way – namely according to the wave equation. The aforesaid *alternatives* come into play only when we make an observation - which need, of course, not be a scientific observation. Still It would seem that, according to the quantum theorist, nature is prevented from rapid jellification only by our perceiving or observing it. [........] The compulsion to replace the "simultaneous* happenings, as indicated directly by the theory, by *alternatives*, of which the theory is supposed to indicate the respective *probabilities*, arises from the conviction that what we really observe are particles - that actual events always concern particles, not waves."

     -Erwin Schroedinger, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Dublin Seminars (1949-1955) and Other Unpublished Essays (Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1995), pages 19-20.

I would indeed observe the external world to be a featureless jelly if I was not subjected to the rules of quantum mechanics but everything else in the external world was, but that is not the case. Copenhagen says that when I observe an electron in a specific quantum state I cause all the other states that the electron could have been in to disappear without a trace, but Many Worlds says that for every quantum state the electron could have been in there is a quantum state of me observing the electron in that state, and that is the least bad idea I've ever heard on how to explain quantum weirdness.  

    John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

rcp

 

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 11:17 AM 'scerir' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Just an interesting quote.

“The idea that they [measurement outcomes] be not alternatives but *all* really happen simultaneously seems lunatic to him [the quantum theorist], just *impossible*. He thinks that if the laws of nature took *this* form for, let me say, a quarter of an hour, we should find our surroundings rapidly turning into a quagmire, or sort of a featureless jelly or plasma, all contours becoming blurred, we ourselves probably becoming jelly fish. It is strange that he should believe this. For I understand he grants that unobserved nature does behave this way – namely according to the wave equation. The aforesaid *alternatives* come into play only when we make an observation - which need, of course, not be a scientific observation. Still it would seem that, according to the quantum theorist, nature is prevented from rapid jellification only by our perceiving or observing it. [........] The compulsion to replace the "simultaneous* happenings, as indicated directly by the theory, by *alternatives*, of which the theory is supposed to indicate the respective *probabilities*, arises from the conviction that what we really observe are particles - that actual events always concern particles, not waves."

 

-Erwin Schroedinger, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Dublin Seminars (1949-1955) and Other Unpublished Essays (Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1995), pages 19-20.

This is how David Deutsch interpreted these lectures:

"Schrödinger also had the basic idea of parallel universes shortly before Everett, but he didn't publish it. He mentioned it in a lecture in Dublin, in which he predicted that the audience would think he was crazy. Isn't that a strange assertion coming from a Nobel Prize winner—that he feared being considered crazy for claiming that his equation, the one that he won the Nobel Prize for, might be true." -- David Deutsch

Jason 

 

 

 

Il 21/11/2023 16:43 +01 Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> ha scritto:

 

 

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 3:32 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 1:22 PM Jesse Mazer <laser...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> Depends what you mean by "couldn't be true"--my understanding is that Einstein's EPR paper was just asserting that there must be additional elements of reality beyond the quantum description

 

Yes, Einstein thought he had proven that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because nature just couldn't be that ridiculous. But it turned out nature could be that ridiculous. The moral of the story is that being ridiculous is not necessarily the same thing as being wrong.  

 

EPR was ultimately right. QM, as the understood was incomplete, for it wasn't acknowledged that there as an infinity of simultaneously existing states all of which persisted after measurement. It was assuming that measurement somehow changed things and made states disappear and do so faster than light which EPR authors couldn't swallow. Their intuition proved correct, there are no FTL influences.

 

Jason 

 

 

 

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brw

 

 

 

 

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[scerir]

According to Schroedinger (1935) the psi-function is a catalogue of expectations.

Continuing with the exposition of the official teaching, let us turn to the psi-function
mentioned above (§ 5). It is now the instrument for predicting the probability of
measurement outcomes. It embodies the totality of theoretical future expectations, as laid down in a catalogue. It is, at any moment in time, the bridge of relations and restrictions between different measurements, as were in the classical theory the model and its state at any given time. The psi-function has also otherwise much in common with this classical state. In principle, it is also uniquely determined by a finite number of suitably chosen measurements on the object, though half as many as in the classical theory. Thus is the catalogue of expectations laid down initially. From then on, it changes with time, as in the classical theory, in a well-defined and deterministic ("causal") way - the development of the psi-function is governed by a partial differential equation (of first order in the time variable, and resolved for dy/dt). This corresponds to the undisturbed motion of the model in the classical theory. But that lasts only so long until another measurement is undertaken. After every measurement, one has to attribute to the psi-function a curious, somewhat sudden adaptation, which depends on the measurement result and is therefore unpredictable. This alone already shows that this second type of change of the psi-function has nothing to do with the regular development between two measurements. The sudden
change due to measurement is closely connected with the discussion in § 5, and we will
consider it in depth in the following. It is the most interesting aspect of the whole theory,
and it is precisely this aspect that requires a breach with naive realism. For this reason,
the y-function cannot immediately replace the model or the real thing. And this is not
because a real thing or a model could not in principle undergo sudden unpredictable
changes, but because from a realistic point of view, measurements are natural phenomena like any other, and should not by themselves cause a sudden interruption of the regular evolution in Nature.

 

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[Brent Meeker]

I think that's very unfair to Bohr.  His basic observation was that we do science in a classical world of necessity.  Only in a classical world can we make measurements and keep records that we can agree on.  So when we study the microscopic world we must use quantum mechanics, but our instruments must be classical.  The boundary can be anywhere, but our science must be on the macroscopic side (this is unlike Heisenberg who thought that a definite boundary could be defined in terms of h).  You can treat a baseball as a quantum system composed of elementary particles; but your measurements on it must still give classical values.  Since the development of decoherence theory this boundary can be quantified in terms vanishing of cross-terms in a reduced density matrix.  What is left unexplained, in MWI as well as Copenhagen, is the instantiation of a random result with probability proportional to the diagonal elements of the reduced density matrix.

It's no good saying some theory is incoherent unless you consider the best possible version of the theory.  Sure a lot of incoherent things have been said about the interpretation of QM and attributed to Bohr, who was always circuitous and indirect in his talks and later tried to make a whole philosophy based on complementarity.  But we've made some progress since Bohr.

Brent

Brent

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[Brent Meeker]

On 11/21/2023 7:43 AM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 3:32 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 1:22 PM Jesse Mazer <laser...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Depends what you mean by "couldn't be true"--my understanding is that Einstein's EPR paper was just asserting that there must be additional elements of reality beyond the quantum description

Yes, Einstein thought he had proven that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because nature just couldn't be that ridiculous. But it turned out nature could be that ridiculous. The moral of the story is that being ridiculous is not necessarily the same thing as being wrong.  

EPR was ultimately right. QM, as the understood was incomplete, for it wasn't acknowledged that there as an infinity of simultaneously existing states all of which persisted after measurement. It was assuming that measurement somehow changed things and made states disappear and do so faster than light which EPR authors couldn't swallow. Their intuition proved correct, there are no FTL influences.

That's like saying because the probability Buffon's needle crosses a boundary is 2*l/pi*t there must exist infinitely many Buffon's and needles and stripes since pi is a transcendental number.  When mathematics implies infinities, it's more likely that the mathematics is merely an approximation than that it calls into being infinitely many things.

Brent

Jason 

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 7:45 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> There is plenty of direct evidence that quantum weirdness exists, even the father of the Copenhagen Interpretation Niels Bohr admitted that "Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum theory does not understand it ". Something must be behind all that strangeness and whatever it is it must be odd, very very odd. Yes, many world's idea is ridiculous, but is it ridiculous enough to be true? If it's not then something even more ridiculous is. As for the Copenhagen interpretation, I don't think it's ridiculous, I think it's incoherent, and if you ask 10 adherents what it's saying you'll get 12 completely different answers, but they all boil down to "just give up, don't even try to figure out what's going on". But I think one must try.

 

> I think that's very unfair to Bohr.  His basic observation was that we do science in a classical world of necessity. 

Bohr was a great scientist but I think he was a lousy philosopher.  Bohr thought there was a mystical interface between quantum events and conscious awareness, some call it the "Heisenberg Cut", but neither Bohr nor Heisenberg could explain the mechanism behind this mysterious phenomenon nor could they say exactly, or even approximately, where the hell the dividing line between the classical world and the quantum world is. By contrast Many Worlds has no problem whatsoever explaining the mechanism behind the Heisenberg cut or where the dividing line is because the Heisenberg cut does not exist and there is no dividing line, everything is quantum mechanical including the entire universe.  I think this is the reason the Many Worlds interpretation is more popular among cosmologists than among scientists in general.

 > Only in a classical world can we make measurements and keep records that we can agree on.  

But the Copenhagen adherents can't agree even among themselves what a "measurement" is or what a "record" means, but Many Worlds people are in agreement, all measurements are a change in a quantum state but a quantum change is not necessarily a measurement.   

  

> when we study the microscopic world we must use quantum mechanics, but our instruments must be classical. 

We can pretend our instruments are classical, in our everyday life we can pretend that everything is classical, but we've known for nearly a century that is just a useful lie we tell ourselves because reality is not classical, it is quantum mechanical.   

 

> You can treat a baseball as a quantum system composed of elementary particles; but your measurements on it must still give classical values. 

As I said before, you can live your entire life by pretending that classical physics is all there is and in fact billions of people have had successful lives doing so, but that doesn't make it true. In theory classical measurements can be exact, but quantum measurements cannot be even in theory. If we wish to study the fundamental nature of reality we're going to need to perform experiments with things when they are in very exotic conditions that we will never encounter in everyday life, and when we perform these difficult experiments we find the things get weird, very very weird, and that demands an explanation. And waving your hands and saying there is a Heisenberg cut is not an explanation.    

> Since the development of decoherence theory this boundary can be quantified in terms vanishing of cross-terms in a reduced density matrix. 

Forget theory, every time the precision of our quantum EXPERIMENTS improves the lower limit of this mythical boundary between the classical world and the quantum world gets larger, I think it's as large as the entire universe.  

 

> What is left unexplained, in MWI as well as Copenhagen, is the instantiation of a random result with probability proportional to the diagonal elements of the reduced density matrix.

If the concept of "probability" is to make any sense and not be paradoxical it must be a real number between 0 and 1, and all the probabilities in a given situation must add up to exactly 1. Gleason's theorem proved that given those restraints, probability can always be expressed by the density matrix, that is to say the Born Rule. So the real question is; Schrodinger's equation is completely deterministic so why do we need probability at all? The Copenhagen people have a range of answers to that question, some say Schrodinger's equation needs to be modified by adding a random element, but they can't agree on exactly what it should be, others say it is improper to even ask that question, but they can't agree among themselves exactly why it is improper.  The Many Worlds people have a clear and simple explanation, until you open the box and look you have insufficient information to know for certain if you are in the branch of the Multiverse  where Schrodinger's cat is alive or the branch in which the poor cat is dead. Before you open the box  all you can do is play the odds, and the Born Rule tells you the way to make the best guess possible.

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bqp

[Jason Resch]

Very well said!

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[Brent Meeker]

You pretty much ignored everything I wrote and were exercised to refute the idea of Heisenberg's cut, which neither Bohr or I endorsed.  Do you deny that science relies on definite recorded results and simply postulating an evolving wave function does nothing without a theory of how we see definite events?  Many world has no clear explanation of how many worlds there are and how they get weighted or divided or multiplied to satisfy Gleason's theorem.  I think they are no better than "the wave function collapses".  Decoherence theory at least gives us an idea of why a measurement in the general sense produces an apparently classical world.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 1:59 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> You pretty much ignored everything I wrote

What the hell?! I went over what you said point by point.  

> and were exercised to refute the idea of Heisenberg's cut, which neither Bohr or I endorsed. 

I don't know about you but Bohr insisted that we treat electrons as quantum objects but our measuring instruments as classical objects. He also insisted that human observers were classical objects, but he never specified exactly where the dividing line between the quantum world and the classical world was. And if that dividing line isn't the "Heisenberg cut" then what is? But to be fair to you it's difficult to know exactly what Bohr endorsed because much of his philosophical prose is virtually unreadable; that's one reason the Copenhagen adherence can't agree about fundamentally important things even among themselves.

 

> Do you deny that science relies on definite recorded results

Experimental results are necessary but they are not sufficient, you also need a theory to make sense of it all, otherwise it's just a bunch of numbers.  Experiments can never prove that a theory is correct but it can prove that a theory is wrong, and it can prove that some theories are less bad than others.

 

> and simply postulating an evolving wave function

 Postulating "an evolving wave function" is one way to put it, and a way to say the same thing with different words is "Schrodinger's equation is correct". You're the one who postulates that Schrodinger's equation must be wrong because all those other worlds simply couldn't exist, that would just be too strange; so despite what the equation says the function must collapse for some reason. But neither you nor anybody else knows how to fix the equation. As for me, I say if something isn't broken then don't fix it.

> does nothing without a theory of how we see definite events? 

 I've already gone over that in some detail, if you disagree with what I wrote that's fine but be specific about your objection, I refuse to just keep repeating myself.  

 

> Many world has no clear explanation of how many worlds there are and how they get weighted or divided

I've already gone over that in some detail, if you disagree with what I wrote that's fine but be specific about your objection, I refuse to just keep repeating myself.  

 

 > Decoherence theory at least gives us an idea of why a measurement in the general sense produces an apparently classical world.

 Decoherence is fully compatible with Many Worlds, in fact the interpretation simply wouldn't work without it. Simply put, when decoherence occurs the universe splits, and when the universe splits decoherence occurs. 

 

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w3q

eba

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/22/2023 12:40 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 1:59 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> You pretty much ignored everything I wrote

What the hell?! I went over what you said point by point.  

> and were exercised to refute the idea of Heisenberg's cut, which neither Bohr or I endorsed. 

I don't know about you but Bohr insisted that we treat electrons as quantum objects but our measuring instruments as classical objects. He also insisted that human observers were classical objects, but he never specified exactly where the dividing line between the quantum world and the classical world was. And if that dividing line isn't the "Heisenberg cut" then what is? But to be fair to you it's difficult to know exactly what Bohr endorsed because much of his philosophical prose is virtually unreadable; that's one reason the Copenhagen adherence can't agree about fundamentally important things even among themselves.

The point is that Bohr (unlike Heisenberg) didn't regard the "cut" as part of physics.  It was a choice of our description.  It could be chosen anywhere up to the macroscopic result recorded or by consciously recorded.  This more like QBism (without knowledge of decoherence) than you version of the admittedly diverse Copenhagen interpretation.

 

> Do you deny that science relies on definite recorded results

Experimental results are necessary but they are not sufficient, you also need a theory to make sense of it all, otherwise it's just a bunch of numbers. 

Experimental results include theoretical interpretations which get written up in arXiv.org, all of which are macroscopic and classical so we can all read them and agree on what they say.  They are never in a superposition anymore than a cat.

Experiments can never prove that a theory is correct but it can prove that a theory is wrong, and it can prove that some theories are less bad than others.

Which has nothing to do with my point; which is that it's all necessarily classical.

 

> and simply postulating an evolving wave function

 Postulating "an evolving wave function" is one way to put it, and a way to say the same thing with different words is "Schrodinger's equation is correct". You're the one who postulates that Schrodinger's equation must be wrong because all those other worlds simply couldn't exist, that would just be too strange; so despite what the equation says the function must collapse for some reason. But neither you nor anybody else knows how to fix the equation. As for me, I say if something isn't broken then don't fix it.

> does nothing without a theory of how we see definite events? 

 I've already gone over that in some detail, if you disagree with what I wrote that's fine but be specific about your objection, I refuse to just keep repeating myself.  

 

> Many world has no clear explanation of how many worlds there are and how they get weighted or divided

I've already gone over that in some detail, if you disagree with what I wrote that's fine but be specific about your objection, I refuse to just keep repeating myself. 

I have been explicit and I refuse to repeat myself too.

 

 > Decoherence theory at least gives us an idea of why a measurement in the general sense produces an apparently classical world.

 Decoherence is fully compatible with Many Worlds, in fact the interpretation simply wouldn't work without it. Simply put, when decoherence occurs the universe splits, and when the universe splits decoherence occurs.

And then the Born rule magically applies as a probability...or is it a weight?...or is it a frequency among splits?  Anyway you're sure Many Worlds is better than than just noting that probability means one thing happens and others don't.

Brent

 

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 5:55 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Bohr insisted that we treat electrons as quantum objects but our measuring instruments as classical objects. He also insisted that human observers were classical objects, but he never specified exactly where the dividing line between the quantum world and the classical world was. And if that dividing line isn't the "Heisenberg cut" then what is? But to be fair to you it's difficult to know exactly what Bohr endorsed because much of his philosophical prose is virtually unreadable; that's one reason the Copenhagen adherence can't agree about fundamentally important things even among themselves.

> The point is that Bohr (unlike Heisenberg) didn't regard the "cut" as part of physics.  It was a choice of our description.  It could be chosen anywhere up to the macroscopic

OK, but Let me ask you this, like Bohr does that explanation satisfy your curiosity about the fundamental nature of reality so much that you don’t think anybody should even try to find something better, so we should just give up? Are you absolutely certain nobody will ever find an explanation a little more satisfying than that? Should Galileo have been satisfied with "things fall to the ground because it is their nature to do so", should Newton have been satisfied with that, or Einstein?  If we never even try to find something better than that we will certainly never find it.

> This more like QBism

Nobody is saying that QBism a.k.a. Copenhagen, a.k.a. Shut Up And Calculate, doesn’t work; if you’re an Engineer who doesn't care what's going on and just wants to make money with a new gadget it’s fine.

>> Experimental results are necessary but they are not sufficient, you also need a theory to make sense of it all, otherwise it's just a bunch of numbers. 

 

> Experimental results include theoretical interpretations which get written up in arXiv.org, all of which are macroscopic and classical so we can all read them and agree on what they say. 

Everybody agrees on what the results of an experiment are, but they disagree about what they mean. Without the General Theory Of Relativity the LIGO results are just squiggles produced by 2 mirrors 2 1/2 miles apart. So the mirrors squiggle, who cares? 

> it's all necessarily classica

Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works. 

> Anyway you're sure Many Worlds is better than than just noting that probability means one thing happens and others don't.

That's not what probability means. Probability is a real number between zero and one that can be used to make money by making bets on what you will see next provided you only make bets when that number is greater than 0.5 and you make enough bets. And quantum mechanics can tell you what that number is. 

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wni

.

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/23/2023 2:26 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 5:55 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Bohr insisted that we treat electrons as quantum objects but our measuring instruments as classical objects. He also insisted that human observers were classical objects, but he never specified exactly where the dividing line between the quantum world and the classical world was. And if that dividing line isn't the "Heisenberg cut" then what is? But to be fair to you it's difficult to know exactly what Bohr endorsed because much of his philosophical prose is virtually unreadable; that's one reason the Copenhagen adherence can't agree about fundamentally important things even among themselves.

> The point is that Bohr (unlike Heisenberg) didn't regard the "cut" as part of physics.  It was a choice of our description.  It could be chosen anywhere up to the macroscopic

OK, but Let me ask you this, like Bohr does that explanation satisfy your curiosity about the fundamental nature of reality so much that you don’t think anybody should even try to find something better, so we should just give up?

No, but we shouldn't adopt a just-so-story out of desperation to avoid saying, "We don't know."

Are you absolutely certain nobody will ever find an explanation a little more satisfying than that?

Are you absolutely certain that the long sought theory of quantum gravity will not change our view of QM?

Should Galileo have been satisfied with "things fall to the ground because it is their nature to do so", should Newton have been satisfied with that, or Einstein?  If we never even try to find something better than that we will certainly never find it.

You're the one who is saying, "I've found the truth and it's MWI."  Not me.  You criticize me because QBism isn't enough interpretation for you.  It leaves too much open.

> This more like QBism

Nobody is saying that QBism a.k.a. Copenhagen, a.k.a. Shut Up And Calculate, doesn’t work; if you’re an Engineer who doesn't care what's going on and just wants to make money with a new gadget it’s fine.

But it's gone beyond Copenhagen and cleaned up some of Copenhagen's vagueness by taking advantage of deoherence theory.

>> Experimental results are necessary but they are not sufficient, you also need a theory to make sense of it all, otherwise it's just a bunch of numbers. 

 

> Experimental results include theoretical interpretations which get written up in arXiv.org, all of which are macroscopic and classical so we can all read them and agree on what they say. 

Everybody agrees on what the results of an experiment are, but they disagree about what they mean. Without the General Theory Of Relativity the LIGO results are just squiggles produced by 2 mirrors 2 1/2 miles apart. So the mirrors squiggle, who cares? 

> it's all necessarily classica

Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works.

The explanation is in print which is classical.

 

> Anyway you're sure Many Worlds is better than than just noting that probability means one thing happens and others don't.

That's not what probability means.

But that's what it needs to mean to explain empirical results.

Probability is a real number between zero and one that can be used to make money by making bets on what you will see next provided you only make bets when that number is greater than 0.5 and you make enough bets. And quantum mechanics can tell you what that number is.

But MWI says all the bets win.  It doesn't tell you will only see one result.  It doesn't take the probabilities seriously.  How is it even an interpretation without interpreting the Born rule.  When I think of MWI I think "results become orthogonal"  should say "...and then all but one vanish."  But that violates the dogma that only the Schroedinger equation is needed.

Brent

 

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[smitra]

> Not me. You criticize me because QBism isn't _enough_ interpretation

> for you. It leaves too much open.
>

>>> _> This more like QBism_

>>
>> Nobody is saying that QBism a.k.a. Copenhagen, a.k.a. Shut Up And
>> Calculate, doesn’t work; if you’re an Engineer who doesn't care
>> what's going on and just wants to make money with a new gadget
>> it’s fine.
> But it's gone beyond Copenhagen and cleaned up some of Copenhagen's
> vagueness by taking advantage of deoherence theory.
>
>>>
>>
>>>> Experimental results are necessary but they are not sufficient,
>> you also need a theory to make sense of it all, otherwise it's just
>> a bunch of numbers.
>
>>
>

>> _ > Experimental results include theoretical interpretations which

>> get written up in arXiv.org, all of which are macroscopic and

>> classical so we can all read them and agree on what they say. _

>
> Everybody agrees on what the results of an experiment are, but they
> disagree about what they mean. Without the General Theory Of
> Relativity the LIGO results are just squiggles produced by 2 mirrors 2
> 1/2 miles apart. So the mirrors squiggle, who cares?
>
>>
>

>> _> it's all NECESSARILY CLASSICA_

>
> Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum
> Eraser Experiment works. The explanation is in print which is
> classical.
>
>>>> Anyway you're sure Many Worlds is better than than just noting
>>> that probability means one thing happens and others don't.
>>
>> That's not what probability means.
> But that's what it needs to mean to explain empirical results.
>
>> Probability is a real number between zero and one that can be used
>> to make money by making bets on what you will see next provided you
>> only make bets when that number is greater than 0.5 and you make
>> enough bets. And quantum mechanics can tell you what that number is.

> But MWI says all the bets win. It doesn't tell you will only see one
> result. It doesn't take the probabilities seriously. How is it even
> an interpretation without interpreting the Born rule. When I think of
> MWI I think "results become orthogonal" should say "...and then all
> but one vanish." But that violates the dogma that only the
> Schroedinger equation is needed.
>

If all bets win, then you would still only see one result. Probability
is not a well-defined physical concept anyway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc&t=1036s

This also means that MWI is likely also not the final answer, but the
implied multiverse aspect of Nature is hard to escape. It's similar to
the position Einstein was in when he had very powerful arguments why
gravity should be described as curved spacetime before he had found the
field equations.

I think it makes much more sense to ditch probability altogether as a
fundamental concept and instead use information as the more fundamental
concept. If I observe the result of an experiment, then I obtain new in
formation. I started out as a container of a massive amount of
information that defines exactly who I am (or actually that part of it
that I am aware of myself). So, before the measurement the fact that
it's me that is about to do the measurement, not someone else is part of
the observation. Personal identity is then just the sum total of all the
information, and this then changes by a tiny amount as a result of the
information that comes out of the experiment.

Probability is then an approximate concept that arises when you pretend
that the vast amount of information that defines an observer is kept
fixed and you can keep the small amount of additional information that
specifies the outcome of the experiment separate from the rest.
Yiu can then talk about some given observer who obtained result X who
could also have obtained result Y In reality the observer having
measured X is not the same observer as that initially identical observer
having measured Y.

Probability can then be ditched in favor of information, because if X
has a larger probability, then that means that you need less information
to specify X given the initial state than you need to specify Y.


Saibal


> Brent
>
>> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis [1]

>>
>> wni
>>
>>> .
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[John Clark]

On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 4:12 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Let me ask you this, like Bohr does that explanation satisfy your curiosity about the fundamental nature of reality so much that you don’t think anybody should even try to find something better, so we should just give up?

 

> No, but we shouldn't adopt a just-so-story out of desperation to avoid saying, "We don't know."

Why is saying Schrodinger's Equation means what it says a desperation just so story?  

> Are you absolutely certain that the long sought theory of quantum gravity will not change our view of QM?

No.

>> Should Galileo have been satisfied with "things fall to the ground because it is their nature to do so", should Newton have been satisfied with that, or Einstein?  If we never even try to find something better than that we will certainly never find it.

> You're the one who is saying, "I've found the truth and it's MWI." 

That is simply untrue! I dare you to find a post of mine where I said the thing that you're quoting! I've been very careful in NOT saying that because I don't believe it's true. I never said we had proved many worlds exist, what I said is that the Many Worlds Interpretation is the least bad quantum interpretation currently available.

> Not me.  You criticize me because QBism isn't enough interpretation for you.  It leaves too much open.

 QBism is not an interpretation, it just says if you perform a quantum calculation in a certain way you will get the correct answer. And that is certainly true. 

>>Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works.

 

>The explanation is in print which is classical.

If you're right and an explanation of how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works that only uses classical concepts is in print then they must've used invisible ink to print it because I've never seen it and I don't know anybody who has. And I've looked! 

 

>> Probability is a real number between zero and one that can be used to make money by making bets on what you will see next provided you only make bets when that number is greater than 0.5 and you make enough bets. And quantum mechanics can tell you what that number is.

> But MWI says all the bets win.  It doesn't tell you will only see one result. 

"You" will only see one result In an experiment because there is one "you" for every outcome that does not violate the laws of physics, however Brent Meeker will see every result that is not physically impossible. The reason the previous sentence sounds rather odd  is because the English language will need to be modified in the way it handles personal pronouns  if the Many Worlds idea ever becomes generally accepted. 

 

> It doesn't take the probabilities seriously.  How is it even an interpretation without interpreting the Born rule. 

I've already explained why I think MWI does a good job explaining why the Born rule is what it is and does what it does, if you disagree with something specific I said then point it out and we'll debate it, if you do a good job  I'll even change my mind, but don't just say every word is wrong and leave it at that and expect that convinced me. 

> When I think of MWI I think "results become orthogonal"  should say "...and then all but one vanish."  But that violates the dogma that only the Schroedinger equation is needed.

And that is exactly why MWI does NOT say "...and then all but one vanish." You're confusing MWI with Copenhagen a.k.a. QBism a.k.a. Shut Up and Calculate. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

epy

[Brent Meeker]

That doesn't seem to get rid of probability.  How will you empirically
confirm that you need less information to specify X than Y.  You will
still need frequentist statistics.  And I don't see that "specify" is
the right word.  X may be up and Y down so they each take the same
information to specify, but X may be much more probably than Y.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/23/2023 11:16 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 4:12 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Let me ask you this, like Bohr does that explanation satisfy your curiosity about the fundamental nature of reality so much that you don’t think anybody should even try to find something better, so we should just give up?

 

> No, but we shouldn't adopt a just-so-story out of desperation to avoid saying, "We don't know."

Why is saying Schrodinger's Equation means what it says a desperation just so story? 

It says there is never a measurement, all possible events occur, you just can't see them.

> Are you absolutely certain that the long sought theory of quantum gravity will not change our view of QM?

No.

>> Should Galileo have been satisfied with "things fall to the ground because it is their nature to do so", should Newton have been satisfied with that, or Einstein?  If we never even try to find something better than that we will certainly never find it.

> You're the one who is saying, "I've found the truth and it's MWI." 

That is simply untrue! I dare you to find a post of mine where I said the thing that you're quoting! I've been very careful in NOT saying that because I don't believe it's true. I never said we had proved many worlds exist, what I said is that the Many Worlds Interpretation is the least bad quantum interpretation currently available.

> Not me.  You criticize me because QBism isn't enough interpretation for you.  It leaves too much open.

 QBism is not an interpretation, it just says if you perform a quantum calculation in a certain way you will get the correct answer. And that is certainly true.

Suppose it says one of the worlds is realized with Born's probability and the others vanish.  It that then an interpretation?

>>Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works.

 

>The explanation is in print which is classical.

If you're right and an explanation of how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works that only uses classical concepts is in print then they must've used invisible ink to print it because I've never seen it and I don't know anybody who has. And I've looked!

I didn't say that, I said the explanation if in print and print is classical.

 

>> Probability is a real number between zero and one that can be used to make money by making bets on what you will see next provided you only make bets when that number is greater than 0.5 and you make enough bets. And quantum mechanics can tell you what that number is.

> But MWI says all the bets win.  It doesn't tell you will only see one result. 

"You" will only see one result In an experiment because there is one "you" for every outcome that does not violate the laws of physics, however Brent Meeker will see every result that is not physically impossible. The reason the previous sentence sounds rather odd  is because the English language will need to be modified in the way it handles personal pronouns  if the Many Worlds idea ever becomes generally accepted. 

 

> It doesn't take the probabilities seriously.  How is it even an interpretation without interpreting the Born rule. 

I've already explained why I think MWI does a good job explaining why the Born rule is what it is and does what it does, if you disagree with something specific I said then point it out and we'll debate it, if you do a good job  I'll even change my mind, but don't just say every word is wrong and leave it at that and expect that convinced me.

Well remind then, do you think that the number of branches determined to implement a frequentist realization of the Born rule?  Or do you adhere to the idea there is only one branch per possible outcome and they have weights attached to them per Born?

> When I think of MWI I think "results become orthogonal"  should say "...and then all but one vanish."  But that violates the dogma that only the Schroedinger equation is needed.

And that is exactly why MWI does NOT say "...and then all but one vanish." You're confusing MWI with Copenhagen a.k.a. QBism a.k.a. Shut Up and Calculate.

MWI still needs the Born rule to be instantiated...which does not follow from the Schroedinger equation.

Brent

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

epy

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[scerir]

[John] Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works.

[Brent] The explanation is in print which is classical.

 

[John] If you're right and an explanation of how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works that only uses classical concepts is in print then they must've used invisible ink to print it because I've never seen it and I don't know anybody who has. And I've looked! 

 

https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03137 Ruth Kastner wrote an interesting paper about Quantum Erasure and Delayed Choice

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/24/2023 2:26 AM, 'scerir' via Everything List wrote:

[John] Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works.

[Brent] The explanation is in print which is classical.

 

[John] If you're right and an explanation of how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works that only uses classical concepts is in print then they must've used invisible ink to print it because I've never seen it and I don't know anybody who has. And I've looked!

Let's review the bidding John.  I said the classical world was necessary to science because we need to write down results and theories that we can share.  We can't deal in superpositions of different results.  You attempted to counter this by challenging me to explain the quantum eraser experiment  without quantum mechanics...a complete non-sequitur.  I replied that our quantum mechanical explanations are written out in classically behaving ink.  I never said explanations must be in classical terms,  I said they must be classically embodied.

Brent

 

https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03137 Ruth Kastner wrote an interesting paper about Quantum Erasure and Delayed Choice

 

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[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 5:36 AM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Let's review the bidding John.  I said the classical world was necessary to science

And if that's all you had said we wouldn't be having an argument, but you insisted that classical concepts were also sufficient to do science. You even claimed that an "explanation is in print" that explains why the Quantum Eraser Experiment does what it does and doesn't do what it doesn't do that, as my challenge specified, uses only classical concepts. But you don't say where I can find this revolutionary article that would certainly change physics forever if it actually existed.

> You attempted to counter this by challenging me to explain the quantum eraser experiment  without quantum mechanics

You seem to have difficulty remembering things I have said and yet you find it very easy to remember things that I did NOT say, therefore I will provide an exact quote of the challenge I gave to you:

 "Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works."

And I am still waiting for that explanation from you. In fact for about a century the entire world has been trying to find an explanation for quantum weirdness using only intuitive classical physics, and they have failed spectacularly. 

 

> ...a complete non-sequitur. 

What is a  complete non-sequitur?

 

 

> I replied that our quantum mechanical explanations are written out in classically behaving ink.  I never said explanations must be in classical terms,

Again I will use exact quotes as I wish you had.  My challenge to you was:

"Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works."

And the best response to my challenge that you could come up with was: 

 

"The explanation is in print which is classical"

Then in your most recent post you *claimed* you had said: 

"the explanation IF in print and print is classical."

You added an "if" that your original quote did not have, and that "if" is of gargantuan size! If in the mathematical literature a correct proof that only a finite number of prime numbers exists, or that 2+2 = 5, then that proof is printed using ink that can be thought of as behaving classically because the quantum mechanical nature of the ink does not interfere with the information it conveys. The preceding sentence is perfectly true, it is also perfectly silly.   

>  I said they must be classically embodied.

I specifically asked for "classical concepts" that explain experimental results, but even if I had not specifically included the word "concepts " I would have found it very difficult to believe you really thought I was interested in ink and not in ideas. I think you were pretending to misunderstand what I was asking you to do because you couldn't find any other way to meet my challenge. But I could be wrong, if so do you also believe that professors of English literature are only interested in the sequence of ASCII characters that Shakespeare outputted when writing his plays and not the ideas the words made up of those ASCII characters represent? 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis  

spw

[Bruce Kellett]

Perhaps this account of quantum eraser experiments by Sean Carroll is an appropriate classical description of a quantum process?

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2019/09/21/the-notorious-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser/

Or you can look at the account of the classical quantum eraser/delayed choice experiment here:

arXiv:1206.6578.pdf

The descriptions of these experiments are given in purely classical terms.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/24/2023 2:35 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On Sat, Nov 25, 2023 at 1:48 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 5:36 AM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Let's review the bidding John.  I said the classical world was necessary to science

And if that's all you had said we wouldn't be having an argument, but you insisted that classical concepts were also sufficient to do science. You even claimed that an "explanation is in print" that explains why the Quantum Eraser Experiment does what it does and doesn't do what it doesn't do that, as my challenge specified, uses only classical concepts. But you don't say where I can find this revolutionary article that would certainly change physics forever if it actually existed.

> You attempted to counter this by challenging me to explain the quantum eraser experiment  without quantum mechanics

You seem to have difficulty remembering things I have said and yet you find it very easy to remember things that I did NOT say, therefore I will provide an exact quote of the challenge I gave to you:

 "Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works."

And I am still waiting for that explanation from you. In fact for about a century the entire world has been trying to find an explanation for quantum weirdness using only intuitive classical physics, and they have failed spectacularly. 

 

> ...a complete non-sequitur. 

What is a  complete non-sequitur?

 

 

> I replied that our quantum mechanical explanations are written out in classically behaving ink.  I never said explanations must be in classical terms,

Again I will use exact quotes as I wish you had.  My challenge to you was:

"Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works."

And the best response to my challenge that you could come up with was: 

 

"The explanation is in print which is classical"

Can you tell the difference between the above and "The explanation is classical and is in print."  You were just trying to move the goal post.  I never said there were not explanations using quantum concepts like Hilbert space and the Born rule.  This started with me pointing out, like Bohr, that all science: experiments, records, results, theories are necessarily in a classical world.  To say that those theories may postulate quantum world does not invalidate it.

Brent

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Sunday, November 19, 2023 at 10:26:58 PM UTC-6 Brent Meeker wrote:

There seems to be a conflation between the multiple worlds of Everett and the eternal inflation of a multiverse.

Brent

Max Tegmark thinks there is a high level multiverse of this form involving MWI. The problem is that we will never be able to know, and MWI is an interpretation that is auxiliary to QM and really not necessary. 

LC

 

On 11/19/2023 4:49 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

The real problem is that anything involving the multiverse, say some quantum field signature from the earliest quantum cosmology, is stretched by inflation into a red-shifted spectrum beyond measurability. The multiverse is consistent with inflationary cosmology, which is supported by data, but information about the multiverse may never be detected.

LC 

On Saturday, November 18, 2023 at 5:58:15 AM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:

I read an article called The multiverse is unscientific nonsense by Jacob Barandes, a lecturer in physics at Harvard University, and I wrote a letter to professor Barandes commenting on it. He responded with a very polite letter saying he read it and appreciated what I said but didn't have time to comment further. This is the letter I sent: 

===========

Hello Professor Barandes

I read your article The multiverse is unscientific nonsense with interest and I have a few comments:

Nobody is claiming that the existence of the multiverse is a proven fact, but I think the idea needs to be taken seriously because: 

1) Unlike Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, the Many Worlds theory is clear about what it's saying. 

2) It is self consistent and conforms with all known experimental results. 

3) It has no need to speculate about new physics as objective wave collapse theories like GRW do.

4) It doesn't have to explain what consciousness or a measurement is because they have nothing to do with it, all it needs is Schrodinger's equation.  

I don't see how you can explain counterfactual quantum reasoning and such things as the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester without making use of many worlds. Hugh Everett would say that by having a bomb in a universe we are not in explode we can tell if a bomb that is in the branch of the multiverse that we are in is a dud or is a live fully functional bomb.  You say that many worlds needs to account for probability and that's true, but then you say many worlds demands that some worlds have “higher probabilities than others" but that is incorrect. According to many worlds there is one and only one universe for every quantum state that is not forbidden by the laws of physics. So when you flip a coin the universe splits many more times than twice because there are a vast number, perhaps an infinite number, of places where a coin could land, but you are not interested in exactly where the coin lands, you're only interested if it lands heads or tails. And we've known for centuries how to obtain a useful probability between any two points on the continuous bell curve even though the continuous curve is made up of an unaccountably infinite number of points, all we need to do is perform a simple integration to figure out which part of the bell curve we're most likely on.

Yes, that's a lot of worlds, but you shouldn't object that the multiverse really couldn't be that big unless you are a stout defender of the idea that the universe must be finite, because even if many worlds turns out to be untrue the universe could still be infinite and an infinity plus an infinity is still the an infinity with the same Aleph number. Even if there is only one universe if it's infinite then a finite distance away there must be a doppelgänger of you because, although there are a huge number of quantum states your body could be in, that number is not infinite, but the universe is. 

And Occam's razor is about an economy of assumptions not an economy of results.  As for the "Tower of assumptions" many worlds is supposed to be based on, the only assumption that many worlds makes is that Schrodinger's equation means what it says, and it says nothing about the wave function collapsing. I would maintain that many worlds is bare-bones no-nonsense quantum mechanics with none of the silly bells and whistles that other theories stick on that do nothing but get rid of those  pesky other worlds that keep cropping up that they personally dislike for some reason. And since Everett's time other worlds do seem to keep popping up and in completely unrelated fields, such as string theory and inflationary cosmology.

You also ask what a “rational observer” is and how they ought to behave, and place bets on future events, given their self-locating uncertainty. I agree with David Hume who said that "ought" cannot be derived from "is", but "ought" can be derived from "want". So if an observer is a gambler that WANTS to make money but is irrational then he is absolutely guaranteed to lose all his money if he plays long enough, while a rational observer who knows how to make use of continuous probabilities is guaranteed to make money, or at least break even. Physicists WANT their ideas to be clear, have predictive power, and to conform with reality as described by experiment; therefore I think they OUGHT to embrace the many world's idea.  

And yes there is a version of you and me that flips a coin 1 million times and see heads every single time even though the coin is 100% fair, however it is extremely unlikely that we will find ourselves that far out on the bell curve, so I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that I will not see 1 million heads in a row.  You also say that "the Dirac-von Neumann axioms don’t support oft-heard statements that an atom can be in two places at once, or that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time", but there are only two possibilities, either there is an alive cat and a dead cat in two different places or there is a live/dead cat that instantly snaps into being either alive or dead by the act of "measurement" even though the standard textbook Copenhagen interpretation can't say exactly what a measurement is, or even approximately what it is for that matter. In many worlds a measurement is simply any change in a quantum system, it makes no difference if that quantum system is a human being or an unconscious brick wall. So in that sense many worlds is totalitarian because everything that is not forbidden by the laws of Quantum Physics and General Relativity must exist.  

You correctly point out that nobody has ever "seen an atom in two places at once, let alone a cat being both alive and dead", but nobody has ever seen infinite dimensional operators in Hilbert space that the Dirac-von Neumann axioms use either, all they've seen is ink on paper in mathematical books. And you can't get milk from the word "cow". 

I'll close by just saying although I believe there is considerable evidence in favor of the many worlds view I admit it falls far short of a proof, maybe tomorrow somebody will come up with a better idea but right now many worlds is the least bad quantum interpretation around. And speculation is not a dirty word, without it science would be moribund, Richard Feynman said science is imagination in a tight straight jacket and I agree with him. 

Best wishes

John K Clark

=========

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

lis

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[Lawrence Crowell]

On Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 6:23:48 AM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 7:45 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> There is plenty of direct evidence that quantum weirdness exists, even the father of the Copenhagen Interpretation Niels Bohr admitted that "Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum theory does not understand it ". Something must be behind all that strangeness and whatever it is it must be odd, very very odd. Yes, many world's idea is ridiculous, but is it ridiculous enough to be true? If it's not then something even more ridiculous is. As for the Copenhagen interpretation, I don't think it's ridiculous, I think it's incoherent, and if you ask 10 adherents what it's saying you'll get 12 completely different answers, but they all boil down to "just give up, don't even try to figure out what's going on". But I think one must try.

 

> I think that's very unfair to Bohr.  His basic observation was that we do science in a classical world of necessity. 

Bohr was a great scientist but I think he was a lousy philosopher.  Bohr thought there was a mystical interface between quantum events and conscious awareness, some call it the "Heisenberg Cut", but neither Bohr nor Heisenberg could explain the mechanism behind this mysterious phenomenon nor could they say exactly, or even approximately, where the hell the dividing line between the classical world and the quantum world is. By contrast Many Worlds has no problem whatsoever explaining the mechanism behind the Heisenberg cut or where the dividing line is because the Heisenberg cut does not exist and there is no dividing line, everything is quantum mechanical including the entire universe.  I think this is the reason the Many Worlds interpretation is more popular among cosmologists than among scientists in general.

The Heisenberg cut is a weakness with the Copenhagen Interpretation. However, all interpretations of QM when chased down their rabbit holes lead to nests of problems that fail to close.

LC

[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 5:51 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> And the best response to my challenge that you could come up with was: 

"The explanation is in print which is classical"

> Can you tell the difference between the above and "The explanation is classical and is in print." 

Yes. The print is classical but the explanation is not. I also know the difference between the cat is in the hat and the hat is in the cat.  

 >  I never said there were not explanations using quantum concepts like Hilbert space and the Born rule. 

Therefore you were never able to do what I challenged you to do, which was "Using only classical concepts explain to me how and why the Quantum Eraser Experiment works."

 

> This started with me pointing out, like Bohr, that all science: experiments, records, results, theories are necessarily in a classical world. 

NO.  Records of the results of experiments are written down classically, but the theories needed to predict those results must be quantum mechanical, and a quantum interpretation is needed to understand why those theories are so good at making correct predictions. 

> To say that those theories may postulate quantum world does not invalidate it.

That depends on what the pronoun "it" in the above refers to.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis  

iyu

 

[Brent Meeker]

This started with my point that we test, observer, infer, write papers, attend conferences, discuss and write down theories, all in a classical world.  Everything we know about QM comes from observations, each of which is seeing a result, not a superposition of results.  This is the basis of the Copenhagen interpretation.  Do you disagree with any of that?

Brent

iyu

 

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 25, 2023 at 5:14 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

  > Everything we know about QM comes from observations, each of which is seeing a result, not a superposition of results. 

But nothing we observe in the quantum realm can be predicted or explained unless we use theories that postulate that a superposition of results must exist. Or to put it another way, the fact that those theories produce correct results comes as close to proving as science ever gets that a superposition of results do exist, or at least they did until something called a "measurement" occurs. 

 

> This is the basis of the Copenhagen interpretation.  Do you disagree with any of that?

Copenhagen needs an additional postulate that Many Worlds does not, Copenhagen needs something called "measurement" that somehow causes most of those results to be completely obliterated so that only the "real" one remains. But Copenhagen does not explain what a "measurement" is, nor does it explain what attribute the "real" one has that allows it to survive the brutal measurement process that the other results do not have. Copenhagen does not explain why some are more real than others, Many Worlds says the obvious answer to this dilemma is that they are all equally real, so there is nothing that needs explaining.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis    

nf) 

 

Brent

iyu

 

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[scerir]

This started with my point that we test, observer, infer, write papers, attend conferences, discuss and write down theories, all in a classical world.  Everything we know about QM comes from observations, each of which is seeing a result, not a superposition of results.  This is the basis of the Copenhagen interpretation.  Do you disagree with any of that?

Brent

It seems that, on page 270 of this paper, Feynman said something about Everett and his "universal wave-function"

https://edition-open-sources.org/media/sources/5/Sources5.pdf

s.

iyu

 

 

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[scerir]

It seems that, on page 270 of this paper, Feynman said something about Everett and his "universal wave-function" https://edition-open-sources.org/media/sources/5/Sources5.pdf

s.

______________________

See also Zeh here  https://arxiv.org/abs/0804.3348

s.

i

 

 

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/26/2023 5:08 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Nov 25, 2023 at 5:14 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

  > Everything we know about QM comes from observations, each of which is seeing a result, not a superposition of results. 

But nothing we observe in the quantum realm can be predicted or explained unless we use theories that postulate that a superposition of results must exist. Or to put it another way, the fact that those theories produce correct results comes as close to proving as science ever gets that a superposition of results do exist, or at least they did until something called a "measurement" occurs. 

 

> This is the basis of the Copenhagen interpretation.  Do you disagree with any of that?

Copenhagen needs an additional postulate that Many Worlds does not, Copenhagen needs something called "measurement" that somehow causes most of those results to be completely obliterated so that only the "real" one remains.

Which is exactly what is observed.

But Copenhagen does not explain what a "measurement" is, nor does it explain what attribute the "real" one has that allows it to survive the brutal measurement process that the other results do not have. 

No, but in the interventing century decoherence has explained that; something MWI takes advantage of too.

Copenhagen does not explain why some are more real than others, Many Worlds says the obvious answer to this dilemma is that they are all equally real, so there is nothing that needs explaining. 

Except how many of them are they, when exactly is the split, and how do they instantiate the probabilities that we measure.

Brent

 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis    

nf) 

 

Brent

iyu

 

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 26, 2023 at 2:52 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Copenhagen does not explain why some are more real than others, Many Worlds says the obvious answer to this dilemma is that they are all equally real, so there is nothing that needs explaining. 

>Except how many of them are they,

Either an astronomical number to an astronomical power of universes or an infinite number of universes depending on if space-time is continuous or discrete which today nobody knows.

> when exactly is the split,

The split starts when a change is made and spreads outward at either the speed of light or is instantaneous, it makes no difference which, the results are the same either way so you can think about it in the way you prefer.  

 

> and how do they instantiate the probabilities that we measure.

There is one observer for every quantum state Schrodinger's cat is in. 

        John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis   

1zp 

[Bruce Kellett]

That is exactly the problem. That would suggest that the two outcomes (dead or alive) are equally likely. But it can easily be arranged that one outcome is more probable than the other. MWI cannot account for unequal probabilities.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 26, 2023 at 5:35 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> and how do they instantiate the probabilities that we measure.

>> There is one observer for every quantum state Schrodinger's cat is in.

>That is exactly the problem. That would suggest that the two outcomes (dead or alive) are equally likely. But it can easily be arranged that one outcome is more probable than the other. MWI cannot account for unequal probabilities.

There are a googolplex number of Bruce Kelletts, all of which are in very slightly different quantum states but they all observe that, although Schrodinger's cat is in slightly different quantum states, the cat is alive in all of them. And there are 3 googolplexes of Bruce Kelletts, all of which are in very slightly different quantum states but they all observe that, although Schrodinger's cat is in slightly different quantum states, the cat is dead in all of them. Therefore if Bruce Kellett had no other information than before he opened the box he would bet that there is only one chance in four he would see an alive cat when the box was opened.

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis  

cod  

 

[Bruce Kellett]

Nonsense. Where did the 3:1 ratio come from? I know the decay rate of the radioactive source. I can arrange to open the box when there is only a 10% chance that the atom has decayed. In that case I clearly have a 90% chance of seeing a live cat when I open the box. Similarly, I can arrange for any probability between zero and one of seeing a live cat. Whereas, if there is always a live cat branch and a dead cat branch, my probability of seeing a live cat is always 50%, contrary to the laws of radioactive decay.

Bruce

[Jason Resch]

The time the decay occurs is roughly continuous over the hour of the experiment. Thus the dead cat will have been dead for a random period between 0 and 1 hours from the time it entered the box. You will find the observed temperature of the cat will be a continuous variable correlated to the time of the decay, and this requires an infinity of possible observers.

Jason

[Brent Meeker]

That seems to entail other problems.  1/3 of infinity is the same size as infinity.

Brent

Jason

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 26, 2023 at 8:07 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> There are a googolplex number of Bruce Kelletts, all of which are in very slightly different quantum states but they all observe that, although Schrodinger's cat is in slightly different quantum states, the cat is alive in all of them. And there are 3 googolplexes of Bruce Kelletts, all of which are in very slightly different quantum states but they all observe that, although Schrodinger's cat is in slightly different quantum states, the cat is dead in all of them. Therefore if Bruce Kellett had no other information than before he opened the box he would bet that there is only one chance in four he would see an alive cat when the box was opened.

>Nonsense. Where did the 3:1 ratio come from?

From the square root of the absolute value of a complex wave function produced by Schrodinger's equation. You don't need Many Worlds or any other quantum interpretation to find the correct probability, Shut Up And Calculate will give you that,  you only need Many Worlds if you wanna figure out what must be going on under the hood that enables an absurd theory like quantum mechanics to make predictions that actually turn out to be correct.    

> I know the decay rate of the radioactive source. I can arrange to open the box when there is only a 10% chance that the atom has decayed.

Obviously.  Change the radioactive source to an element with a different half life and you'll change the probability, and you will also change the probability if you change the amount of time the cat is in the box.  

> In that case I clearly have a 90% chance of seeing a live cat when I open the box. Similarly, I can arrange for any probability between zero and one of seeing a live cat. Whereas, if there is always a live cat branch and a dead cat branch, my probability of seeing a live cat is always 50%, contrary to the laws of radioactive decay.

That would be true only if the cat had one and only one property, the alive/dead property. But, except for Black Holes, all macroscopic objects have an astronomical number of properties and most of them are not binary, however in the cat thought experiment you're only interested in one of them and it is binary, the alive/dead property. You're not interested in the precise position or momentum of a particular electron in the cat's left toenail. So there are an astronomical number of cats, and there are an astronomical number of Bruce Kelletts, and all of them are in very slightly different quantum states, but the astronomical number of Bruce Kelletts who observe a living cat when the box is opened is 9 times larger than the astronomical number Bruce Kelletts who observe a dead cat.  So before the box was opened all the Bruce Kelletts would expect to see a living cat, but 10% of them would be surprised.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

y9%

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 12:51 AM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That seems to entail other problems.  1/3 of infinity is the same size as infinity.

That's one reason I suspect that space-time is discrete, not continuous. But even if it's not all hope may not be lost, after all in quantum electrodynamics at least, Richard Feynman found a way to get infinities to cancel out so he could perform calculations and get finite answers that turn out to be correct. Some mathematicians complain that Feynman's method is not rigorous enough and so might contain inconsistencies, but we know for a fact that it works and I just don't believe that quantum electrodynamics is inherently paradoxical. Unfortunately Feynman's method doesn't work if the strong force is involved, nor does it work with gravity when things get very small and very dense, but maybe someday we will find something like it that will allow us to deal with infinities more generally.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

ixe

 

[Bruce Kellett]

None of that is in the Schrodinger equation. The infinities are all of your own making,

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 5:00 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> I can arrange for any probability between zero and one of seeing a live cat. Whereas, if there is always a live cat branch and a dead cat branch, my probability of seeing a live cat is always 50%, contrary to the laws of radioactive decay.

>> That would be true only if the cat had one and only one property, the alive/dead property. But, except for Black Holes, all macroscopic objects have an astronomical number of properties and most of them are not binary, however in the cat thought experiment you're only interested in one of them and it is binary, the alive/dead property. You're not interested in the precise position or momentum of a particular electron in the cat's left toenail. So there are an astronomical number of cats, and there are an astronomical number of Bruce Kelletts, and all of them are in very slightly different quantum states, but the astronomical number of Bruce Kelletts who observe a living cat when the box is opened is 9 times larger than the astronomical number Bruce Kelletts who observe a dead cat.  So before the box was opened all the Bruce Kelletts would expect to see a living cat, but 10% of them would be surprised.

> None of that is in the Schrodinger equation. The infinities are all of your own making,

That is incorrect.  Schrodinger's equation, the thing that generates the complex wave function, says nothing, absolutely nothing, about that wave function collapsing, So if you don't like philosophical paradoxes but still want to use Schrodinger's equation because it always gives correct results, you only have 2 options: 

1) You can stick on bells and whistles to Schrodinger's equation to get rid of those other worlds that you find so annoying even though there's no experimental evidence that they are needed.

2) You can use bafflegab, as Niels Bohr did, to conceal the fact that the universe is odd, very very odd. 

I don't like the first option because I do like William of Ockham. And I don't like the second option because I do like clarity. Maybe tomorrow something better will pop up but as of today the only quantum interpretation that doesn't use either of the above two options is Many Worlds. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

qqb

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/28/2023 4:28 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 5:00 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> I can arrange for any probability between zero and one of seeing a live cat. Whereas, if there is always a live cat branch and a dead cat branch, my probability of seeing a live cat is always 50%, contrary to the laws of radioactive decay.

>> That would be true only if the cat had one and only one property, the alive/dead property. But, except for Black Holes, all macroscopic objects have an astronomical number of properties and most of them are not binary, however in the cat thought experiment you're only interested in one of them and it is binary, the alive/dead property. You're not interested in the precise position or momentum of a particular electron in the cat's left toenail. So there are an astronomical number of cats, and there are an astronomical number of Bruce Kelletts, and all of them are in very slightly different quantum states, but the astronomical number of Bruce Kelletts who observe a living cat when the box is opened is 9 times larger than the astronomical number Bruce Kelletts who observe a dead cat.  So before the box was opened all the Bruce Kelletts would expect to see a living cat, but 10% of them would be surprised.

> None of that is in the Schrodinger equation. The infinities are all of your own making,

That is incorrect.  Schrodinger's equation, the thing that generates the complex wave function, says nothing, absolutely nothing, about that wave function collapsing, So if you don't like philosophical paradoxes but still want to use Schrodinger's equation because it always gives correct results, you only have 2 options: 

1) You can stick on bells and whistles to Schrodinger's equation to get rid of those other worlds that you find so annoying even though there's no experimental evidence that they are needed.

You can do exactly the same thing the MWI fans do and apply the Born rule to predict the probability of your world.  That's MWI fan's bells and whistles which they keep trying to deny.

Brent

2) You can use bafflegab, as Niels Bohr did, to conceal the fact that the universe is odd, very very odd. 

I don't like the first option because I do like William of Ockham. And I don't like the second option because I do like clarity. Maybe tomorrow something better will pop up but as of today the only quantum interpretation that doesn't use either of the above two options is Many Worlds. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

qqb

 

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 4:22 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is incorrect.  Schrodinger's equation, the thing that generates the complex wave function, says nothing, absolutely nothing, about that wave function collapsing, So if you don't like philosophical paradoxes but still want to use Schrodinger's equation because it always gives correct results, you only have 2 options: 
1) You can stick on bells and whistles to Schrodinger's equation to get rid of those other worlds that you find so annoying even though there's no experimental evidence that they are needed.

> You can do exactly the same thing the MWI fans do and apply the Born rule to predict the probability of your world. 

That is absolutely correct. If you're an engineer and are only interested in finding the correct answer to a given problem then Shut Up And Calculate works just fine.  MWI is only needed if you're curious and want to look under the hood to figure out what could possibly make the quantum realm behave so weirdly.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

asc

2) You can use bafflegab, as Niels Bohr did, to conceal the fact that the universe is odd, very very odd. 

I don't like the first option because I do like William of Ockham. And I don't like the second option because I do like clarity. Maybe tomorrow something better will pop up but as of today the only quantum interpretation that doesn't use either of the above two options is Many Worlds. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

qqb

 

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[Brent Meeker]

On 11/28/2023 1:33 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 4:22 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is incorrect.  Schrodinger's equation, the thing that generates the complex wave function, says nothing, absolutely nothing, about that wave function collapsing, So if you don't like philosophical paradoxes but still want to use Schrodinger's equation because it always gives correct results, you only have 2 options: 
1) You can stick on bells and whistles to Schrodinger's equation to get rid of those other worlds that you find so annoying even though there's no experimental evidence that they are needed.

> You can do exactly the same thing the MWI fans do and apply the Born rule to predict the probability of your world. 

That is absolutely correct. If you're an engineer and are only interested in finding the correct answer to a given problem then Shut Up And Calculate works just fine.  MWI is only needed if you're curious and want to look under the hood to figure out what could possibly make the quantum realm behave so weirdly. 

Except that in spite of many attempts the application of the Born rule isn't found under the hood.

Brent

[Jason Resch]

Is it found in Copenhagen?

Jason

Brent

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[Bruce Kellett]

Yes.John is doing a lot of flailing around in an attempt to avoid the question of where the Born Rule comes from, and the fact that it is actually incompatible with the many worlds approach.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 4:55 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

 >> If you're an engineer and are only interested in finding the correct answer to a given problem then Shut Up And Calculate works just fine.  MWI is only needed if you're curious and want to look under the hood to figure out what could possibly make the quantum realm behave so weirdly. 

> Except that in spite of many attempts the application of the Born rule isn't found under the hood.

 Many Worlds, the Born Rule, and Self-Locating Uncertainty

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

tbw

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 8:58 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 4:55 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/28/2023 1:33 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 4:22 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is incorrect.  Schrodinger's equation, the thing that generates the complex wave function, says nothing, absolutely nothing, about that wave function collapsing, So if you don't like philosophical paradoxes but still want to use Schrodinger's equation because it always gives correct results, you only have 2 options: 
1) You can stick on bells and whistles to Schrodinger's equation to get rid of those other worlds that you find so annoying even though there's no experimental evidence that they are needed.

> You can do exactly the same thing the MWI fans do and apply the Born rule to predict the probability of your world. 

That is absolutely correct. If you're an engineer and are only interested in finding the correct answer to a given problem then Shut Up And Calculate works just fine.  MWI is only needed if you're curious and want to look under the hood to figure out what could possibly make the quantum realm behave so weirdly. 

Except that in spite of many attempts the application of the Born rule isn't found under the hood.

Is it found in Copenhagen?

Born was not based in Copenhagen. But for the so-called "Copenhagen" interpretation, the Born Rule is a necessary additional hypothesis in order to connect the theory with experiment. You have to explain the origin of probabilities somehow, and the Born rule simply associates them with the square of the amplitudes of the eigenfunctions in the wave function. This still leaves the basis question unresolved, but decoherence has given some clues about the answer to that question. MWI has no clue about how to resolve the basis question.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:00 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> John is doing a lot of flailing around in an attempt to avoid the question of where the Born Rule comes from, and the fact that it is actually incompatible with the many worlds approach.

How so?

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

sdf

\

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 9:07 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 4:55 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

 >> If you're an engineer and are only interested in finding the correct answer to a given problem then Shut Up And Calculate works just fine.  MWI is only needed if you're curious and want to look under the hood to figure out what could possibly make the quantum realm behave so weirdly. 

> Except that in spite of many attempts the application of the Born rule isn't found under the hood.

 Many Worlds, the Born Rule, and Self-Locating Uncertainty

I don't think Carroll has solved the problem either. He only gets the answer he wants by assuming the Born rule probabilities in advance.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/28/2023 1:57 PM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 4:55 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/28/2023 1:33 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 4:22 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is incorrect.  Schrodinger's equation, the thing that generates the complex wave function, says nothing, absolutely nothing, about that wave function collapsing, So if you don't like philosophical paradoxes but still want to use Schrodinger's equation because it always gives correct results, you only have 2 options: 
1) You can stick on bells and whistles to Schrodinger's equation to get rid of those other worlds that you find so annoying even though there's no experimental evidence that they are needed.

> You can do exactly the same thing the MWI fans do and apply the Born rule to predict the probability of your world. 

That is absolutely correct. If you're an engineer and are only interested in finding the correct answer to a given problem then Shut Up And Calculate works just fine.  MWI is only needed if you're curious and want to look under the hood to figure out what could possibly make the quantum realm behave so weirdly. 

Except that in spite of many attempts the application of the Born rule isn't found under the hood.

Is it found in Copenhagen?

Yes, because Copenhagen explicitly included it and didn't pretend the the Schroedinger equation was everything.

Brent

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 9:10 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:00 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> John is doing a lot of flailing around in an attempt to avoid the question of where the Born Rule comes from, and the fact that it is actually incompatible with the many worlds approach.

How so?

The incompatibility is obvious. Given a long series of N spin measurements, MWI says that there is always one person who sees N spin-ups. Since this observation is certain, it has probability one. Whereas the Born probability of seeing N ups is 1/2^N. A clear contradiction.

Bruce

 

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:08 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> the Born Rule is a necessary additional hypothesis in order to connect the theory with experiment.

 True, and for that reason theory does not have to derive the Born Rule, but theory does have to be compatible with it.  

 

> You have to explain the origin of probabilities

The Shut Up And Calculate people would disagree, they would say you don't need to explain anything as long as you get an answer that agrees with experiment.  And the Copenhagen people would say that bafflegab is a sufficient explanation .

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

mev

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 9:21 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:08 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> the Born Rule is a necessary additional hypothesis in order to connect the theory with experiment.

 True, and for that reason theory does not have to derive the Born Rule, but theory does have to be compatible with it.

MWI claims that the SE is everything that is needed for quantum mechanics. That is obviously false, because the Born rule is also needed to connect the wave function with experiment. Therefore, Everettians have to derive the Born rule from the SE, and this has proved to be difficult. Largely because the Born rule is incompatible with MWI, as I have pointed out.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:14 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Given a long series of N spin measurements, MWI says that there is always one person who sees N spin-ups. Since this observation is certain, it has probability one. Whereas the Born probability of seeing N ups is 1/2^N. A clear contradiction.

 The probability that Bruce Kellett will see N spin-ups is indeed one. However the probability that you will see  N spin-ups is not. As I mentioned before, for this sort of discussion the way the English language handles personal pronouns needs to be modified. 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

0nt

 

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 9:29 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:14 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Given a long series of N spin measurements, MWI says that there is always one person who sees N spin-ups. Since this observation is certain, it has probability one. Whereas the Born probability of seeing N ups is 1/2^N. A clear contradiction.

 The probability that Bruce Kellett will see N spin-ups is indeed one. However the probability that you will see  N spin-ups is not. As I mentioned before, for this sort of discussion the way the English language handles personal pronouns needs to be modified. 

It is not a question of whether you will see the N spin-ups, or whether it is just one copy of Bruce Kellett that will see this. The incompatibility arises from the fact that the series of N spin-ups necessarily exits in MWI, where it only has probability 1/2^N from the Born rule.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:28 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Everettians have to derive the Born rule 

Nobody needs to derive the Born rule because we know from experiment that it's true,  a quantum interpretation just needs to be compatible with it, and MWI certainly is. 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

hga

yuq

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 9:35 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:28 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Everettians have to derive the Born rule 

Nobody needs to derive the Born rule because we know from experiment that it's true,  a quantum interpretation just needs to be compatible with it, and MWI certainly is. 

Of course you need to derive the Born rule if you think that the SE gives you everything you need. Besides, the incompatibility is obvious, as I have pointed out.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 5:34 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

 >> The probability that Bruce Kellett will see N spin-ups is indeed one. However the probability that you will see  N spin-ups is not. As I mentioned before, for this sort of discussion the way the English language handles personal pronouns needs to be modified. 

> It is not a question of whether you will see the N spin-ups, or whether it is just one copy of Bruce Kellett that will see this.

If those factors don't enter into your "question" then what you ask is not a question at all, it's just gibberish.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

qop

 

[Bruce Kellett]

And that is the way in which you avoid difficult questions.

Bruce

[Jason Resch]

If both Interpretations must assume it, I don't see how that's a special weakness of MWI.

Jason

Brent

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[Stathis Papaioannou]

If you lived in any sort of universe where you were duplicated, there would be some probability that you would see different outcomes.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 10:25 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 5:12 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/28/2023 1:57 PM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 4:55 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/28/2023 1:33 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 4:22 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is incorrect.  Schrodinger's equation, the thing that generates the complex wave function, says nothing, absolutely nothing, about that wave function collapsing, So if you don't like philosophical paradoxes but still want to use Schrodinger's equation because it always gives correct results, you only have 2 options: 
1) You can stick on bells and whistles to Schrodinger's equation to get rid of those other worlds that you find so annoying even though there's no experimental evidence that they are needed.

> You can do exactly the same thing the MWI fans do and apply the Born rule to predict the probability of your world. 

That is absolutely correct. If you're an engineer and are only interested in finding the correct answer to a given problem then Shut Up And Calculate works just fine.  MWI is only needed if you're curious and want to look under the hood to figure out what could possibly make the quantum realm behave so weirdly. 

Except that in spite of many attempts the application of the Born rule isn't found under the hood.

Is it found in Copenhagen?

Yes, because Copenhagen explicitly included it and didn't pretend the the Schroedinger equation was everything.

If both Interpretations must assume it, I don't see how that's a special weakness of MWI.

It is a particular weakness of MWI because the Born rule is incompatible with MWI. It is not incompatible with the CI.

Bruce

[Bruce Kellett]

So what? The problem you have is that you have changed the rules of the theory -- from a theory about what exists, to a theory about what you will see. Since you will only ever see one outcome, one world, you have reduced it from a theory of many worlds to a theory of a single world -- the world you will see!

Bruce

[Stathis Papaioannou]

Obviously the Born rule under MWI is about the probability of what outcome you will see.

 

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruce Kellett]

As I pointed out, if it is a theory about what you will see, then it is a single world theory, since you will only ever see just one world. Hence the incompatibility with Many worlds, which is a theory about what exists.

Bruce

[Stathis Papaioannou]

If I pull a coloured ball out of a basket, there is a probability of what ball I will see and a theory about what balls exist.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/28/2023 3:25 PM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 5:12 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/28/2023 1:57 PM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 4:55 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/28/2023 1:33 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 4:22 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is incorrect.  Schrodinger's equation, the thing that generates the complex wave function, says nothing, absolutely nothing, about that wave function collapsing, So if you don't like philosophical paradoxes but still want to use Schrodinger's equation because it always gives correct results, you only have 2 options: 
1) You can stick on bells and whistles to Schrodinger's equation to get rid of those other worlds that you find so annoying even though there's no experimental evidence that they are needed.

> You can do exactly the same thing the MWI fans do and apply the Born rule to predict the probability of your world. 

That is absolutely correct. If you're an engineer and are only interested in finding the correct answer to a given problem then Shut Up And Calculate works just fine.  MWI is only needed if you're curious and want to look under the hood to figure out what could possibly make the quantum realm behave so weirdly. 

Except that in spite of many attempts the application of the Born rule isn't found under the hood.

Is it found in Copenhagen?

Yes, because Copenhagen explicitly included it and didn't pretend the the Schroedinger equation was everything.

If both Interpretations must assume it, I don't see how that's a special weakness of MWI.

But MWI fans assert that it is superior because it doesn't assume the Born rule, only the Schroedinger equation.  I wouldn't claim that the (modern) version of Copenhagen is superior to MWI, I'm just unconvinced of the converse.

Brent

[Bruce Kellett]

Not really comparable. The probability of what ball you get is distinct from the fact that the ball exists. MWI is not a theory about what you will see. Any theory about that is necessarily a single world theory since you only see one ball. MWI is a theory about what exists, and its claim is that many worlds all exist with probability one.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

For comparison you could posit a theory, MWI*, which is MWI plus the provision that only one exists with probability as defined by the Born rule.  Would MWI* be a different interpretation than modern-CI?  In other words, is the only difference between the interpretations the posited existence of a virtually infinite number of orthogonal worlds in which we are duplicated and see different results?  Is that the important "under the hood" part that  JC  values?

[Stathis Papaioannou]

The Born rule allows you to calculate the probability of what outcome you will see in a Universe where all outcomes occur.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruce Kellett]

You are still conflating incompatible theories. The Born rule is a rule for calculating probabilities from the wave function -- it says nothing about worlds or existence. MWI is a theory about the existence of many worlds. These theories are incompatible, and should not be conflated.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 6:49 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> the Born rule is incompatible with MWI. It is not incompatible with the CI.

Nothing is incompatible with CI and nothing is compatible with it either because nobody knows what the hell CI is saying, and that includes Niels Bohr. 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

bni

[Stathis Papaioannou]

“The Born rule is a rule for calculating probabilities from the wave function -- it says nothing about worlds or existence”  -and- “MWI is a theory about the existence of many worlds” are not incompatible statements.

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 7:30 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> MWI fans assert that it is superior because it doesn't assume the Born rule, only the Schroedinger equation.  I wouldn't claim that the (modern) version of Copenhagen is superior to MWI, I'm just unconvinced of the converse.

A pretty convincing argument can be made that if the Many Worlds idea is true then the Born Rule must have the ability to predict the most probable outcome of any quantum experiment and as an added bonus, unlike its competitors, it can do so without adding any random elements. However I admit nobody has ever been able to prove that Many Worlds is the only possible explanation of why the Born Rule works, and we already know from experiments that it does. Put it this way, if Many Worlds is true then the Born Rule works, and if the Born Rule works (and we know that it does) then Many Worlds MIGHT be true. But that's still a hell of a lot better than any other quantum interpretation anybody has managed to come up with, at least so far. I'm not certain Many Worlds is correct, but I am certain its competitors are wrong, or so bad they're not even wrong.  

And as far as assumptions are concerned, every scientist, not just physicists, has no choice but to assume that probability must be a real number between zero and one, and all the probabilities must add up to exactly one for any given situation, because otherwise the very concept of probability would make no sense. And we know that taking the square root of the absolute value is the only way to get a number like that out of a complex function like Schrodinger's wave equation.  If Many Worlds is true, and If each version of Brent Meeker makes bets In accordance with the laws of probability so derived, then more Brent Meekers will make money by following the advice given by the Born Rule than if they followed any other betting strategy. Yes some Brent Meekers will still go broke even if they follow the Born Rule, but most will not. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

7ff

[scerir]

[Bruce] Not really comparable. The probability of what ball you get is distinct from the fact that the ball exists. MWI is not a theory about what you will see. Any theory about that is necessarily a single world theory since you only see one ball. MWI is a theory about what exists, and its claim is that many worlds all exist with probability one.

 

Principle of least information? Omniverse -> Multiverse -> Universe?

"Jaynes' followers propose a profound connection between action and information, such that the principle of least action and the laws of thermodynamics both derive from basic symmetries of logic itself. We need only accept that all conceivable universes are equally likely, a principle of least information. Under this assumption, we can imagine a smooth spectrum from metaphysics to physics, from the omniverse to the multiverse to the universe, where the fundamental axis is information, and the only fundamental law is that you can never assume more than you know." -- David Dalrymple

 

 

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 7:43 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> For comparison you could posit a theory, MWI*, which is MWI plus the provision that only one exists with probability as defined by the Born rule.  Would MWI* be a different interpretation than modern-CI? 

In that case  MWI* would be the same as CI un that neither could explain why Schrodinger's equation and the Born rule treat one world very differently from all the others that makes it more real.  MWI* we have to start talking about measurement and observers and all that crap. 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

kik

[Brent Meeker]

Yes, I knew all that.  But does it follow from the Schroedinger equation alone.  Reading the Carroll/Sebens paper is suggestive, but it depends on transforming to a basis that makes the number of components match the Born rule.  But it seems to me that one could transform to basis where the number of components did not match the Born rule.  Their example is chosen so that in the transformed basis each component has amplitude 1 ,  but that's just scaling.  They even start with eqn (33) which is not normalized.  So it shows how to convert a weighted superposition into a branch count.  But it appears to me that it could produce any number of branches.  The example is chosen to neatly produce all branches of amplitude 1, but that cannot be significant since eqn(35) is not normalized.  So the number of branches is not actually determined and could be anything.

Brent

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

7ff

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[Jason Resch]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 2:59 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/29/2023 4:00 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 7:30 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> MWI fans assert that it is superior because it doesn't assume the Born rule, only the Schroedinger equation.  I wouldn't claim that the (modern) version of Copenhagen is superior to MWI, I'm just unconvinced of the converse.

A pretty convincing argument can be made that if the Many Worlds idea is true then the Born Rule must have the ability to predict the most probable outcome of any quantum experiment and as an added bonus, unlike its competitors, it can do so without adding any random elements. However I admit nobody has ever been able to prove that Many Worlds is the only possible explanation of why the Born Rule works, and we already know from experiments that it does. Put it this way, if Many Worlds is true then the Born Rule works, and if the Born Rule works (and we know that it does) then Many Worlds MIGHT be true. But that's still a hell of a lot better than any other quantum interpretation anybody has managed to come up with, at least so far. I'm not certain Many Worlds is correct, but I am certain its competitors are wrong, or so bad they're not even wrong.  

And as far as assumptions are concerned, every scientist, not just physicists, has no choice but to assume that probability must be a real number between zero and one, and all the probabilities must add up to exactly one for any given situation, because otherwise the very concept of probability would make no sense. And we know that taking the square root of the absolute value is the only way to get a number like that out of a complex function like Schrodinger's wave equation.  If Many Worlds is true, and If each version of Brent Meeker makes bets In accordance with the laws of probability so derived, then more Brent Meekers will make money by following the advice given by the Born Rule than if they followed any other betting strategy. Yes some Brent Meekers will still go broke even if they follow the Born Rule, but most will not.

Yes, I knew all that.  But does it follow from the Schroedinger equation alone.  Reading the Carroll/Sebens paper is suggestive, but it depends on transforming to a basis that makes the number of components match the Born rule.  But it seems to me that one could transform to basis where the number of components did not match the Born rule.  Their example is chosen so that in the transformed basis each component has amplitude 1 ,  but that's just scaling.  They even start with eqn (33) which is not normalized.  So it shows how to convert a weighted superposition into a branch count.  But it appears to me that it could produce any number of branches.  The example is chosen to neatly produce all branches of amplitude 1, but that cannot be significant since eqn(35) is not normalized.  So the number of branches is not actually determined and could be anything.

I found this interesting, on comparing whether all bases are really on equal footing or not:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XDkeuJTFjM9Y2x6v6/which-basis-is-more-fundamental

Jason 

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/29/2023 6:27 AM, 'scerir' via Everything List wrote:

[Bruce] Not really comparable. The probability of what ball you get is distinct from the fact that the ball exists. MWI is not a theory about what you will see. Any theory about that is necessarily a single world theory since you only see one ball. MWI is a theory about what exists, and its claim is that many worlds all exist with probability one.

 

Principle of least information? Omniverse -> Multiverse -> Universe?

"Jaynes' followers propose a profound connection between action and information, such that the principle of least action and the laws of thermodynamics both derive from basic symmetries of logic itself.

I'd like to see that derivation.

We need only accept that all conceivable universes are equally likely,

That figures; they are zero likely.

a principle of least information. Under this assumption, we can imagine a smooth spectrum from metaphysics to physics, from the omniverse to the multiverse to the universe, where the fundamental axis is information, and the only fundamental law is that you can never assume more than you know." -- David Dalrymple

Just scienecy speak.

Brent

 

 

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[Brent Meeker]

On 11/29/2023 10:01 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 7:43 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> For comparison you could posit a theory, MWI*, which is MWI plus the provision that only one exists with probability as defined by the Born rule.  Would MWI* be a different interpretation than modern-CI? 

In that case  MWI* would be the same as CI un that neither could explain why Schrodinger's equation and the Born rule treat one world very differently from all the others that makes it more real.  MWI* we have to start talking about measurement and observers and all that crap.

All that crap that makes up everything we observe, write down, report and cite in papers?  That crap?

Brent

[Bruce Kellett]

Perhaps that is the wrong way to look at it. The linearity of the Schrodinger equation implies that the individuals on all branches are the same: there is nothing to distinguish one of them as "you" and the others as mere shadows or zombies. In other words, they are all "you". So you are the person on the branch with all spins up and your probability of seeing this result is one, since this branch certainly exists, and, by linearity, "you" are the individual on that branch. This is inconsistent with the claim that the Born rule gives the probability that "you" will see some particular result. As we have seen, the probability that "you" will see all ups in one, whereas the Born probability for this result is 1/2^N. These probability estimates are incompatible.

Bruce

[Jason Resch]

According to relativity you exist in all times across your lifespan (and all times are equally really). Yet you are only ever aware of being in one time and in one place. I think this tells us more about the limitations of our neurology than it reveals about the extent or nature of reality. If a copy of me is created on Mars, the me know Earth doesn't magically become aware of it.

Jason

Bruce

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