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Posted by rramadass 22 hours ago

I don't understand quantum physics (2018)(www.southampton.ac.uk)
309 points | 244 comments
mahboi 2 minutes ago|
Don't know if it's just me, but whenever I read or asked about quantum physics or just electricity/magnetism, I'd immediately get stuck on what exactly a wave means in EMR. Most explanations say "it's a wave like the ocean" or make it look like the particles move in a sine wave.

This doc is a lot better in explaining what a wave means here: "The quantity which travels in this way is known as a 'disturbance'. Precisely what this disturbance is depends on the wave," and for EMR, "it is an electric field and a magnetic field which are perpendicular to each other and also perpendicular to the direction of the wave." This still doesn't completely spell out that it's the direction/strength of the fields that oscillate, but I'm guessing you'd understand that from the rest of the doc. I'm going to keep reading.

fasterik 9 hours ago||
So many entry-level explanations of quantum mechanics start with classical physics, waves, particles, the double-slit experiment, etc. and then jump straight to infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. In my opinion, there's way too much conceptual baggage that comes with these concepts [0].

As a non-physicist, QM only clicked for me when I learned the linear algebra of one- and two-qubit systems and observables on those systems [1]. The math is accessible at a pre-calculus level, and the most "counter-intuitive" aspects of QM (interference, the uncertainty principle, entanglement) make perfect sense in this framework. I think it's the best starting point for understanding what QM really says.

[0] That's not to say they aren't important historically or for a complete understanding of QM. I'm talking about conceptual understanding for someone, especially an amateur, encountering QM for the first time.

[1] Chapter 2 of Nielsen and Chuang is what did it for me. It's heavygoing if you've never seen linear algebra before, but I don't know of a clearer explanation of the postulates of quantum mechanics.

BobbyTables2 4 hours ago||
The math is one thing, but I find the idea that the fundamental pieces of reality aren’t particles a little unsettling.

The classic double-slit experiment is kinda bizarre when one considers the “single electron” case.

wwarner 8 hours ago|||
https://profmcruz.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/q...
mattm 9 hours ago|||
Do you have any recommended resources that you used to help learn the linear algebra?
fasterik 9 hours ago|||
Start with 3Blue1Brown's "Essence of Linear Algebra" series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...

Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right" https://linear.axler.net/LADR4e.pdf

Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Information" Chapter 2. (Available online, but legality depends on where you live)

If you're interested primarily in QM rather than linear algebra, I'd recommend not working through all of Axler, but instead using Nielsen and Chuang to learn about qubits and observables, and using Axler to fill in the gaps.

d_tr 2 hours ago||||
"A Course in Modern Mathematical Physics: Groups, Hilbert Space and Differential Geometry" by Peter Szekeres has several chapters on linear algebra early on, starting with sets and groups and including tensors (which you absolutely need for QM).

I loved it.

GlibMonkeyDeath 9 hours ago||||
https://linear.axler.net/
brooke2k 7 hours ago|||
not sure about its specific applications to quantum mechanics, but I worked through MIT OpenCourseWare's Linear Algebra class (taught by Gilbert Strang) and I thought it was amazing. The lectures are very very good.
anotherpaulg 5 hours ago|||
Agreed.

Quantum Processes, Systems, & Information by Benjamin Schumacher and Michael Westmoreland is another good treatment along those lines.

podocarp 9 hours ago|||
It makes sense in the framework but the framework makes no sense. The model contradicts regular intuition.
fasterik 8 hours ago|||
If we've learned anything from modern physics, it's that our regular intuitions are often wrong. The framework makes perfect sense mathematically, and it makes the right predictions experimentally. It's still controversial how exactly the framework relates to reality, which is where you get into interpretations of quantum mechanics.
hansvm 6 hours ago||
One of my favourite examples of this pedagogically is how kinetic energy is quadratic with velocity. It's easy to tie into things people think they understand, like braking distance. Our intuitions are wrong even in shockingly simple problems.
whatever1 1 hour ago||
This. A tesla model Y going 60mph has almost 2 times the kinetic energy (75MJ) of the same car going 45mph (40MJ)

Your stupid brain thinks, oh I am just 10ish over the limit.

SJC_Hacker 5 hours ago|||
Nature gives jack crap about our intuition
wnoise 6 hours ago||
Mike and Ike is almost always my standard recommendation.
the-mitr 16 hours ago||
Of possible interest

Basic Concepts Of Quantum Mechanics by L. V. Tarasov

https://archive.org/details/tarasov-basic-concepts-of-quantu...

The dialogues of the author engages with various personas and the reader that are interspersed as Prelude and Interludes are really enlightening.

For example:

Classical Physicist: Can one seriously speak about an object without having an idea of what it looks like? Isn’t it strange that we study, for example, the behaviour of an electron in a crystal while we don’ t even know what an electron actually is?

Author: I don’t agree that we don’t even know what an electron is. I have just indicated a number of precisely determined characteristics and properties of an electron. More detailed properties of microparticles in general and electrons in particular were considered in the preceding sections of the book (and will be considered in the following sections). In fact, we know quite a lot about the electron and know, in particular, about its behaviour in a crystal. This is evidenced by the large number of semiconducting devices fabricated and used by us in practice. As you will see, the absence of a “physically intuitive” model of the electron has in no way turned out to be a serious obstacle. We may even go a step further and state that an understanding of natural phenomena in which Planck’s constant plays an important role is possible only through a significant rejection of a graphic description. By the way, this idea was given by Heisenberg, in whose works much attention was given to questions of the use of physically intuitive methods.

rini17 16 hours ago||
Classical physicists had conceptual difficulty when something stopped behaving as "body" even macroscopically. For example when they tried to determine coefficient of friction of pure coper, throughly cleaned, in vacuum to prevent any oxidation, the surfaces cold-welded together. The copper did not get the memo that it is supposed to be two physical bodies.
rramadass 9 hours ago||
Nice; a classic "Mir Titles" book!

Also checkout Tarasov's other books - https://mirtitles.org/?s=Tarasov Relevant here are his books on Probability and Lasers.

The Physics of the "very small" is essentially probabilities applied to Atomic, Molecular and Optical (AMO) domains where light and matter interact.

the-mitr 6 hours ago||
His book on Symmetry also discusses symmetry aspects of the microworld.
bobvanluijt 21 hours ago||
Somewhat related: a book that really helped me is Picturing Quantum Processes by Bob Coecke. It's a visual representation of quantum processes, which really helped me understand the concept
yboris 20 hours ago||
Full PDF https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/PQP.pdf
iorekz 31 minutes ago|||
Thanks for sharing! Just read the first pages and it looks promising
newsy-combi 19 hours ago|||
Funny, both books scream default LaTeX
internetter 13 hours ago||
Both books are default LaTeX. What’s wrong with that?
newsy-combi 7 hours ago||
It stands out as not too common a sight for books, so having two like this, more or less in the same style, on the same topic, both posted in this thread, is amusing. Maybe it's not that rare and I'm just not reading enough books from academics for whom a book is like a weird long paper with hand-holding for amateurs.
wasabi991011 6 hours ago|||
Finished reading this book not too long ago, one of my top three textbooks. An absolute joy to read full on great insight.

Not sure how it feels to a beginner, but to someone with a good deal of familiarity in the field it put everything in such a nice tight conceptual package.

rramadass 17 hours ago||
This looks quite interesting; thanks for sharing.
dbvdh 18 hours ago||
"This rather fanciful interpretation of Quantum Physics has now become accepted by many theoretical physicists as being more satisfactory than the Copenhagen interpretation, despite the fact that the mechanism which causes the splitting of the Universe is not explained in any more detail than wavefunction collapse. As you can probably tell, I am in the minority of physicists who finds the Many Worlds interpretation dificult to accept, and not particularly illuminating."

I think these lectures are a good intro to QM. This statement feels very emotional though. Many-worlds just states there is no such thing as wave function collapse. The many worlds are a logical conclusion following. Copenhagen simply refuses to elaborate to when wave-function collapse happens, which to me is not a complete theory.

You could have some critique of many-worlds in relation to statistics, although I think many people have given quite satisfactory explanations.

Many worlds is just bare bones QM.. If any other theory is proposed, it should be falsifiable (like pilot wave theory for example). Doesn't mean it won't be difficult to measure.

linuxhansl 13 hours ago||
FWIW (and it's not worth a lot, since I'm a layperson), I think the interpretation that makes the most sense to me is Quantum Decoherence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence).

My interpretation of the interpretation is that the universe is a giant constraint resolution system. Particles are free to be anywhere randomly as long as they do not randomly interact with other particles. As soon as they interact they have fewer "degrees of freedom", since now they interacted. When they interact with anything macroscopic they have no freedom left. Makes sense to me anyway.

monktastic1 11 hours ago|||
Decoherence isn't an interpretation, but an experimentally established fact. What makes interpretations interpretations is that they cannot be experimentally distinguished (or in some cases, can only be with great difficulty). That said, the study of decoherence has certainly made aspects of the measurement problem easier to come to terms with, which in turn has bearing on the intuitive draw of some interpretations over others. In particular, it helps answer when universes should be said to "split" in MWI (though, as many will rightly tell you, that's not a complete solution to the measurement problem, as decoherence is still unitary--i.e., there's no in-principle irreversibility there).
rcxdude 11 hours ago||||
Decoherence is how you get from "Maybe the wave function never collapses" to "Maybe there are many parallel 'universes' in QM.".
kgwgk 11 hours ago||
Decoherence gets you a diagonal density matrix description of the world. It doesn't get you a single-state description of the world. Going from "There are many parallel universes" to "and we are in one of them" still takes a lot of handwaving.
mitthrowaway2 10 hours ago||
But we're not in one of them. We're in all of them. Yours is a misunderstanding of how it feels to be in a quantum superposition. There's no component of the wave function in which Schrodinger's cat experiences anything other than being alive or being dead. There's no component in which it feels like it's in some ghostly combination of both outcomes. Both components of the wave function exist in superposition, and to the extent that they are decoherent, they do not interact and do not even notice that they have company. I don't mean this only as an academic statement; it's also true of you and me, at this very moment.
monktastic1 39 minutes ago|||
It's a bit like:

"Doc, I feel pain in my toe."

"No, sorry, the math says you don't."

"Okay, but like... I do."

"Sorry, you're just not good at accepting math!"

Not a perfect analogy, of course, but people have competing intuitions of what to do when the map fails to match the territory. MWI abandons the latter, most prefer the former.

podocarp 8 hours ago||||
If that isn't absurd, then I don't know what is.
mitthrowaway2 4 hours ago||
I think the alternatives would be more absurd:

- That humans can't be put into quantum superpositions, or

- That a human being in a quantum superposition of two states A and B would feel at all to that human like being in a quantum superposition of two states A and B, when neither of those states is "a human feeling like they're in a superposition of two states A and B".

Follow this to its conclusion, and you end up with a superposition of A and B meaning: "the universe is in a superposition, containing a component where a human believes that they're in state A, and a component where a human believes that they're in state B. Within both branches, the human thinks their wavefunction collapsed in that state". This is exactly the way that all interpretations of QM already understand things to work with particles in superpositions.

kgwgk 9 hours ago|||
There's the handwaving.
goatlover 11 hours ago|||
Decoherence only hides entanglement by having the entire world go into a complex superposition. It's entirely compatible with MWI. Decoherence does not resolve the measurement problem on its own. It's not a separate interpretation. It only provides us a mathematical reason for why the world appears classical.
EvgeniyZh 14 hours ago|||
Many-worlds is an interpretation and not a theory. It makes no additional predictions beyond what QM does. Believing in any interpretation (or shutting up and calculating) is purely emotional; it has no scientific content.
edanm 14 hours ago|||
(Disclaimer: I'm nowhere near truly knowledgeable about any of this)

Quantum computing was explicitly proposed as a way to prove the truth of many worlds. As far as we can tell, quantum computing appears to work.

I don't think most people believe QC truly proves many-worlds, but I think it is considered some evidence in its favor, and historically it was I think one of the reasons for the development of QC originally.

antognini 13 hours ago|||
I've heard this claim, but I don't think it holds up. The idea is that supposedly the calculation is done in parallel across the different universes which allows you to see an exponential speedup in some calculations. But the whole point of many-worlds is that after a branch event the various branched portions of the wavefunction no longer interact. Even if it were true that quantum computing was really a bunch of parallel classical computations (which it is not), there would be no way for any of the other universes to communicate the result back to the universe you observe it in.
rcxdude 11 hours ago||
Many worlds doesn't really feature 'hard branches'. In fact the interpretation is pretty specific that quantum interactions becoming de-correlated and stopping to react is the mechanism by which you get the 'many worlds', and this is a soft and messy process not some global hard split.

OTOH, I don't think any of the other interpretations really struggle to explain quantum computing so I agree it's not much of a distinguishing factor.

thayne 7 hours ago|||
I don't think there is anything in quantum computing that is specific yo the many worlds interpretation.
card_zero 14 hours ago||||
But if what you want is understanding, you want a good explanation. (Or to quote TheOtherHobbes from elsewhere in these comments, a reasonable metaphor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50220700)

If you only like predictions and disparage explanations, I might start calling you names, specifically instrumentalist.

spolitry 7 hours ago||
What do call someone who wants good "Just So" story explanations that don't explain anything, but posit the existence of meaningless things?
card_zero 7 hours ago||
Here you are taking "good explanation" and combining it with the term "just so story" which indicates a bad (arbitrary) explanation. So you cast doubt on the idea that explanations can be good. What's this, sabotage?
goatlover 11 hours ago|||
It has mathematical and philosophical content. People can be convinced for reasons other than empirical without it being emotional. Sean Carroll makes logical arguments for why he's convinced MWI is correct.
spolitry 7 hours ago||
I'm not Sean Carroll. I'm interested in logical arguments for why I should be convinced that something completely impossible to ever test, not even in theory, is correct.
mitthrowaway2 4 hours ago||
How do you test whether the dinosaurs once existed as living animals, vs as fossils that were embedded in the Earth when the universe began 6000 years ago?

Because I only believe one of these propositions, even though I can't imagine any test that would discriminate between the two.

dualvariable 17 hours ago|||
The quantum world involves states that are a complex linear superposition of all possible states. It isn't just that the world bifurcates into one where the cat is |alive> or |dead>, but also all c1 |alive> + c2 |dead>, where c1^2+c2^2 = 1 and c1 and c2 are complex. The MWI has no explanation for how this other infinity of possible states disappears into just two states. You still wind up with the collapse of the wave function--involving a lot of hand-waving or appealing to some nebulous property of consciousness.
trenchgun 15 hours ago||
>The MWI has no explanation for how this other infinity of possible states disappears into just two states. You still wind up with the collapse of the wave function--involving a lot of hand-waving or appealing to some nebulous property of consciousness.

The real issue here is the preferred basis problem, not an infinity of worlds: a single state vector can be decomposed many ways, and the bare math doesn't say which decomposition counts as "the branches." Decoherence picks it out: once the cat is entangled with its environment, the alive/dead decomposition becomes effectively unique and stable, through ordinary unitary dynamics. No collapse, no consciousness (that's von Neumann–Wigner, not Everett). MWI does have an open problem, but it's a different one: the Born rule, i.e. why |c|^2 should count as probability when every branch is real. Also, the normalization is |c1|^2 + |c2|^2 = 1.

kgwgk 12 hours ago|||
Sure, the MWI still has an open problem which is why it looks like there is a collapse of the wave function.
rcxdude 11 hours ago||
No, it explains that well enough, it just struggles to explain why you would expect to see the collapse with the probabilities that you do (though, to be fair, most other interpretations don't presume to explain this at all, it's just a rule. MWI just reframes it in a way that makes it odd that there is a rule).
soVeryTired 10 hours ago|||
AI comment
vlovich123 16 hours ago|||
Given we haven’t bridged quantum with gravity yet, my bet is the function collapses right at the boundary when gravity starts to play a meaningful role.

That’s a more physically plausible interpretation than ever “tick” of the universe actually creates infinitely more universes because every fundamental particle is quantum and each one is constantly interacting under the wave function every plank second. And the infinite number of possible events that a single particle would experience is multiplied by the joint combination of all particles in the entire universe. It doesn’t seem plausible.

dbvdh 16 hours ago|||
How would you define exactly ‘when gravity starts playing a role’. It always plays a role, from photons to planets.

And on the ‘every tick creates more universes’: we are completely fine with superposition in nanoscopic systems. It’s just uneasy to follow that conclusion to the logical end. Just my two cents. I think just because the conclusion seems hard to grasp, the reasoning to get there is completely sound..

vlovich123 16 hours ago|||
“Starts to play a role” means when the effect of gravity becomes significant to the quantum equations which currently don’t have any placeholder for gravity.

Just like Newton’s equations are accurate to describe gravity and motion but only because the full equations Einstein worked simplify to them at small speeds.

So similarly it would make more sense that quantum equations and relativity are two sides of the same coin and there’s some missing mathematical bridge where at small particle sizes it simplifies to quantum and at large particle scales gravity matters and we get Newton and then further relativity.

Using Occam’s razor that’s at least my prior vs some undefined mechanism of action where all possible interactions of every particle actually creates an infinite superposition of universes where that did happen and you get an infinite number of such superpositions ad infinitum. Much easier to believe the huge gaping hole between two very accurate theories explains how quantum mechanics turns into classical mechanics, especially since we know gravity exists, what it is, and quantum mechanics can’t explain gravity.

analog31 15 hours ago||
The place where quantum and gravitational effects are thought to become significant to one another is at energy levels that cannot be obtained in our experiments, either in the lab or through astronomical observation.
vlovich123 15 hours ago||
And so as a result there’s multiple worlds? That’s the simpler more testable prediction?
analog31 12 hours ago|||
I'm just an old industrial physicist, but as I understand it, quantum gravity has yielded no testable predictions so far, and neither have multiple-worlds theories.
vlovich123 11 hours ago||
I never said anything about quantum gravity. String theory is also trying to bridge things. But many worlds is pointing to a gap in the math and claiming god. All I’m saying is we don’t have any model or math and many worlds is the more fantastical explanation.
card_zero 13 hours ago|||
It's simple and elegant if you like it, overcomplicated if you don't.
vlovich123 11 hours ago||
Many worlds is a philosophical interpretation akin to god. It doesn’t add anything to our understanding and instead invokes some kind of supernatural untestable phenomenon.
antognini 13 hours ago|||
This is more or less Roger Penrose's position: https://web.archive.org/web/20150327124054id_/http://image.s...

He argues that the wavefunction collapses on a timescale of h-bar / E_G, where E_G is the gravitational self-energy of the quantum system.

vlovich123 7 hours ago||
Didn’t know this but glad I’m in such distinguished company.
tempaccountabcd 14 hours ago|||
[dead]
red75prime 17 hours ago|||
When the future has multiple instances of you, it becomes problematic to define what the Born rule means.

For example, "Many Worlds, the Born Rule, and Self-Locating Uncertainty" notices that the rule doesn't mean anything, but it is rational to behave like it does. It's not a very satisfying position, I'd say.

bazoom42 18 hours ago|||
Is many worlds falsifiable?
mr_mitm 17 hours ago|||
Yes. Many worlds is just the Schrödinger equation without the wave function collapse. It makes less assumptions. Falsify the Schrödinger equation, and you have falsified many worlds. However, is the wave function collapse falsifiable? It's one postulate which many worlds doesn't make, and it cannot be confirmed or falsified by experiment.
tsimionescu 15 hours ago|||
> Many worlds is just the Schrödinger equation without the wave function collapse.

It is not, it is the Schrödinger equation plus an extra rule that says that classical observers are only certain kinds of quantum states. There's no explanation in the MWI for why a device never reads out that a particle is 1/sqrt(2) |here> + 1/sqrt(2)|there>, even though that is exactly as probable a state as being |here>. And it turns out that this is exactly equivalent to positing wave function collapse / the Born rule.

And no, decoherence has nothing to do with this. Decoherence explains why there is no observable interference at the classical level between these states, not why you can only observe some states.

This is known as the preferred basis problem, for anyone who wants to read more about it.

spot5010 53 minutes ago||
Doesn’t the structure of the Hamiltonian (local interactions) set what the preferred basis are?
Gimpei 17 hours ago|||
This is not what falsifiability means in the Popperian sense. You are confusing falsifiability of a theory’s predictions with falsifiability of an additional claim of what those theories mean. We might as well say that the simulation hypothesis is falsifiable because the laws of physics govern our simulated universe, so if you can falsify those laws you can falsify the simulation hypothesis. That being said, the concept of falsifiability is not without its weaknesses.
baxtr 17 hours ago|||
Exactly.

Any good scientific theory must create falsifiable hypotheses.

Otherwise it’s just a nice story.

soon_to_be_sb 17 hours ago|||
>Any good scientific theory must create falsifiable hypotheses.

For any behavior inside the world, this is good.

But for the world itself and what harbor's it, asking for falsifiability is like measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space.

Even science, that works in terms of cause and affect, which implies space and time, cannot be used to describe space and time itself.

Vanilla "scientists" have been trying to do that, but that is a dead end.

aleph_minus_one 17 hours ago|||
> But for the world itself and what harbor's it, asking for falsifiability is like measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space.

Which exactly is what general relativity is centrally about and the reason why general relativity is defined in terms of intrinsic properties of the Einstein manifold describing the space of the universe. Intrinsic properties are, colloquially, indeed properties that can be measured "using a ruler that inhabits the same space".

Gauß' Theorema Egregium [1] is an early predecessor of intrinsic properties of general manifolds, and says that the curvature of a surface can indeed be "be determined entirely by measuring angles, distances and their rates of change on a surface, without reference to the particular manner in which the surface is embedded in the ambient 3-dimensional Euclidean space" ([1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theorema_Egregium...

zmgsabst 16 hours ago||
Also why LIGO works but Michelson-Morley failed: you can use the ruler distortion as a signal, with some caveats.

In LIGO, we detect the far away distortions propagating through our rulers and the differential effect of those waves.

But Michelson-Morley failed because the ruler distorted synchronously with the signal we tried to measure — since we mistakenly believed EM and matter were different fields.

senderista 15 hours ago||
How are general-relativistic effects relevant for the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment?
aleph_minus_one 13 hours ago||
> How are general-relativistic effects relevant for the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment?

General-relativistic effects are relevant for the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment in the sense that the general theory of relativity is a generalization of the special theory of relativity. :-)

Otherwise: the additional predictions that the general theory of relativity makes about gravity, curvature of space etc. are not relevant for the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment.

senderista 13 hours ago||
I mean, if you're claiming that general relativity is relevant here, then you need to show that quantitatively.
zmgsabst 17 hours ago|||
> measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space

We do that, routinely: that’s how we do cosmology.

soon_to_be_sb 16 hours ago||
> We do that, routinely:

Yea, that is why we are not getting any where...

aleph_minus_one 5 hours ago||
> Yea, that is why we are not getting any where...

Which alternative way of doing measurements do you propose? As far as I know, measuring intrinsic properties, i.e. "using a ruler that inhabits the same space" is with our current technology the only possible way of doing measurements.

soon_to_be_sb 3 hours ago||
Assuming that we are trying to understand the ground truth about existence by doing these measurements, may be we can acknowledge the limitation and stop trying to do it. Then we can be open minded and stop being hung up of the idea of "falsifiability", and could come up with or give more consideration to radically different hypothesis that we might come up with alternative measurements that we could make, that can prove or disprove them.
russdill 10 hours ago|||
So time extending into the future is not a useful hypothesis? Space continuing beyond the cosmic horizon is not a useful hypothesis? The past entropy of the past being arbitrarily low (vs what is essentially last tuesdayism) is not a useful hypothesis?
spolitry 4 hours ago||
Time extending into the future is validated by direct experience.

A continuum of variants of myself is bought.

What is the value of assuming that literally every possible trajectory actually happens, but somehow I am only in one of them, while also being a continuum of other ones? If everything is true, than nothing is true.

russdill 4 hours ago||
If time did not continue into the future, it would not be observable. Therefore hypothesis that it will continue to do so is not disprovable.

As far as multiverse goes, there isn't any inherit value in assuming that the wavefunction as given actually happens, it's just a simpler explanation than trying to come up with (arguable unprovable) ways to cull the wavefunction.

zarzavat 7 hours ago|||
The Copenhagen interpretation doesn't even deserve to sit with the other interpretations because it's not well defined. It's protoscience, like alchemy.
wnoise 6 hours ago||
It's "rules of thumb for a working physicist".
mohamedkoubaa 15 hours ago|||
"Many-worlds just states there is no such thing as wave function collapse" is the emotional statement. The contempt for many-worlds is both principled and rational.
AIorNot 13 hours ago||
Many worlds as real ontology are just as wild as saying their is a God. Physicists are thus making claims that just as wild as the theologians .. I find this fascinating.

Just like the AI nerds and the AGI singularity or Musk saying we are in simulation...

ie so many crazy ideas.. for the rationalist, its like being in an insane asylum and trusting one mental patient or another..

I suppose at some level its just not rational why we exist. We must accept some wild, fundamental metaphysical assumption

pamcake 11 hours ago|||
I think a common mistake when approaching MWI is reading too much into it. These Other Worlds "exist" in similar sense to the number i. MWI does _not_ claim anything about there being infinite alternative equivalent planes of existence where these physically manifest or anything like that.
spolitry 4 hours ago||
You make an extraordinary claim.

Where in MWI do you believe the preferred unique macroscopic reality is defined?

y1n0 13 hours ago|||
This has never not been true. There are always hand wavy axioms at the bottom.
jasrys 15 hours ago||
Sharing in case useful for someone. Started getting into this subject in 2015, and full disclosure: I'm no physicist by any means. Without the formal background, the math and concepts were really hard to conjure and comprehend purely from the page, so I built an interactive self-study guide to "feel" the equations from Newton to holography. https://apples-to-entanglement.jasonrys.com/
ridiculous_fish 2 hours ago||
Link looks to be broken.
cjfd 2 hours ago||
Regarding questions of what how measurement relates to schrodinger time evolution: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0503009 . I think it is absolutely astonishing that many physicists do not know this.
asystole 21 hours ago||
This piece looks great, adding to my ever-growing "to read" collection on Zotero.

If anyone is interested in self-studying quantum physics, QFT for the Gifted Amateur [1] is very well regarded.

1: https://academic.oup.com/book/36442?login=false

ktallett 21 hours ago||
Second this book, but you need a source before this to study QP successfully. This requires a lot of UG maths and physics knowledge that I think most would not have.
rustyhancock 18 hours ago||
I like QM for engineers.

It is much more shut up and calculate.

But I do believe that is atleast in part Feynmans point. The way we have explored QM for the past... 120 years (? Wow is it really that old!?) is you don't need to understand it, here are the rules and tools to carry out extraordinary calculation.

I believe the likes of Sean Caroll are trying to bring understanding back to physics and meet philosophy.

https://web1.eng.famu.fsu.edu/~dommelen/quantum/

spolitry 4 hours ago|||
Sean Carroll is trying to bring storytelling fantasy back to physics. No good comes from "studying" the angels dancing on the head of a pin.
ktallett 18 hours ago|||
It really depends on your goal. If you wish to use it day to day then you do need to understand it but yes you can use the handy Dirac notation to let you calculate lots without ever going too deep.
rramadass 20 hours ago||
See also, Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961595
isolli 22 hours ago||
In a podcast, Alain Aspect (Nobel Prize winner) explained that he does use the power of visualization and his imagination to generate new ideas, but that he always needs to check them with actual calculations because no mental picture can be an accurate representation of quantum physics.
quietFerry94 21 hours ago|
That pre-determined value idea is exactly local hidden variables, and Bell's inequality rules it out, Aspect's 1982 CHSH experiment measured the violation.
caturopath 21 hours ago||
To be precise, Bell's inequality rules out a local hidden variable theory. Pilot wave theories/Bohmian mechanics is an attempt to describe a nonlocal hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics.
antonvs 21 hours ago||
To be even more precise, it rules out hidden variable theories that satisfy Bell locality, i.e. the assumptions that the theorem makes.

Superdeterminism and retrocausality both allow for local hidden variables - it’s just that they don’t satisfy Bell’s assumptions.

rcxdude 13 hours ago||
They're also generally regarded as weirder than the problem they are trying to solve.
antonvs 13 hours ago||
Intuitive notions of “weird” aren’t necessarily a good guide here. We already know time doesn’t behave the way we intuitively imagine, because of relativity: there can’t be universal agreement on what is past, present, or future. Once you’ve accepted that, retrocausality seems much less strange.

Similarly, superdeterminism is simply the application of the determinism that was believed to apply to physics before QM, to QM itself. In a way, one might have expected it to be the default interpretation.

drdeca 9 hours ago||
No? Superdeterminism says that there’s no way to pick your experimental choices in a way that reveals things because any possible random number sources you could use have contrived correlations that prevent that? Why would one ever consider that as “the default”?
antonvs 6 hours ago||
The strong belief before QM was discovered was that the universe was deterministic - that given sufficient knowledge of a physical system's present state, you could accurately predict its specific future states (not just possible future states.)

Laplace expressed this in "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities" in 1814: "We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of that which is to follow. [...] For [an intelligence that has sufficient information] nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes."

Superdeterminism essentially extends this idea of deterministic physical evolution to quantum mechanics. It could be considered an appropriate default simply because it was previously considered to be, not only the default, but the strongly believed truth.

> Superdeterminism says that there’s no way to pick your experimental choices in a way that reveals things because any possible random number sources you could use have contrived correlations that prevent that

You're arguing against a consequence of superdeterminism, not its motivation. Its motivation is as I've described.

The word "contrived" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement. Nothing needs to be contrived in superdeterminism, even if it seems that way to an observer within the universe.

The explanatory problem you've alluded to only arises because we're trying to understand the universe from within the universe. The universe is under no obligation to make itself sensible to us.

Essentially, you're saying little more than that you don't like the idea of superdeterminism.

HarHarVeryFunny 16 hours ago|||
I've got a feeling that our intuitive ick around spooky action at a distance is due to out intuitive view on locality and the nature of space, maybe time too, being wrong. IOW remote is really not remote.

Perhaps we've got it backwards and quantum entanglement is what defines "locality" rather than mysteriously existing in the face of it.

spolitry 4 hours ago||
Ironically everyone assumed non spooky action at a distance for most of human history, until relativity.
mono442 20 hours ago|||
it doesn't if you assume superdeterminism
salsa_catsup 20 hours ago||
I don't understand the superdeterminism idea. Wasn’t that already the classical/Newtonian view - that everything was predetermined, a universe of billiard balls following their destiny exactly?
triMichael 12 hours ago|||
No, they are completely different. Determinism is the idea that if you have a perfect snapshot of the universe at one time, you could run that snapshot forwards or backwards using the laws of physics and have a complete history of the entire universe. It's a valid scientist idea, but Bell's Inequality experiments pretty much prove it false by showing that either realism or locality is false, and you kind of need both to have determinism.

Meanwhile, superdeterminism is the idea that you can still have realism and locality by claiming that Bell's Inequality experiments are invalid because the universe could somehow "know" you are performing a Bell's Inequality experiment and rig it to get the "wrong" answer. Superdeterminism is equivalent to saying that we can't prove smoking causes lung cancer, because the universe might rig any science experiments to make it look like smoking causes cancer. Anytime you ask why the universe would do that or how you can prove anything in such a universe, they shrug their shoulders. It's a completely BS idea that got traction because specific people pushed it and others don't understand quantum physics enough to know how unserious of an idea it is.

MattPalmer1086 20 hours ago||||
Newtonian is just plain determinism. One thing causes another, but does not imply things are fixed in any particular way.

Superdeterminism implies that things are fixed in advance in such a way that the things we "choose" to measure always looks as if there are no local hidden variables (e.g. Bell's inequality) even though there are.

gyrovagueGeist 11 hours ago||||
You can imagine the general idea by imagining the state space of a bunch of billiard balls: their position and velocity in a 6D space.

This is a metaphor and not the state or experiment that superdeterminism seeks to answer. I am also speaking well outside the areas of physics I was trained in. So huge grain of salt.

In classical determinism, the trajectories of all billard balls can be derived precisely from their initial conditions. Due to sensitivity to initial conditions and our ability to know them precisely, we can see chaotic mixing behavior where the trajectory of even two billiard balls that start at nearly the same place become more and more uncorrelated as time goes on as they bounce around and into each other. One expects that many accessible observables and functions loose detectable correlations as this billiard ball universe goes on and the billiard balls go on to roughly fill the full 6D state space up to conservation of momentum.

Now imagine the weirder scenario, that there exists some function and statistical comparison you can make between state variables from sets of billiard balls. Although these state variables themselves seem uncorrelated after enough time has passed, there are these properties that always hold with perfect correlation even after infinite chaotic time bouncing around. The points in state space that the balls cover is restricted to some manifold where these statistical properties are true when checked. The system cannot evolve in a way where those correlations of bulk quantities would disappear.

In this toy metaphor it’s not so horrifically odd. Superdetermism gets more flak because: (i) the state space and property in question is so much weirder and more complicated than the kinematic example, the correlations are between objects that measure and the objects being measured! (ii) if these properties are always true under any check we can make there is no way to falsify. Then it doesn’t matter if the behavior is from some unimaginable underlying universal state space geometry or local quantum effects. This same argument could also be applied more generally and inappropriately to reduce any experiment to “that’s just the way the structure of the universe is”.

rcxdude 13 hours ago|||
It's quite deeply weird. It's basically looking at the seemingly impossible correlations that occur in quantum mechanics and saying that they happen because the decision about what to measure is correlated with the state of the system somehow (Bell's inequality assumes that these are independent). This is very strange in a universe where we apparently could base that decision on many different seemingly unrelated processes. (including processes that have been causally seperated for near the lifetime of the universe, e.g. by choosing the measurements based on noise in the CMB).
antonvs 21 hours ago||
If you saw that in section 15, the very next paragraph covers Bell.
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