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DevilsAvocado said:How can we explain this in QM terms??
Seriously, nice post stevendaryl. For a long time I’ve been trying to figure out exactly when the shared wavefunction of the two entangled photons collapse/decohere (or split the universe) to set the indefinite state (unknown polarization) to a definite state (polarized)??
Is it when one or the other passes through a filter?
Or, is it when one or the other ‘splash’ into the detector?
Or, is it some other “total-setup-view” criterion [which I think is DrC’s view]?
Well, for all practical purposes, it doesn't matter when the collapse happens. You could even imagine it happening 10 years after the measurement was made. The Many World's Interpretation basically amounts to taking the limit: the collapse never happens. Or alternatively, you can imagine that at the end of history, someone finally compiles a "history of the universe" that documents everything that ever happened, and it is that historian's observations that collapse the wavefunction. It doesn't make any difference, because of decoherence.