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Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

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Re: Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a physicist, but this seems backwards to me. If anything, it is the Copenhagen interpretation that comes with the largest amount of extra-mathematical baggage while many-worlds interpretation came out of effort to add the least amount of additional assumptions on top of the math.

The price that MWI pays for this minimalism is that it loses some contact with reality, i.e. physical experiments. Basic physical observations like "some measurements are non-deterministic" are quite difficult to explain in the MWI. Reality is inconvenient.

I don't think that's true - it takes that into account, it just looks like it collapses because you're in the world with that state - not seeing the entire picture. MWI accounts for it appearing that way while in actuality the wave function never collapses.

Max Tegmark gives a pretty accessible description of this in his book - Our Mathematical Universe, and Eliezer Yudkowsky does a decent job with a general explanation here (though he avoids talking about MWI): http://lesswrong.com/lw/pd/configurations_and_amplitude/

I think the Copenhagen interpretation is now considered wrong by most physicists. It's strange to me that it was ever really thought of as true - though it makes sense that it would look like what's happening at first.

It's less that MWI is a predictive theory and more that MWI is something that comes out as a result of the theory's prediction (Schrodinger's wave equation that doesn't collapse).

Re: Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

#32
Not a physicist, but isn't "Bohmian Mechanics" (1) what's also known as "Pilot Wave Theory", which is now gaining experimental support (2) ?

Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie–Bohm_theory

2. https://www.quantamagazine.org/pilot-wave-theory-gains-exper...

Re: Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

#33
post #32

Not a physicist, but isn't "Bohmian Mechanics" (1) what's also known as "Pilot Wave Theory", which is now gaining experimental support (2) ? Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie–Bohm_theory 2. https://www.quanta…

Pilot waves, multiverse and Copenhagen are fundamentally ineligible for experimental support, at least with respect to each other. They lead to the same numbers, meaning than an experiment that agrees with one will also agree with the others. It's something like trying to tell the difference between 2x=2y and x+2=y+2.

The "support" in the article is really just a physical system that obeys (as a macroscopic approximation) something like pilot waves: "just like the universe" if pilot waves are right, and "just like those silly nonlocalists" if pilot waves aren't.

Re: Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

#34
post #32

Not a physicist, but isn't "Bohmian Mechanics" (1) what's also known as "Pilot Wave Theory", which is now gaining experimental support (2) ? Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie–Bohm_theory 2. https://www.quanta…

Pilot waves, multiverse and Copenhagen are fundamentally ineligible for experimental support, at least with respect to each other. They lead to the same numbers, meaning than an experiment that agrees with one will also agree with the others. It's something like trying to tell the difference between 2x=2y and x+2=y+2. The "support" in the article is really just a physical system that obeys (as a macroscopic approxima…

Right. It doesn't provide evidence for pilot wave theory any more than rolling some balls around on a rubber sheet provides support for Glgeneral relativity.

Re: Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

#35
post #2

The many worlds interpretation is just that, and INTERPRETATION, not a predictive theory. The article seems really upset by that, but is it any reason to label it a lost cause? I guess you can’t really study it or preform experiments on it but that shouldn’t be any suprise for any interpretation of quantum mechanics. I might be missing something here...

From other sections it seems clear that the author is a devout adherent of The Copenhagen Interpretation, aka objective wavefunction collapse; this is a close relative of the baseline non-Interpretation “Shut Up And Calculate.” People like that are generally utterly unmoved by anything short of a rigorous mathematical formulation, which works for them in QM where “rigorous mathematical formulation” is pretty much all…

"Objective wavefunction collapse" is not a good "aka" for the CI. There is a great deal of objectivity in it but there's an essential element of subjectivity (shared by neo-CI descendants of the CI such as QBism and Rovelli's relational interpretation) too. Streater's discussion of EPR explains why: https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kc...

Broadly speaking, the CI and its "radical" psi-epistemic* relatives interpret QM as (generalised) probability theory applied to mechanics: https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/the-quantum-mech... It's hardly a cop-out. See e.g. Rovelli's take on what the ontological ramifications are: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.02894

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135521981...

Re: Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

#36
post #4

> Aspect, Dalibrand and Roger (1982) Aspect, Dalibard and Roger (1982)

Grad school physics was/is your background I assume. I had the same thought when reading.

Yep, I was a graduate student in physics, but not at all in that field. The reason why I recognize Dalibard's name even misspelled is because I was a student in the same institution and I used to know several of his grad students.

Little bit of trivia: he was 23 or 24 when he wrote that paper…

Re: Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

#39
post #38

Does it say Mach Principle is incorrect? That is good, as a non physicist I could never wrap my head around the distant stars influencing anything.

The distant stars are important because they make space flat. Remember that general relativity says mass bends space, or more accurately is the same thing as space.

So if all the mass was nearby, space would bend inward around the current point and it would fold in on itself - the universe would be like the inside of a sphere.

Because the mass is distributed evenly at the largest scales, it instead continues flatly in all directions.

Re: Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

#40
post #2

The many worlds interpretation is just that, and INTERPRETATION, not a predictive theory. The article seems really upset by that, but is it any reason to label it a lost cause? I guess you can’t really study it or preform experiments on it but that shouldn’t be any suprise for any interpretation of quantum mechanics. I might be missing something here...

It does make different predictions though. WMI essentially says there is only unitary evolution and nothing like a physical collapse. That means everything unitary evolution predicts will happen, unlike other "interpretations".

This matters in at least two cases:

(1) In a finite system (perhaps our universe, but doubtful), those other worlds will eventually come back into contact. They never go away and with only a finite number of states available, the splitting of worlds can't continue forever.

(2) From a subjective perspective, there is always a future version of yourself in some "branch". Since you will become all future versions, you are subjectively immortal.

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