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JamieSalaor
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- Is there only one universe in RQM? I'm a bit confused on how relative things are...
Hi everyone.
I've been learning about RQM, I actually had a small chat with Carlo Rovelli over email a while ago to further understand what RQM was...
This question is a little philosophical, but it's something I never got round to asking him..
In RQM it appears that at our macroscopic level there is objectivity, as due to decoherence many of the quantum disagreements are washed away.
However, though we do not notice these discrepancies they are surely still there. So, we all see a slightly different world. However, we don't all just see a different world, does that mean inhabit a different world/universe than everybody else...
That would therefore mean I am not actually seeing my friend; I am instead seeing a relative copy of him in my world... Therefore, when I interact with my friend, I do not truly interact with him. We are in different worlds. Would this mean that there are actually two versions of my friend? One in my world and the one in his world?
This is a little disconcerting... I don't know if any of you know of Amanda Gefter's book Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn but this reminds me a bit of her Cosmic Solipsism... That we are all alone in our own universes... Seems a bit too post - modern for my liking..
However.. This might just be me overthinking and misunderstanding.
I don't actually think this is what RQM actually implies, but I would like some further clarification as to why not.. I'll include a couple of things Carlo said to me below..Of course we do not see the same world: I see snow and a squirrel out of my window. Do you?
But if I we are near by and I ask what you see, I see the same as what you say. So, I see no reason to doubt that it is the same world.
If then there are some tiny differences (there are!), so be it. But this does not mean that we do not communicate and simply observe a lot of consistency.
in the macroscopic world the tiny discrepancies are washed away very rapidly and become invisible.
The "discrepancies" are of the order of the Planck constant: very small.I think that the world is objective, is real, is out there. The stones of a geologist are really out there...
Only, what they really are, is just the way those stones affect and interact their surroundings: other stones, the water that hits them, the light of the Sun hitting them.
So, a stone is described the way it affects whatever it interacts with. If it hits my skin, it hits my skin, and it manifests its properties in interacting with my skin.
So, we can describe the stone with variables that capture the way it affects my skin.
The same variables describe how it affects another stone, and so on.
However, quantum theory shows that at small scale we make a mistake that the stone "is" something else than the ensemble of these interactions, because there are tiny discrepancies between the values these variables take when they interact with one object or the other.
Subjectivity, humans, perception, have nothing to do with all that,
It is all physics.
Things are the way they affect other things. We have a clear way of accounting for these interactions, and attributing values to properties "independently from any interaction" misses crucial details that show up in quantum phenomena. It is possible for macroscopic things, but not at the quantum level of precision...
What do you guys think? Would love to hear some opinions.
Thanks!
I've been learning about RQM, I actually had a small chat with Carlo Rovelli over email a while ago to further understand what RQM was...
This question is a little philosophical, but it's something I never got round to asking him..
In RQM it appears that at our macroscopic level there is objectivity, as due to decoherence many of the quantum disagreements are washed away.
However, though we do not notice these discrepancies they are surely still there. So, we all see a slightly different world. However, we don't all just see a different world, does that mean inhabit a different world/universe than everybody else...
That would therefore mean I am not actually seeing my friend; I am instead seeing a relative copy of him in my world... Therefore, when I interact with my friend, I do not truly interact with him. We are in different worlds. Would this mean that there are actually two versions of my friend? One in my world and the one in his world?
This is a little disconcerting... I don't know if any of you know of Amanda Gefter's book Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn but this reminds me a bit of her Cosmic Solipsism... That we are all alone in our own universes... Seems a bit too post - modern for my liking..
However.. This might just be me overthinking and misunderstanding.
I don't actually think this is what RQM actually implies, but I would like some further clarification as to why not.. I'll include a couple of things Carlo said to me below..Of course we do not see the same world: I see snow and a squirrel out of my window. Do you?
But if I we are near by and I ask what you see, I see the same as what you say. So, I see no reason to doubt that it is the same world.
If then there are some tiny differences (there are!), so be it. But this does not mean that we do not communicate and simply observe a lot of consistency.
in the macroscopic world the tiny discrepancies are washed away very rapidly and become invisible.
The "discrepancies" are of the order of the Planck constant: very small.I think that the world is objective, is real, is out there. The stones of a geologist are really out there...
Only, what they really are, is just the way those stones affect and interact their surroundings: other stones, the water that hits them, the light of the Sun hitting them.
So, a stone is described the way it affects whatever it interacts with. If it hits my skin, it hits my skin, and it manifests its properties in interacting with my skin.
So, we can describe the stone with variables that capture the way it affects my skin.
The same variables describe how it affects another stone, and so on.
However, quantum theory shows that at small scale we make a mistake that the stone "is" something else than the ensemble of these interactions, because there are tiny discrepancies between the values these variables take when they interact with one object or the other.
Subjectivity, humans, perception, have nothing to do with all that,
It is all physics.
Things are the way they affect other things. We have a clear way of accounting for these interactions, and attributing values to properties "independently from any interaction" misses crucial details that show up in quantum phenomena. It is possible for macroscopic things, but not at the quantum level of precision...
What do you guys think? Would love to hear some opinions.
Thanks!