Ultimately, Binney's approach requires knowledge of the state of the universe from some outside perspective. — Rich
Of course, the observer who also participates in the field has an effect. With the possibility of free will, we have a casual model of QM which permits creative actions. — Rich
What I was intending to get at is that the experiment appears to fully substantiate that consciousness has some top-down causal role in what physically, presently is. And it does this by accounting for all variables that could lead to alternative conclusions. I, at least, wasn't imaginative enough to find any. — javra
I think that Bohm was necessarily cautious about declaring consciousness and/or free will is necessitated by QM. — Rich
Bohm dared not go so far though he's clearly implied it was there. — Rich
You're aware that Bohm's reputation in US academia had already been permanently affected by his early association with communism? — Wayfarer
I was having a discussion here a few months back about an interesting feature of the double-slit experiment, which is that the interference patterns are not rate-dependent. Whether you fire one photon at a time, or many together, you end up with the same pattern (up to a certain point). I posted a couple of threads about this on physics forums. — Wayfarer
It strikes me as being philosophically significant, although nobody on the physics forums were prepared to acknowledge that. To me it signifies that the probability wave is not a function of time, and from a relativistic point of view, therefore not of space-time. — Wayfarer
Even if we could make enough measurements simultaneously to know the exact state of a system, it would not dispel uncertainty.The problem is that we can't measure the exact state of something made up of many particles, because that would involve an enormous number of measurements. — Marchesk
However, I wonder whether what your physicist was actually referring to was the notion of Decoherence, which is a fairly intuitive (some might say 'pseudo-classical, but one has to be careful using vague terms like that) way of explaining what happens in a measurement of a quantum system. The reason I think he might be referring to that is the reference to the interaction between the state of the observed system and the state of the measuring apparatus, which is what Decoherence addresses. — andrewk
The De Broglie-Bohm addresses the delayed choice by an instanteous action at a distance by the quantum field. — Rich
I expect he just expressed himself poorly - not an unusual occurrence for scientists trying to communicate to a non-scientific audience. The Uncertainty Relation is derived directly from the four postulates of quantum mechanics, with no additional assumptions*. It doesn't get more fundamental than that.sounded to me like he was denying that the Uncertainty Principle was fundamental instead of a useful approximation based on epistemic limitations. — Marchesk
When you say 'MWI is a testable prediction', what you mean is that the results are compatible with the many worlds explanation; the results appear to support the idea that there are many worlds. But you can never actually detect 'the other worlds' directly, except by way of inference. Is that the case? — Wayfarer
I expect he just expressed himself poorly - not an unusual occurrence for scientists trying to communicate to a non-scientific audience. The Uncertainty Relation is derived directly from the four postulates of quantum mechanics, with no additional assumptions*. It doesn't get more fundamental than that. — andrewk
The Uncertainty Relation is derived directly from the four postulates of quantum mechanics, with no additional assumptions*. — andrewk
I'll restate it briefly. There wavefunction is not real. Rather, our uncertainty about the exact quantum state (which is classical in Binney's interpretation) is translated to the particle or particles in these experiments. If we could take into account the exact state of the measuring device, then the uncertainty of the particle's property in question would dissipate, and thus there would be no need for the wavefunction. — Marchesk
Binney's view of the wavefunction is that it's a really useful and powerful tool, given our limited knowledge, but it has unreal properties, such as superposition. He thought the notion of a superposed cat to be absurd, like Schrodinger did. Basically, Binney thinks all the other interpretations of QM go wrong because they took the wave equation to be something more than a useful tool. — Marchesk
You didn't address the point. Putting it another way - the evidence for 'other worlds' can only ever be indirect. — Wayfarer
I don't think that was the case. He repeated himself a lot, and was rather adamant. He doesn't except certain postulates as being anything more than useful modelling tools. Also, becuase the other speaker conceded that MWI would be unnecessary if the measuring apparatus is the culprit of the wave function probability distribution. — Marchesk
It is a common misconception that the 'state' of a system is a specification of the exact value of every observable of the system - location, momentum, spin, energy, etc. But the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - which is core QM, not interpretation - tells us that for any pair of dual observables - of which position and momentum are the most commonly cited - a state that has a narrow range of possibilities for one of the observables must have a very wide range of possibilities for the other. This has nothing to do with the practical ability to make measurements and is instead based on what 'state' means in QM. It is a purely theoretical, mathematical result. To reject that result we would have to radically alter, or even jettison, QM, not just choose another interpretation. — andrewk
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