gwern comments on [SEQ RERUN] Quantum Non-Realism - Less Wrong

1 Post author: MinibearRex 29 April 2012 02:40AM

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Comment author: MinibearRex 29 April 2012 09:32:19PM 0 points [-]

Eliezer is definitely a big fan of Jaynes. I've never seen him write anything like a whole post or essay on that particular topic, but he has touched on it a few times. In general, Jaynes seems to have considered and rejected all the various interpretations of QM that were floating around in his day, on probability theoretic grounds. I did see EY in one place imply that he thinks Jaynes would have gone for the MWI, if Jaynes had ever heard about it. To the best of my knowledge, he never did.

Comment author: gwern 29 April 2012 11:11:05PM *  6 points [-]

Jaynes died in 1998. How did he never hear of MWI? I'd heard of MWI in 1998, and I was just a kid.

EDIT: Google Books turns up the following snippet in The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III:

All possibilities 'actually realized,' with corresp. observer states.15 In May 1957, Everett wrote a critical letter to ET Jaynes, a physicist at Stanford University who was pioneering the use of von Neumann-Shannontype information...

I have been unable to find any copies online, Amazon wants $30 for any copy, and neither my local library nor university nor county catalog hold it. Man!

EDITEDIT: Google Books gives more access to The Everett Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Collected Works 1955-1980, which gives an entire chapter 18 to 'Correspondence: Everett and Jaynes (1957)': http://books.google.com/books?id=dowpli7i6TgC&pg=PA261&dq=jaynes+everett&hl=en&sa=X&ei=N9CdT9PSIcLOgAf-3vTxDg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

I'm not sure what they are discussing, and many-worlds doesn't seem to come up (at least under that name) and most of the chapter is inaccessible, but it's clear from the chapter summary Jaynes doesn't think much of Everett's position.

Comment author: gwern 30 April 2012 03:46:02PM 2 points [-]

Buy Buy - Dan Davis:

The correspondence mentioned is available online. http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1158

They seem to be talking more about Jaynes work in probability theory and statistical mechanics. Didn't see relevant comments on quantum theory, but mainly scanned the docs.

Given Jayne's interest in the foundations of quantum theory, it seems extremely unlikely to me that he was unaware of MWI. I've read most of his papers since around 1980, and can't recall a mention anywhere. Surely he was aware, and surely he had an opinion.

Comment author: arundelo 29 April 2012 11:30:59PM *  1 point [-]

Ditto [edit: responding to gwern's first paragraph] but in the mid-1980s. The many-worlds interpretation and the Copenhagen interpretation are contrasted in the pop-science books The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, published respectively in 1975 and 1979.

Comment author: ksvanhorn 30 April 2012 02:09:02AM 0 points [-]

Heck, I'd heard of MWI in the mid-70's, and I was just a kid.

Comment author: MinibearRex 30 April 2012 12:42:23AM 0 points [-]

You're right, that should have been obvious. Hmm. I'm going to have to see if I can track down where I heard that and didn't question it.

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