I’m pretty sure the POV expressed in the movie was about a light year out in front of the facts, but I would like some learned person to tell me if this is true.
It seems that in the world of Quantum Mechanics, the position of a particle is expressed as a set of probabilities that it will be in a given place. But it can’t be said to be in any particular place until it’s observed. Then, and only then, does it “lock in” to a particular location.
This imples that observation is somehow necessary to create reality, at least at the quantum level. This is sometimes referred to as “The Measurement Problem” or “The Observer Problem.”
The makers of the movie take this to mean that there is no physical reality apart from an observer. So not only does a tree falling in an unhabited forest not make a noise, there is no tree and no forest until someone is there to observe it.
Ditto. If you want to hear the story without paying to see the movie, go sit in a hippie coffee shop and listen to a bunch of stoners talk about the universe.
I don’t see the quantum question discussed in the linked thread, although it may be in one of the even earlier ones.
The observer problem comes from one interpretation of the equations of quantum mechanics, usually called the Copenhagen Interpretation. It’s actually the one that is the least at odds with common sense understanding of the universe.
However, there are mathematically equivalent formulations of the equations that remove the observer problem entirely. And many physicists have shown that a human observer is not necessary for macroscopic (i.e. larger than quantum-sized) objects to exist in the common sense way we’re used to.
The whole thing boils down to a particular philosophical viewpoint, one that can be questioned or challenged in numerous ways. The filmmaker apparently liked to use the most “Gosh WOW” argument, figuring that would be the best way to blow peoples’ minds. Almost nobody in the scientific community much cares for this interpretation, or spends any real time thinking about it. The few who do tend to reject it entirely. Certainly, the rest of us can safely ignore it at all times during our lives.
While I agree with the rest of your post, I’m left wondering why you feel that the CI is the interpretation “least at odds with common sense understanding of the universe.”
IANAP, but from my reading, not only is the CI is now widely held to be obsolete (at least outside beginning quantum physics courses), it is the one most at odds with common sense. For one thing, it is non-deterministic (a wildly counter-intuitive property) while many if not most other interpretations these days are deterministic. Then, there is the measurement problem at issue here in this thread, which is only a problem (to my knowledge) for CI.
What are the challengers? The main one is the Everett many-worlds interpretation, which requires an infinite number of complete universes splitting off with every determination of a quantum variable. My understanding is that it’s even less accepted by physicists than the Copenhagen Interpretation and the philosophical arguments are even more stretched.
Other interpretations can be found on Wiki and all have weirdnesses so great that most of them are accepted by the originator and not many others.
I don’t think that the Copenhagen interpretation is obsolete, although one of the physics gurus can correct me. It’s still probably the popular and widely used, and that means that more people have tinkered with it to smooth out more of the rough edges. You cannot correct it to have determinism, though, without creating other problems from a common sense viewpoint. The universe really does appear at base to be counterintuitive from any human standpoint or interpretation of it.
I don’t know,I think it’s the most obvious thing. It’s even reflected in our speech. Velocity is defined as rate of change of position over a period time. Location is defined as position at a point in time. You can’t have a period of time and a point of time at the same damn time. For any given time point, the lack of precision provides an interval and not an infinitely small point. For example, 5 seconds from now is the interval between 4.75 to 5.25s from now if we’re using 1/4 second resolution. That time interval would have a change in position during it, and the bigger the time interval the more precisely can we define the objects momentum over that time period and less precisely can we define the objects position. So the precision in the time point at which you define “position” of something is inversely proportional to the precision of its momentum. I think “measurement” is a really poor choice of words. The object simply would have 0 precision in its momentum (not the measurement of the momentum) for any given absolute position. Heisenberg just put a hard limit on that.
First, Exapno Mapcase, I must say it seems to me that you haven’t really answered the question regarding why you feel CI is the least bizarre interpretation. I still say that if it is not themost, then it is certainly among the very few most bizarre. After all, CI insists consciousness is an essential ingredient in quantum physics and that your mind actually controls what happens, which is supremely outlandish and is really just too absurd for modern minds outside of crackpots like Gary Zukav of The Dancing Wu Li Masters infamy. For example, it essentially suggests that the moon does not truly exist when no one is looking at it and gives considerable credence for the absurd Berkeleyian view and his proof of the existence of God! Many people don’t seem to realize it, but Schroedinger’s cat was actually an utterly compelling reductio ad absurdum argument against the Copenhagen interpretation.
Most of what I have read tends to contradict your thesis regarding the popularity of CI, at least for younger physicists. For one thing, by far the most popular “interpretation” is actually a refusal to interpret QM at all (see: The shut up and calculate interpretation). Yet there appears to be a strong correlation between the “shut up” view and CI.
As for those who can’t ignore the epistemological and other problems and thus actually hold an interpretation, one form or another of the many-worlds interpretations are held by the strong majority of more modern/younger physicists (for better or worse; I personally don’t like it all that much either). But I don’t think there can be any reasonable doubt that an interpretation that excludes Berkeleyian popping in and out of existence or between states depending on a mind’s whim is vastly less bizarre and more rational and comprehensible than the laughably freakish Copenhagen view.
I kind of like Bohm’s implicate order, myself, even though nonlocality and its relativity violation bothers the hell out of me (but I’d rather give up locality than determinism and realism). The CI is, among the younger experts, comatose if not completely dead from what I’ve been given to understand from my reading. You just don’t find many newly minted QM doctorates laboring under the old-fashioned and extremely counter-intuitive concepts of CI (but I freely admit you find effectively zero Bohmians).
It’s my view that quantum weirdness arises from the fact that we cannot (yet?) model what’s really happening because we cannot know what’s happening. But I don’t think QM is necessarily counterintuitive, especially given that locality has already been shown to be probably the weakest link in the “pick only two of three” triad of locality, determinism, and realism. So why not abandon locality along with the absurdity of Copenhagen and limit your choices to those interpretations that demand both realism and determinism? That would leave you with far more intuitive options.
No it doesn’t and no it doesn’t. The moon is not there if you don’t look at it nonsense has long been abandoned by physicists, including those who use CI.
I disagree. All the larger theories that marry QM and relativity will still have elements that are counterintuitive weirdnesses. Our sense of what should be is too limited to work at the very large and very small. For that matter, we can’t even agree on what is intuitive and what isn’t.
I prefer to leave this to the philosophy majors. As long as all the interpretations are mathematically equivalent I agree with those who say that philosophizing about things we’ll never be able to touch and measure is an irrelevancy. And I believe that the universe is really there all the time, and does not depend on any definition of consciousness. But I don’t think that is incompatible with CI either.
Beyond that I’m not competent to comment, so I think I’ll let it go at that.
I was speaking metaphorically, as I thought you would recognize. C’mon, now. Address my points rather than my metaphors, please. There is a great deal you haven’t addressed.
So who’s arguing about marrying QM with relativity here? We’re talking about interpretations of QM and which are more intuitive; specifically, we’re arguing about your assertion that CI is the most intuitive interpretation.
If you’re saying that you and I can’t agree, that’s obvious. If you’re talking about interested people in general, you still have to try to establish that the view in which the outcomes of real, quantum events are determined arbitrarily by a mind’s whim is more intuitive than one in which consciousness plays no part, like every other facet of the universe. You still have to try to establish that the view in which even asking whether Schroedinger’s Cat is alive or dead is absolutely forbidden is more intuitive than one in which at least the question itself isn’t meaningless.
Two points. (1): I guess you were then being disingenuous when you insisted that CI was more intuitive than the other interpretations since according to your last assertion they are all equal at least in that they are equally irrelevant, and (2): You must not have followed the link I provided above: The shut up and calculate interpretation, wherein it states:
I strongly believe that last statement is incorrect. To the best of my understanding, it is fundamentally inherent in CI that quantum states are not merely unknown prior to measurement by a conscious entity, they effectively have no state at all. Even if they do, the outcome requires conscious measurement. It would follow that the Universe could not have begun and evolved without constant measurement of every single quantum “collapse” in all existence over all time.
And, to me at least, that’s pretty damn counter-intuitive.
As I keep saying, no it doesn’t. You’re way behind the times. Many physicists have shown in many ways that macro events do not require conscious measurement.
