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A. Neumaier
Science Advisor
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What interference are you talking about?charters said:The uncertainty in QM must be ontic because we observe interference between the different possibilities the state of a single subsystem ranges over
In the TI, beables are q-expectations, not wave functions. The reduced density matrix is only a tool to compute these. In case of a 2-state system, one can instead use the Bloch vector to encode the q-expectations, ranging over a unit ball. Interference does not apply to this representation.
We observe approximations to the ontic values. The same observed highly peaked bimodal distribution of observations in a large sample of trials can be interpreted either as the observation of a tiny random true binary value ##\pm\hbar/2## of the system measured, with small bell-shaped measurement error - this is the TI interpretation of the observations regarded as measuring the detector beable. Or it can be interpreted as the observation of a single true value of the order of ##O(\hbar)## with a bimodal measurement error - this is the TI interpretation of the observations regarded as measuring the system beable.
Only the convention used - for which beable the measurement is and what is regarded as its true value - can decide between the two possibilities, and say anything about the relation between the measurement of the detector beable and what it means for the system beable.
A single observation gives a value approximating the corresponding beable of the detector, which approximates the corresponding beable of the measured system, with an unknown error (if one does not assume to know beables).charters said:The possibilities in an epistemic probability distribution cannot exhibit interference, as only one of them actually exists.
This is independent of any epistemic analysis. The latter is about what an observer knowing only approximate observations is rationally entitled to imagine about success rates of future predictions.
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