- #36
my_wan
- 868
- 3
I can't ascribe to the idea that QM is not physics. The empirical data is king of all questions, and QM handles that fine. I do suspect (hope) that we are missing some basic connection that the formalism doesn't include, but that doesn't make it not physics.
I do find the "collapse of the wavefunction" hard to take seriously. Not the least of which because it's not that hard for another observer to be forced to consider me entirely in a superposition of states. Feynman emphasized the "final amplitude for the event" being a summation of a long series of amplitudes. Statistical ensembles are another construct where a large number of 'possible' states are superimposed as if a single state. Classically only one of these possible states represents the actual state of affairs, but in QM we are unable to reduce it to an actual state, like dice that takes a particular route to a particular outcome. So even if we take the wavefunction to be physically valid, it must still be formally smeared over a large ensemble of possible states without detailed knowledge of micro-states.
The fact that, in QM, possible states interfere with actual outcomes perhaps indicates some level of reality of a wavefunction. But that does not mean that the ensemble, which superimposes all possibilities over one another, is the actual state, any more than dice take all possible routes to an outcome. Only that for the dice, at the micro-level, there exist a waveform representation, rather than classical parts. There's still something quiet weird if the world we know is a persistent projection from something resembling Hilbert space, even if our model of it is a superposition of ensembles for which only a singular subset of these possibilities is real.
I do find the "collapse of the wavefunction" hard to take seriously. Not the least of which because it's not that hard for another observer to be forced to consider me entirely in a superposition of states. Feynman emphasized the "final amplitude for the event" being a summation of a long series of amplitudes. Statistical ensembles are another construct where a large number of 'possible' states are superimposed as if a single state. Classically only one of these possible states represents the actual state of affairs, but in QM we are unable to reduce it to an actual state, like dice that takes a particular route to a particular outcome. So even if we take the wavefunction to be physically valid, it must still be formally smeared over a large ensemble of possible states without detailed knowledge of micro-states.
The fact that, in QM, possible states interfere with actual outcomes perhaps indicates some level of reality of a wavefunction. But that does not mean that the ensemble, which superimposes all possibilities over one another, is the actual state, any more than dice take all possible routes to an outcome. Only that for the dice, at the micro-level, there exist a waveform representation, rather than classical parts. There's still something quiet weird if the world we know is a persistent projection from something resembling Hilbert space, even if our model of it is a superposition of ensembles for which only a singular subset of these possibilities is real.