A Boost For Quantum Reality 241
Eponymous Hero sends this excerpt from Nature:
"The philosophical status of the wavefunction — the entity that determines the probability of different outcomes of measurements on quantum-mechanical particles — would seem to be an unlikely subject for emotional debate. Yet online discussion of a paper claiming to show mathematically that the wavefunction is real has ranged from ardently star-struck to downright vitriolic since the article was first released as a preprint in November 2011. ... [The authors] say that the mathematics leaves no doubt that the wavefunction is not just a statistical tool, but rather, a real, objective state of a quantum system."
Emotional debate (Score:4, Insightful)
> The philosophical status of the wavefunction [..] would seem to be an unlikely subject for emotional debate
Well not to me. I guess any subject a given amount of people put lots of effort in can arise emotional debates. *Especially* if the subject in question is discussed philosophically.
Re:Hegel was half-right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never understood how some people can be so dogmatically sure about the existence of an objective reality. Not to say there isn't one. but I've actually heard some people claim that 100% of their own experience supports an objective reality external to themselves. That would imply that a persons dreams, hallucinations, emotions, being fooled by optical illusions, and other such things were all proof of something about the nature of that reality. A little bit of introspection here soon shows that, however convinced you are of there being an objective reality or however certain you are that your experiences support it, you simply can't, in reason, claim that every single experience you have proves something about the nature of that reality.
Hell, most people don't learn that their 'self' is running on a physical substrate normally called a brain, until they are at least eight to ten years old. All those other experiences up until then certainly didn't reveal much about the underlying nature of any objective external reality until then, did they? That's a pretty damned important fact about the supposed objective external reality, considreing that brain will have litterally trillions of sensory experiences before it ever even possibly gets to a state where it can become aware of its true nature, and then only if it grows up in a society that has learned modern medicine.
It amazes me still that so many people can think kicking a stone really refutes Bishop Berkeley.
The evidence that QM is more than a mathematical trick mounts. It's worth noting that, at the beginning of the 20th century, most scientists weren't at all sure atoms were real and not just a mathematical convenience. It took Einstein's paper on Brownian motion to convert many scientists to the viewpoint that atoms were more than a convenient simplifying model. If this work holds up as well as Einstein's, it may be equally respected in the judgment of history.
If the internet has taught us anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Its that there's no such thing as an unlikely subject for emotional debate.
Re:Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that I've spent the majority of my life working with computers, I've come to accept reality as just another theory. Does the OS know it's inside a virtual machine ? (without the hypervisor intentionally making itself known) How can any person know, with absolute certainty, that they're not a brain in a jar, being fed simulated input ? How can we even know we're a brain at all ? For all I know, my entire existence could be a work of fiction, the Internet could be a fabrication of my mind, along with all its inhabitants.
The only thing we can reasonably assume, is that thought exists.
(and yes, I think the best psych/philosophy profs were the ones who dropped acid on a regular basis :)
Re:Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
My own take as a physicist who knows a bit about this stuff can be found here: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=621 [tjradcliffe.com]
The important fact is at the end: "That is, 'Preparing a photon in the same quantum state will sometimes result in photons in different physical states' does not imply 'Preparing a photon in different quantum states will sometimes result in photons that are in the same physical state'. The former proposition is the statistical interpretation. The latter is the assumption that the authorâ(TM)s argument depends on."
Since the author's assumption has nothing to do with the statistical interpretation, their argument says nothing about the statistical interpretation.