31–40 of 44 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are the actual papers available online? On arxiv.org?
Yes, they are linked from the blog post. The experimental papers are arXiv numbers 1803.01913, 1808.07388, and 1809.10456. The basic theoretical papers are available from the Wikipedia page on quantum Darwinism, also linked.
I don't know if the analogy to darwinian evolution makes much sense, it seems to me that it makes more sense to see this as a way of error-correcting our reality, that is to say quantum phenomenon occur because anything else would cause a severe inconsistency.
I don't know if the analogy to darwinian evolution makes much sense, it seems to me that it makes more sense to see this as a way of error-correcting our reality, that is to say quantum phenomenon occur because anything else would cause a severe inconsistency.
It is indeed a stretch, but it's just supposed to be an evocative name not a perfect analogy. In particular, quantum Darwinism has a notion of fittest types of information, and this information is replicated, but it crucially does not feature a notion of mutation, so in particular it cannot result in increasing complexity/sophistication over time as produced by biological Darwinism.
Here's a rebuttal from a physicist https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/07/quanta-magazines-anti-qua...
Motl is often too agressive and not fair to the target of his critiques, but when it's about quantamagazine vs. Motl he's the safe bet. (I've not read neither in this case, though.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is indeed a stretch, but it's just supposed to be an evocative name not a perfect analogy. In particular, quantum Darwinism has a notion of fittest types of information, and this information is replicated, but it crucially does not feature a notion of mutation, so in particular it cannot result in increasing complexity/sophistication over time as produced by biological Darwinism.
Evocative "sorta" names have a tendency to spread misinformation when the scientific details are opaque to most people. It's not a practice that I think is okay.
Seriously though, all evocative names are imperfect. Laymen always over interpret them. I don't like "quantum Darwinism" much, but if your standard is that the name of a mathematical concept not be misinterpreted, then basically all English words are out.
Really good article but I’m unconvinced about those pointer states. The classicly observed values simply have overwhelmingly higher probability.
I would like to write down what I considered to be the standard motivation for why the classical solution arises, which is in other words why it is more probable, as you point out.
In the Feynman path integral formalism, any paths in the system is possible, with an amplitude proprotional to the exponential of the action. (Action as in a Lagrangian). For paths that are an extremum of the action, there is the least destructive interference between neighboring paths, since there is the smallest phase change between these neighboring paths. Of course this extremum of the action is, not coincidentally, the classical solution, which is the result from the lagrangian formulation of classical machanics.
> An atom typically can’t be assigned a definite position, for example — we can merely calculate the probability of finding it in various places.
Is this really the case? Or maybe author meant 'electron' instead of 'atom'?
I mean, if we wouldn't be able of calculating the position of an Atom, how could "A Boy And His Atom" would be possible?
Is there even such a thing as objective reality?