Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:26:36 UTC No. 16554472

>>16554459
There's no wavefunction to begin with. It's just a mathematical tool we use to calculate the distribution of a large number of repeated measurements.

Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:28:19 UTC No. 16554477

>>16554472
Sure, if we're going full Copenhagen, the wavefunction is just a bookkeeping device for probabilities. But isn't that sidestepping the question of why it works so well? If it’s just a tool, why does it seem to act like a real physical entity when you look at interference patterns or entanglement? How do you reconcile that with the many-worlds or pilot-wave interpretations that treat it as something real?

Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:31:33 UTC No. 16554482

>>16554459
>What’s the most no-nonsense way to frame it?
Probably Copenhagen if you don't dwell on it too much.
None of the explanations seem elegant when you spend a ton of time thinking about them, but Copenhagen is the most down-to-earth:
1. No magical parallel universes that somehow pop into being out of nothingness.
2. No magical shroud of quantum influence that hovers around particles.
BUT
If you dwell too long on exactly what an observer is, you'll probably start muttering to yourself.

Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:32:14 UTC No. 16554485

Decoherence puts it in a incoherent superposition, and that is wave function collapse for all practical purposes. It isn't caused by anything special due to observation or consciousness or what have you, it is caused by interaction with a large number of degrees of freedom in the environment or the detailed microstate of the system. There is still a step going from an incoherent superposition to the actual definite outcome observed in an experiment that different interpretations disagree on, but whatever.

Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:33:03 UTC No. 16554486

>>16554482
Is that it?

The inner monologue?

Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:33:26 UTC No. 16554488

>>16554477
A: See that plane?
B: Yep.
[...one hour later...]
A: Where do you think that plane is now?
B: Well, knowing what we know about aircraft, I couldn't say for sure, but here's where it could be, with some isoprobability lines drawn in.
A: I'll check FlightTracker. Hey look, there it is. Right inside your distrbition.

Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:34:28 UTC No. 16554492

>>16554459
Just stop pretending there is some reason that the physical world "needs to be" deterministic at all levels. There can be fundamentally uncertain realizations of physical state changes while still having consistent statistics/moments.

Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:39:13 UTC No. 16554503

>>16554477
Neither of those interpretations add anything to our understanding or clear up any ambiguity in quantum mechanics. They just replace the mystery of wavefunction collapse with some other mystery, like other worlds we can't observe. I'm not saying there isn't some deeper theory which might explain some of the mystery of quantum mechanics, but I don't think such a theory will include an ontologically real wavefunction.

Anonymous at Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:41:53 UTC No. 16554508

>>16554486
>Is that it?
>The inner monologue?
All I know is that I talk to myself a lot now, anon.
Yup, I sure do all right!

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:25:36 UTC No. 16554561

>>16554503
I get where you're coming from—both many-worlds and pilot-wave theories just move the problem around. But the wavefunction isn't just a mystery in itself, it’s a convenient model that predicts outcomes in a way that works (most of the time). If we're saying it’s not real, then what’s the alternative? What's actually happening when the system goes from a superposition to a definite state? If we dismiss the wavefunction as a real entity, are we just going to accept the same spooky behavior as 'it’s just math' and move on?

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:29:29 UTC No. 16554563

>>16554459
>What’s the most no-nonsense way to frame it?
shut up and calculate

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:32:12 UTC No. 16554565

>>16554561
>What's actually happening when the system goes from a superposition to a definite state?
You're assuming that the system was actually physically in a state of superposition to begin with. We've never observed this, it doesn't even make sense physically, so there's no reason to assume it's anything more and mathematical and conceptual model.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:07:20 UTC No. 16554599

>>16554565
Fair enough, but if the system isn’t physically in a superposition, then what is the wavefunction describing? If it’s just a conceptual tool for predictions, then what causes the sharp agreement between theory and experimental results? For example, experiments like double-slit interference seem to behave as if superposition is real. If not, what else explains the outcomes without invoking some hidden dynamics?

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:12:50 UTC No. 16554603

>Does it happen because of
consciousness
quantum eraser is a good example of it

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:19:31 UTC No. 16554611

there is only one mystery in physics: why am i here experiencing things? everything else is downstream from that

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:21:16 UTC No. 16554614

>>16554459
I will give you a full list about what we do know here.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:24:46 UTC No. 16554617

>>16554614
Kek. Nice one anon.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:28:21 UTC No. 16554619

>>16554599
Philosophers had a similar dilemma when Newton proposed his universal theory of gravitation. Newton proposed a mathematical rule describing the force between two bodies that had no underlying physical basis. There was no string pulling the bodies towards each other, no substance pushing the bodies towards each other, no mechanism at all behind this mysterious force acting at a distance. Until then philosophers always thought of physical interactions in terms of direct mechanical forces touching each other, so they had difficulty accepting Newton's theory. I think we're in a similar position with quantum mechanics. There could be some underlying mechanism that is yet to be discovered, but it could also simply be the nature of reality we have to accept.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:32:54 UTC No. 16554624

>>16554619
>that had no underlying physical basis.
nigga, he had copernicus' heliocentric ideas, brahe's observations, and kepler's laws to support the conclusions of his model

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:46:38 UTC No. 16554633

>>16554624
I think you misunderstood what the other anon said. The prevailing notion was that the motion of objects could only be influenced by mechanical contact. That a strange invisible "force" could have tangible physical effects seemed absurd. That's what he meant by gravity supposedly having no physical basis. The works you quoted of course were evidence to the contrary.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:55:01 UTC No. 16554638

>>16554633
Got it—Newton's gravity challenged the notion of 'contact mechanics' and made people rethink causation. But even if Newton didn’t have an underlying mechanism for gravity, his model still had predictive power. In quantum mechanics, though, the predictive success of wavefunctions relies heavily on the idea of superposition. So if we dismiss superposition as merely conceptual, isn’t it like rejecting the essence of the theory while still using its math to get results? I get that we’re in the same philosophical limbo as Newton’s time, but QM seems harder to just 'accept' without probing deeper—because it challenges intuition at such a fundamental level.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:59:45 UTC No. 16554644

>>16554638
I think we've pretty much reached the limits of our intuition with quantum mechanics. It's really only calculation going forward.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 02:30:06 UTC No. 16554671

the whole reason wavefunctions are needed is because of experiments showing that when two probability distributions representing the position of particles overlap, they don't just sum up they interfere. collapses occur because when you take a huge amount of parameters in measurements, it's like adding a huge amount of quantum numbers, which is equivalent to leaving the quantum system and returning to the macroscopic system. i'm pretty sure the dirac delta function is what's used here, and that's how you converge to the classical point position probability.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 02:38:19 UTC No. 16554679

>>16554644
Agreed, intuition hits a wall with quantum mechanics. But doesn’t that raise a deeper question? If calculation is all we have going forward, does that mean we’re doomed to treating quantum mechanics as purely instrumental? Or do you think there’s still value in searching for a conceptual framework, even if it’s just for the sake of coherence?

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 02:58:10 UTC No. 16554698

>>16554603
https://youtu.be/RQv5CVELG3U

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 03:23:54 UTC No. 16554719

>>16554671
That's solid. It shows the bridge between the quantum and classical worlds pretty well. The idea of interference in overlapping distributions is key, but doesn’t the use of tools like the Dirac delta function in this context kind of reinforce the idea that wavefunctions are more of a mathematical abstraction than a physical reality? Or would you argue that the math directly reflects something ontologically real about quantum systems?

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 03:39:08 UTC No. 16554725

>>16554698
she is only "debunking" the time travel not that it doesn't work

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 03:51:35 UTC No. 16554734

>>16554725
So she's debunking the only part of the experiment that was potentially of interest. All that's left is a big fat nothing.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 04:11:42 UTC No. 16554750

>>16554698
shut up

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 04:14:24 UTC No. 16554751

>>16554734
the point of interest is that the result depends on the measurement, the particles know how you measure them. she admitted that's true.
this "debunking" doesn't actually rule out the time travel. she claims it doesn't erase anything, i'm not sure if she really understands how the experiment works.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 04:17:17 UTC No. 16554754

>>16554459
Has "it" ever been shown "to happen" under laboratory conditions? No, of course not. It's another "Model" that's never actually been show to be. Every Physics and Chemistry teacher knows this, but they keep teaching it anyway because we STILL have nothing better after all these decades. Not a promising outlook, really, but it's all we got.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 04:29:30 UTC No. 16554771

>>16554477
>But isn't that sidestepping the question of why it works so well? If it’s just a tool, why does it seem to act like a real physical entity
You are not describing just QM, but all of physics, all of science for that matter.
Welcome to the rabbithole.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 04:31:33 UTC No. 16554773

I read some reviews about this. What I learned is that nobody fucking knows. People can't even agree whether decoherence can explain collapse, although I was fairly convinced that it can't after reading various papers.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 04:51:06 UTC No. 16554787

schizophasia thread
spout out all your favorite polysyllabic science jargon so you can feels smug and get dat social media dopamine buzz you crave

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 05:31:50 UTC No. 16554803

>>16554459
Unironically FTL explains it

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 05:41:37 UTC No. 16554811

>>16554803
this is not incompatible with theory

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 06:04:50 UTC No. 16554826

>>16554614
Underrated

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 09:47:04 UTC No. 16554938

>>16554719
it's more about the fact that there is a wave-particle duality. under certain conditions you get particle-like precision. classical, newtonian notions of momentum can hold because you can measure mass and velocity fine without the interference creeping itself. but when you study each particle in isolation, getting momentum measurements leads to absurdities because you can't measure positions accurately. it's not so much tools were a limitation, or our models were a limitation, but that having certainty was a preconceived notion. my understanding is that on the quantum level, elementary particles don't have an exact place in space and time. everything exists AS probability waves. that's just what they are, and when you try to measure with certainty, you get paradoxical results. anytime a paradox occurs it's due to a false premise of some sort, and in this case it's exact energy, position, mass, etc. parameters known to a fixed value.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 10:23:21 UTC No. 16554960

The Penrose Interpretation is the correct one

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 15:50:36 UTC No. 16555195

>>16554698
if this is true there is time travel
https://www.stonybrook.edu/laser/_amarch/eraser/index.html
>How this happening? It wouldn't make sense that photon p could know about the polarizer before it got there. It can't "sense" the polarizer's presence far away from it, and send photon s a secret signal to let s know about it. Or can it? And if photon p is sensing things from far away, we shouldn't assume that photon s isn't.
http://strangepaths.com/the-quantum-eraser-experiment/2007/03/20/en/
>At time T0 when D0 is triggered no interference appears, since the which-way information is contained in the system at that time. At time T1, which in the experiment is some nanoseconds later but could be in principle any time later,10 when D1/D2/D3/D4 are triggered, we find interference in the correlated subsets of past D0 records undergoing future erasure of the which-way information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
>Detection of signal photons at D0 does not directly yield any which-path information. Detection of idler photons at D3 or D4, which provide which-path information, means that no interference pattern can be observed in the jointly detected subset of signal photons at D0. Likewise, detection of idler photons at D1 or D2, which do not provide which-path information, means that interference patterns can be observed in the jointly detected subset of signal photons at D0.

the bitch didn't even do minimal research, just repeats what other youtube fags said. thanks for the video, now i know she's a fraud and only good for clickbaits.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:11:29 UTC No. 16555208

>>16554488
"That's odd, flight path indicates it went through the rocky mountains?

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:13:01 UTC No. 16555214

>>16554459
It happens because is quantized. All or nothing, whole quanta or no quanta, no fractions. It can't be half here and the other half there. Simple as.
You should be asking why it goes from right to left. Is it a probability distribution or that is just how a position evolves in time?

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:20:40 UTC No. 16555219

>>16554477
>what are fields?
>what are lagrangians?
>what is literally all of thermodynamics/statmech?
>what is all physics?
Anon, the list of non-physical things we use to accurately predict the behavior of complex physical systems could fill a textbook, or a few thousand.

Wave functions are just another mathematical formalism that's useful for predicting the behavior of a physical system; and it probably *does* have some deeper meaning to it in-so-far as *why* it works so well, but we don't completely know what that is yet.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:38:10 UTC No. 16555231

>>16554482
>If you dwell too long on exactly what an observer is, you'll probably start muttering to yourself.
isn't it any particle which isn't entangled with the system? when a photon interacts with the entangled system the photon itself is the observer, acts like the observer.
maybe observer is not the best word. interactor? anything that isn't entangled with the system?

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:39:01 UTC No. 16555232

>>16555208
>I mean, I wasn't actually watching the particle the entire time.
>A scientist has to eat lunch, right?
>But when I came back, the particle had climbed a really big hill.
>I couldn't do that, especially after lunch.
>Obviously, it teleported.

Anonymous at Sat, 18 Jan 2025 22:41:25 UTC No. 16555676