'Handwaving' describes vagueness. Yet, just how much vagueness qualifies as 'handwaving' is not well-defined!
This builds on the result of 'joint configurations', which is that for interference to occur, everything needs to line up. EVERYTHING. Otherwise, it's offset in some dimension or other, and not really in the same 'place' at all. With that in place, this is a short step to take.
'Handwaving' describes vagueness. Yet, just how much vagueness qualifies as 'handwaving' is not well-defined!
I don't disagree? I'm making essentially an aesthetic point.
I thought I qualified how much vagueness was acceptable -- there is vagueness that is pedagogically useful, and there is vagueness that is not pedagogically useful, and my accusation of handwaving is isomorphic to saying that the vagueness with Feynman paths here is not pedagogically useful.
...This builds on the result of 'joint configurations', which is that for interference to occur, ev
Today's post, On Being Decoherent was originally published on 27 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Where Experience Confuses Physicists, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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