Comment on xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse
bunchberry@lemmy.world 13 hours agoMy issue with the orthodox interpretations is not that they are random but that they contain miracles. This was John Bell’s original criticism that people seem to have forgotten. The Copenhagen interpretation says that there is a quantum world until you look, then a miracle happens, and you have a classical result, but it does not tell you at all how this process actually works. The Many Worlds Interpretation, which is the second most popular, just denies that the classical world made up of observable particles in 3D space where experiments actually have outcomes does not actually exist and is a grand illusion created by the conscious mind, but also cannot explain how this illusion can possibly come about and just says it has something to do with consciousness. They just punt the miracle over to neuroscience and ultimately do not answer anything either. A lot of people think Einstein wasn’t the biggest of quantum mechanics due to the randomness, but if you actually read his works, he was clear the issue was that it does not give you a coherent complete picture of reality, so he just thought it was incomplete, an approximation of a more fundamental theory that we have yet to discover.
FundMECFS@anarchist.nexus 7 hours ago
The thing is we have no fucking clue what happens down there. The Copenhagen interpretation is just the “default” one because it’s the one that got taught.
All of the possible interpretations require on massive leaps of faith, miracles, hidden variables etc.
bunchberry@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
That’s the thing, though. Einstein’s interpretation did not require a “miracle” because his interpretation was merely to believe quantum mechanics is incomplete because we don’t currently fully understand “what happens down there.” It was more of a statement of “I don’t know” and “we don’t have the full picture” rather than trying to put forward a full picture. Most people agree that GR is merely an approximation for a more fundamental theory and there is a lot of work on speculative models to potentially replace it one day, like String Theory or Loop Quantum Gravity. But it has become rather taboo to suggest that maybe quantum mechanics is not the most fundamental “final” theory either and that maybe potential speculative replacements for it should be studied as well.
Those were the kinds of things that interested Einstein in his later years. He had published a paper “Does Schrodinger’s Wave Mechanics Completely Determine the Motion of a System, or Only Statistically?” where he proposed an underlying model similar to pilot wave theory, although later retracted it because it was later showed to him to be nonlocal and he hoped to get rid of then nonlocal aspect of it. He had published a paper earlier titled “Does Field Theory Offer Possibilities for the Solution of the Quantum Problem?” in which he had hoped to figure out if you could use an overdetermined system of differential equations to restrict the possible initial configurations of the system such that it would not be physically possible for the experimenter to choose the initial conditions of the experiment freely. If he was still alive today, he would probably take interest in the works of people like Gerard 't Hooft.