- #36
Maui
- 768
- 2
bhobba said:But the classical world is not at variance with the quantum world. The reason it has properties when you are not observing it is because its virtually never not being observed - it is in constant entanglement with its environment which decoheres it and from the modern viewpoint is the reason for the emergence of the classical realm.
But remove that entanglement, at least partially, and quantum behaviors reassert themselves eg liquid helium and bucky balls. It is not a size issue - it is an entaglement and decoherence issue.
It seems to me there is some misunderstanding on your part. First, the buckyballs experiment, in the words of the experimenters, highlights that decoherence only happens when information about the system is potentially obtainable(as opposed to being environemtally induced, which is a another contradiction as the environment is also completely quantum).
"In quantum interference experiments, coherent superposition
only arises if no information whatsoever can be obtained, even in
principle, about which path the interfering particle took. Interaction
with the environment could therefore lead to decoherence.We
now analyse why decoherence has not occurred in our experiment
and how modifications of our experiment could allow studies of
decoherence using the rich internal structure of fullerenes.
In an experiment of the kind reported here, ‘which-path’ information
could be given by the molecules in scattering or emission
processes, resulting in entanglement with the environment and a
loss of interference. Among all possible processes, the following are
the most relevant: decay of vibrational excitations via emission of
infrared radiation, emission or absorption of thermal blackbody
radiation over a continuous spectrum, Rayleigh scattering, and
collisions.
When considering these effects, one should keep in mind that
only those scattering processes which allow us to determine the path
of a C60 molecule will completely destroy in a single event the
interference between paths through neighbouring slits. This
requires lpd; that is, the wavelength l of the incident or emitted
radiation has to be smaller than the distance d between neighbouring
slits, which amounts to 100nm in our experiment. When this
condition is not fulfilled decoherence is however also possible via
multi-photon scattering7,8,17.
http://qudev.ethz.ch/content/courses/phys4/studentspresentations/waveparticle/arndt_c60molecules.pdf
Anton Zeilinger et al.
Second, there is no view yet that puts classical determinism at the crest and no one i know(and certainly no one I've seen here) understands emergent determinism of the type you are espousing. It's much less clear what and how takes place and if i am to take your view as the only correct, i'd have to subscribe to some of the quantum conspiracy theories, as the classical world and all of the history of the sciences REST completely on the idea that fundamental determinism cause what and how will happen and not emergent events that seem to conform to some form of apparent determinism after the fact. I am not even a physicist and will likely get a lot of deserved critiscism, but without the MWI, the decoherence theory makes no sense wrt to the outside world. Then again, most interpretations make no sense as well wrt the outside world :)I don't quite understand why this view is still prevalent - there are plenty of standard texts these days that give the correct view. The one I have is Schlosshauer's textbook that explains it very clearly:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/3540357734/?tag=pfamazon01-20
Thanks
Bill