Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
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Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#2Actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05607
Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#3I don't know to what degree the metaphor is accurate but as a non-physicist I find thinking about quantum mechanical experiments easier if I think of them as running code on a vast decentralized computing infrastructure.
The concept of "measurement" is just executing code on one node that populates local registers- "creating" not "measuring". Yes- by running code you are pulling on a reality fabric that we still know almost nothing about. But I find it easier to visualize than relying on my colloquial/non-QM intuition in words like "measuring"- which implies something like a single centralized reality database, not a creative decentralized infrastructure. QM experiments seem to create things, not measure them.
Would love to learn metaphors of folks in the space.
Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#4Veritasium has a great video that explains the concept of parallel worlds vs wave collapse in a single world https://youtu.be/kTXTPe3wahc
Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#5I don't know to what degree the metaphor is accurate but as a non-physicist I find thinking about quantum mechanical experiments easier if I think of them as running code on a vast decentralized computing infrastructure. The concept of "measurement" is just executing code on one node that populates local registers- "creating" not "measuring". Yes- by running code you are pulling on a reality fabric that we still know…
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Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#6The original Wigner's friend paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend
The paradox seems to rest on magical thinking about consciousness, and if one simply accepts that a conscious observer can be in a superposition like any other piece of matter, the paradox is resolved.
And, from the article:
For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer becomes involved, the entanglement would “collapse” to make the friend’s observation definite.
But what if Wigner was wrong?
Well, obviously Wigner is wrong, sorry for being flippant.
In this paper (preprint here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05607.pdf), the magical thinking about consciousness seems to be transmuted into "“Absoluteness of Observed Events” (i.e. that every observed event exists absolutely, not relatively)". The authors (it appears to me) mean by this that if an observer performs an experiment, while this observer is himself in a superposition, we have to regard the outcome of the experiment as absolute (i.e. not in a superposition) because it was made by a (conscious) observer.
In my opinion, both "Absoluteness of Observed Events", and the equivalent from the layman's article, "When someone observes an event happening, it really happened", is a disingenuous and confusing way of talking about observers who are in a superposition. We have crossed over from "quantum mechanics is weird" to "these superficially intuitive but clearly false assumptions about quantum mechanics are weird".
(by the way, I read the article here: https://theconversation.com/a-new-quantum-paradox-throws-the... because that site doesn't think I'm a robot and then redirects me to the homepage after filling out the captcha)
Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#7The original Wigner's friend paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend The paradox seems to rest on magical thinking about consciousness, and if one simply accepts that a conscious observer can be in a superposition like any other piece of matter, the paradox is resolved. And, from the article: For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer be…
You might consider reading the original paper. Because the experiment doesn't rely on conscious observers at all. (Unless you think photons are conscious, which I'm assuming you don't.)
Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#8Veritasium has a great video that explains the concept of parallel worlds vs wave collapse in a single world https://youtu.be/kTXTPe3wahc
Nice video. Now I wonder if God uses structurally shared data structures in his implementation of the world. I also wonder if there can be a kind of continuous description of branching that is more amenable to calculus than the discrete tree-like branching.
Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#9The original Wigner's friend paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend The paradox seems to rest on magical thinking about consciousness, and if one simply accepts that a conscious observer can be in a superposition like any other piece of matter, the paradox is resolved. And, from the article: For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer be…
You might consider reading the original paper. Because the experiment doesn't rely on conscious observers at all. (Unless you think photons are conscious, which I'm assuming you don't.)
Well, that's the point. The experiment shows that one of three assumptions has to be false. But one of these (AOE) being false is not surprising or concerning at all, when dealing with non-conscious observers (such as photons, indeed). With conscious observers it would be concerning to some (not to me, but to Wigner and presumably the authors), because of the supposition that there's something special about conscious observers (i.e., magical thinking, IMHO). So what has this paper really shown? Absoluteness of Observed Events is false when the observers are photons, which (my layman's assumption) should surprise exactly nobody. And then they propose to repeat the experiment with an AI in a quantum computer as the observer. Lol.
Re: Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
#10Actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05607
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