http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/
Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
265 thoughts on “Bohm Lives Again–(aka was Krishnamurti right? ;>} )”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
We also don’t have any publications containing the complete world-history of every atom that makes up the Mt. Everest. Yet geology successully explains mountain formation nonetheless.
Yet geology successully explains mountain formation nonetheless.
Hah. I’m sticking with geology plus Spongebob.
I’m admittedly out of my depth here, but I don’t really see how the multi-worlds hypothesis could fail to “account for the world we see” and “fit all the data we have ever collected.” It seems to me (from my position of relative ignorance) almost tautological that it do so.
What more I would want from a theory than that is for its explanation not to violate the Law of Non-Contradiction, which seems to me quite useful. I mean, the multi-world interpretation does this by adding worlds, which allows each to be consistent, but I have to admit that that move strikes me as medieval angel positing. And I note, too, my suspicion that if a multi-world theory can be properly inferred from the premises Carroll adduces in that post, I could probably devise what I think he ought to take to be a sound ontological argument for the existence of pretty much anything. I make that as a reductio, myself. My impression is that Carroll probably thinks he can distinguish some ontological arguments from others….but I, for one, would like to see him do it.
Anyhow, that’s my (layman’s) response to many worlds. I will continue in my (no doubt futile) longing for pilot waves…..
Pure ignorance.
Then all it would take is for a single publication from IDists to demonstrate the exact steps or mechanisms in ID and you’ve got the evolutionists beat.
What’s the hold up?
Oh that’s an easy one.
The hold-up is all of the effort evolutionists make to censor the information in public schools, to discredit university professors who attempt to do research that doesn’t support evolution, to pass bills that don’t allow the teaching of weaknesses in evolutionary theory, the efforts by Wikipedia, Huffingtonpost and other of guerilla groups that plant phony propaganda into mainstream media, the stifling of scientific inquiry at scientific journals and institutions of science, etc….
What would you like to present to children that is not currently being presented?
For example?
Give an example of a weakness that you’d like taught? Also explain why it is appropriate to teach that to children.
Yeah, because the wedge document was not exactly that.
I’ve asked this to many ID supporters, none have ever responed. But I’ll ask you.
Do you have a rejection letter for some ID research that was rejected soley on the basis that it supports ID?
If not, please do explain how scientific journals are stifling inquiry? They can’t suppress what does not get submitted
Hardly. All that’s happening is that creationism is not allowed in the science classroom.
So, to be clear, what’s stopping ID supporters doing ID research in their own labs are the nasty evolutionists? How? Are they holding their hands over the test tubes or something?
Odd that, as for example the Templeton people put out a call for ID research projects they would fund directly. Did anyone apply? Not that I’m aware of.
If you were a football manager you’d be blaming your team’s loss on the other team, right? As that was, after all, the reason your team lost, if they had not turned up you’d have won! Do you think the fans might disagree with that?
There are entire “Bible Universities” out there that have plenty of $.
Who is stopping them from performing ID research? Jesus?
OMagain,
OMagain,
What would be the pay-off to me providing even more evidence of intentional censoring of information by the scientific community? You actually admitting something that is obvious?
Anybody with a true inquisitive mind would already know this is all true. The only people who deny it are those who wish to protect their worldview.
So if you are interested in it, read about, investigate it. The information is everywhere. Anyone with knowledge of the subject knows it (But just try getting polite opposing viewpoints printed on Jerry Coynes blog. He is interested in truth? Ha) But expecting people like you to ever admit the reality, don’t be ridiculous. Finding the truth is NEVER the goal of evolutionists.
OMagain,
And what is the evolutionists excuse for not having a coherent theory?
It may be incoherent to you, phoodoo. You never attempted to understand it.
If this is so well known, you must be able to give examples.
What did you try and post “politely” at Evolution is True. Just referring to it as a blog would upset Jerry Coyne. Did you save the comment? Post it here. You haven’t posted much with specifics yet apart from the odd content-free scoff at evolutionary theory.
More? I’ve yet to see you provide any.
Ah, another “self evident truth” eh, with no need for actual evidence.
Shrug. Believe what you like, but if it’s true and as pervasive as you say you’d not have any trouble supporting your claims.
Start your own blog. What right have you to dictate what he writes about?
The reality is that you claim evidence is everywhere but when asked cannot produce!
I noticed you did not address any of my points about the fact that there is money for research available but as yet it’s unclaimed by the ID supporters. Why?
Same as yours.
I’ve seen Gary Gaulin’s posts at Sandwalk and several other high traffic blogs. If he is allowed to post, anyone can post. anyone who doesn’t try to post obscenities.
Panda’s thumb does have the equivalent of Guano. Actually two equivalents. the Bathroom Wall, and AtBC, the official forum. AtBC has no rules at all. (I suppose they would frown on stuff that would pose a legal problem.)
All of the proposed interpretations of QM fit the predictions of QM (although some make predictions that others don’t that we cannot test at present). I’m not sure why accounting for the data is a tautology, but in any event, I don’t think that is the issue.
If all you want from a theory to to predict the results of experiments, then you may not care much about interpretations. Instrumentalists (like WJM?) and those of the related “shut up and calculate” approach to QM fit in this group, I think.
But if you want a scientific theory to tell you something about how the world is, then you will likely find the Copenhagen interpretation incomplete because of the role it gives measurement means it does not fully characterize reality.
The worlds are already in the Schrödinger equation used as part of the formalism, so it comes does down to whether you consider that equation to be telling us something about how reality is. If you don’t, OTOH, if you think it is simply a way of updating subjectivity probabilities about future experiments, then you will lean to something like QBism, but it seems to me this is essentially an instrumentalist approach.
Not sure what you are getting at here, but any ontological argument you put forward would have to be consistent with the predictions of QM as MW is. That seems a tall order.
Is that because you desperately want hidden variables as part of your ontology? Those pilot waves are pretty mysterious too.
Alan Fox,
Alan, you are just as guilty as guys like Olegt and Omagain, and so many of the other evolutionists out there (Why do you think Eugenie Scott and Richard Dawkins and PZ Meyers and all of the so outspoken evolutionists are so afraid of debating? Is being a chickenshit a requirement for being a leading voice for evolution? ). You don’t care about what’s true or not, you want to promote an agenda. If you don’t know about the extensive efforts in the scientific community to censor thought and ideas, you are extremely uninformed or deliberately in denial.
I could give you ten examples of blatant, obscene censorship that comes from the science community, and what good would it do? You would simply say, well, what about 11? Well, that’s an exception. Richard Sternberg wasn’t affected in his job. Gonzales wasn’t a good astronomer anyway. Wikipedia didn’t smear Rupert Sheldrake. Eric Hedin wasn’t teaching science. Oh that’s not censorship, that’s just the need to conserve paper…Your excuses would never end.
You are going to admit anything? You are a seeker of truth? That’s preposterous.
The fact that you claim you don’t don’t about how extensive the desire within your community to stifle open discussion shows just how uninterested you are in knowing truth.
What do you want to debate about?
Bet you can’t!
Please, explain how he was affected!
You are here, able to discuss anything you like. You even have a thread dedicated to a topic you chose, yet don’t want to use it.
So you should look in the mirror.
Bet you can’t even give 1.
Go on then!
(One will do as a starter. Why not pick your best example.)
Alan Fox,
Eric Hedin.
Now can you explain why you are such an apologist preaching cheerleader for evolution, that has no desire for truth?
It may surprise you to learn that I have never heard of Eric Hedin. So I will Google him.
Is this Eric Hedin?
Hedin was prevented from teaching ID as science at Ball State.
ID is also not taught in Home Ec class. Nor in pottery classes.
Perhaps phoodoo could tell us where it would be appropriate to teach a content-free subject.
The evil Jerry Coyne version of truth
So phoodoo
It seems that religious material is considered inappropriate in a physics class. Is there any more to it than that?
BruceS,
Is that because you desperately want hidden variables as part of your ontology?
Yes!
Those pilot waves are pretty mysterious too.
I guess so, but (at least to me) not as mysterious as the claimed truth of P • ~P.
You understand the concept of secularism, phoodoo? It is a protection for all minority religious views. Matters not having to do with religious belief are (or should be) blind to particular religious claims,beliefs, sensibilities.
Elizabeth the First (attempting rapprochement with her Catholic subjects.)
Oops!
Are we derailling, Walto?
ID has their own pseudo-journal “Bio-Complexity”. No complete model of design has been published there either.
Why is that, phoodoo?
phoodoo,
Sheldrake!
ROFLMAO
I agree with you, phoodoo, that pseudo-scientific woo gets a frosty reception from the scientific community (d’oh!), but the evil Darwinist conspiracy does not have the vice-like grip that you imagine. Note that you are arguing that:
Despite ID’s clear superiority, no concrete progress in ID has been reported because such reports are censored and because researchers who voice anti-evolutionary opinions are punished.
Let’s explore this argument together:
Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that there exists a population of highly competitive researchers who are not beholden to the Darwinian Omerta, whose biological research is very well funded and this research is judged solely on its results, not on its philosophical implications. Furthermore, their remuneration and career prospects are completely unaffected by their ability to publish their results in the peer-reviewed literature. According to your argument, these researchers (if such existed) would obviously be at the fore-front of developing ID science to surpass the fundamentally flawed Darwinist approach, and would be enjoying the fruits (money, power, women) of their superior paradigm.
If, on the other hand, this hypothetical group of researchers consistently follow the evilutionist paradigm, then your argument would be refuted.
Do you agree with this logic, phoodoo?
Eric Hedin was simply told not to teach christian theology and philosophy in his physics and astronomy courses.
He could simply elect to teach them as philosphy or theology courses instead.
Being reprimanded for teaching inappropriate material for the course isn’t censorship, that’s just how education works. You aren’t taught german in english class either and being told to refrain from it isn’t censorship.
I don’t understand the reason you think MW violates P • ~P.
On a related, point, QM does not get along with traditional propositional logic, and I believe this is the case regardless of the QM interpretation.
Careful now. That statement, or a relative of it, got me banned from UD.
What, you mean like UD is prevented from discussing square circles?
Or how there’s no book called “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery”? Written by a certain Mr Gonzales?
No, what pisses you off is that for all your efforts you’ve managed to convince a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a percent of scientists that ID is science. And what convinces scientists? Evidence.
But you can’t accept you have no evidence of a quality suitable to convince scientists that ID is real. So you invent these tales of a vast conspiracy spanning multiple countries and religions (after all there are non-ID believing scientists in every church in the world!) and use that as the reason why ID is not getting the uptick in belief you think it should be getting.
I know more about ID and it’s history then you ever will.
This is your mistake. Everyone desires that, but you only think you have the truth. Others can know it, at least to certain margins of error 😛
But it seems, phoodoo, you can’t handle the truth!.
BruceS,
It’s this:
(spin is up ; apparatus says “up”)
+ (spin is down ; apparatus says “down”).
This is handled by the many worlds interpretation by saying “Well, the first line is true in W1 and the second line is true in W2 so there’s no contradiction.” The thing is, as I said above, the whole creation of worlds is basically a matter of avoiding contradictions by that trick. That’s why I said that it’s not clear to me how it might “fail”–it’s just a trick specifically designed to handle said failure of the law of non-contradiction.
Thanks for that reference. I’m not really convinced, though, and while I readily admit that Putnam is a lot smarter than I am, I note that as he’s changed his mind about pretty much everything he’s ever published three or four times, there’s not much chance he’s still defending that thesis.
Anybody know?
BTW, there’s a comment to Carroll’s paper with like 30 positive reactions (one is mine) according to which the many worlds view suffers from needless reification. As this person points out, we could just say “it’s as if there were a bunch of worlds” and let it go at that, without suggesting there’s actually any additional explanation produced by making the worlds “real.”
walto,
You seem to be arguing that superposition violates the LNC, but I think that is a mistake.
A comment of mine at UD:
Not sure. Maybe you’re right.
FWIW, I wouldn’t want to lose the law of excluded middle either, unless I really had to. I.e., I’d like to be able to derive x is not-upspinning from x is down-spinning. I don’t think the other interpretations of QM require me to lose that inference, but I’m hardly an expert.
As Keith points out, I don’t think this is a contradiction; it is instead a layman’s simplification of the QM formalism underlying any interpretation. The measurement problem with the Copenhagen theory is to explain why we only see one or the other; the theory just postulates a collapse which is unexplained by the theory.
This response just avoids the issue with Copenhagen and so is really a non-response. Why is there only one world which appears as it does after a measurement? An alternative to Copenhagen is needed and the above response does not provide it.
To perceive a problem for LEM, I think you need to assume that statements like “the electron went through the left slit” are meaningful in a double slit experiment. They are not unless you allow for hidden variables, as in Bohm. So they cannot be true or false unless you go for hidden variables.
But then you have to live with the pilot wave, which lives in the same space as the MW interpretation: some even claim that hence Bohm is a special case of MW! But even putting this aside, although Bohm gives you a real (but hidden) position, you have to live with the fact that this position could depend instantaneously on measurements taken in another galaxy. Further, the position depends on the total world context, eg even though we have a trajectory that definitely goes through the one slit, its path depends on whether the other slit is open or shut.
Surely that is considered a badge of honor among “right-thinking” people like you and me? [Edit: removed possible violation of site rules].
phoodoo,
If only there were some medium whereby all this information and ID research could be put out there, and damn the journals! Some medium that gets into almost every home, whereby you could document precisely what the cutting-edge ID research is, and the extent of the cover-up.
Sadly, there does not appear to be such a medium. Which would explain why sites like Uncommon Descent or ENV don’t exist. If they did, you could see all this research in all its gory details. And sites like this, or Sandwalk, Rationalskepticism, talk.origins et al which also don’t exist, where people would be perfectly prepared to allow you to post ad lib, within certain rules of civility. The very non-existence of such fora is further evidence of the Great Evolutionist Cover-Up.
You have tons of elegant pro-ID research to reveal, but the margins are sadly not big enough to detail it.
http://xkcd.com/1381/
Can you explain that paragraph, Bruce? I don’t understand it.
Here is my layman’s understanding.
We’re talking about the double slit experiment involving a single electron at a time in the apparatus where we monitor where it hits the screen but do not attempt to monitor which slit it goes through. Despite there being only a single electron, we still see a gradual build up of the interference pattern when we use a series of properly prepared electrons (but still one at a time).
If you accept that the quantum state is all there is to say about the world, as all QM interpretations except Bohm do as I understand it, then that quantum state does not provide a position or trajectory for the electron in this experiment until it hits the screen.
So in that sense statements about which slit the election went through are meaningless. I say meaningless because they purport to be statements about the world but there is nothing in the world for them to connect to.
OTOH, Bohm says position is real always: it is the hidden variable. So if you accept Bohm you can say where it went, although the trajectory is still under the guidance of that non-local, contextual pilot wave.
If you are interested in a philosophers take on the issues of MW, David Wallace is one of the prominent ones. He also has a PhD in physics, which I suspect is a prerequisite for this type of metaphysics.
(BTW, did you see Unger’s dismissal of metaphysics where he makes a similar point about the qualifications for some types of metaphysics?).
He’s blogging these days and has this post up on color, a subject that I think is close to your heart. (whereas for me to be interested, it would need to be about colour).
In fact, even after the electron hits the screen we don’t know its trajectory. We know its endpoint, but not the rest of it.
Thanks for the correction.
It is nice to see that someone who knows what he is talking about when it comes to physics still comments in the forum..
Although what you get out of your ongoing sparring with phoodoo is beyond me.
Unless it is to bring the a wry smile to us lurkers in the peanut gallery, in which case you are succeeding.
Statements like this should not be taken literally. The Wiki explains: “In his classic treatise Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann noted that projections on a Hilbert space can be viewed as propositions about physical observables.” We can translate some formalisms of quantum mechanical into plain-language propositions using intuitive, but not particularly rigorous rules. Along the way we find that the relationships between these propositions violate classical logic.
This translation, however, is not a necessary part of the physics. The full formalism is written in the framework of linear algebra, which, as far as I know, is consistent. Apparent contradictions are the result of an imperfect translation.
As for ontology, while I don’t oppose the MWI, I do not feel the same urgency that Carroll feels to give quantum mechanics a definite metaphysical interpretation. I don’t see what our understanding gains by affirming or denying that the many worlds “exist.” Still, I am more attracted to Everett than to Copenhagen or Bohm, because of its formal minimalism: it doesn’t try to add anything to the physics (collapse, pilot wave), just to satisfy our metaphysical prejudices.
I can go with either spelling.
I’ve been following Putnam’s blogging for a while now. It’s often quite interesting.
SophistiCat,
Thanks for your comments on the wiki quantum logic article, sophisticat, which seem right to me. And…
‘I don’t see what our understanding gains by affirming or denying that the many worlds “exist.”’
Agreed. I admit, though, that I’m likely more wedded to my metaphysical prejudices than you may be to yours (if you have them). My condition of relative ignorance on the physics makes most of what I write on this topic much more about my prejudices than about anything else. E.g., Bruce writes,
If you accept that the quantum state is all there is to say about the world, as all QM interpretations except Bohm do as I understand it, then that quantum state does not provide a position or trajectory for the electron in this experiment until it hits the screen.
So in that sense statements about which slit the election went through are meaningless. I say meaningless because they purport to be statements about the world but there is nothing in the world for them to connect to. <
I don't care for the sort of instrumentalism that that suggests, and, presumably, neither do the many worlds supporters. It's a prejudice, certainly, but one that I bring to non-quantum stuff as well, and not just with respect to physical sciences; I bring it to my ordinary dealings with garden variety physical objects. So, dropping it seems to me to have a lot of consequences that I don't want to deal with (which, of course, is mostly a psychological remark about me–but I think reflects some stuff involving words and the world generally).
Anyhow, if we aren't instrumentalists, it seems to me we can just reify worlds in very large quantities to satisfy this prejudice–the MW tact which, though elegant, I take to be really ad hoc and non-falsifiable–or we admit ignorance. This could be a result of (i) hidden variables that we have been unable to find, or (ii) the fact that the world is just probabalistic without “explanation” (so shut up and calculate!). I prefer either of those two latter suggestions to MW, in spite of the supporters of that interpretation seeming to share my anti-instrumentalist prejudice, because they handle our ignorance by creating worlds willy-nilly and saying “OK, now we know.”
But again, what I understand about this stuff would barely fill a thimble.
Incidentally, I too have been enjoying the Putnam blog for a while. He's awesome.
Perhaps I am not a thoroughgoing instrumentalist, but on the question of ontology (be it the ontology of quantum mechanics or, say, mathematics), I often wonder, what difference does it make? I don’t mean that in a vulgar, pragmatic sense (well, maybe I do). But does it make a difference to anything other than this particular game that we play, in which we sort things into “exists” and “does not exist” piles? As far as philosophy goes (I think we can all agree that science as such is instrumental through and through), does ontology leak into other fields?