🚀 go-pugleaf

On Feb 5, 6:26 pm, James Warren <jwwarren...@gmail.com> wrote:
> To me it all sounds like mumbo jumbo. I would like to know that there
> is a sensible interpretation of quantum theory, but so far I have not
> seen one. Reluctantly, I think, for now, I have to be in the "shut up
> and compute" school. Quantum theory makes excellently precise predictions
> but its meaning is unknown at the moment.

It may always be.  Once the cast of characters was discovered (quarks,
electrons, gluons, photons, etc), the scientific community was left
with two "problems"...

  1. What are these things?

  2. With *what* do we measure them?  I.e., what claims can we make
about them
     that we can actually show?


The answer to #1 was given by the double-slit experiment:  At times,
they're particle-LIKE... and at times, they're wave-LIKE.  All
theories of QM would seem to indicate that the experimental setup
confers certain properties upon the entity... precisely because the
experimental setup, at these levels of existence, is inextricably part
of the thing/event being measured... much the same way that "blue" is
not solely the property of, say, an automobile... but also of the eye
and brain and consciousness that beholds it.

Think of a rainbow.  It's both there and not there, depending on one's
definition of "there."  Strictly speaking, there is no such "object"
as a rainbow.  Yet, it can be photographed.  And it appears in a
slightly different way to each observer... i.e., the observer standing
two metres to the left of you, while seeing the same phenomenon of
light-through-mist, is actually seeing, point for point, a different
"object"... one that looks almost exactly same to the human eye, but
is, when measured, demonstrably different.

The most interesting question I've heard is:  What if quantum entities
like electrons simply *have no inherent properties*?  What if they're
like the rainbow?  Nick Herbert mentioned in his book _Quantum
Reality_ that the electron will respond not only to a pulse wave,
giving a spectrum of data that corresponds to positions... and to a
sine wave, giving data that correspond to momenta... but also to
"middle C on a Steinway grand piano": that wave will give the same
kind of random probability distribution as the others.  It would be
odd to conclude that the electron has within it a "middle C on a
Steinway grand piano" property.


As for #2, it seems that even with string theory, scientists may
forever be stuck measuring not simply one entity, but always the
interactions between two or more.  In that case, our descriptions of
reality will always be relative.


(Lee Smolin disses the almost dogmatic attitudes within the string
theory community in _The Trouble with Physics Today."  He wants to get
back to experimental results, whereas these string theorists want to
do things the "new way" -- i.e., math only with no real need for
experimental backup.)


db