Unknown comments on Where Experience Confuses Physicists - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 April 2008 05:05AM

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Comment author: Unknown 26 April 2008 06:11:15AM 1 point [-]

How come no one has yet investigated whether or not Ha'ro's suggestion can be proven or disproven from first principles?

Comment author: Manfred 17 April 2012 07:15:14AM 7 points [-]

I come from the future, bearing important news!

Probably the easiest way to show that Ha'ro's suggestion requires additional postulates is to use a toy model like a weighted quantum coinflip. Because flipping a coin is nice and simple, the extra step required to eliminate states of low amplitude squared really stands out. If you do a single flip, you get probabilities of 1/2 from counting states, even if the amplitudes squared are, say, 0.4 and 0.6. If you flip many independent coins, you should just be able to multiply the results together, which means counting states still gives the wrong answer - if something else supposedly happens, that's a property called "nonlinearity," which normal quantum mechanics provably does not have.

This can be quickly seen if you spend a lot of time on this stuff, which is why nobody has gotten a paper published about it specifically (though there are plenty of speculations about changing quantum mechanics to be nonlinear). Yhis is a case where no journal articles specifically on something doesn't mean it's "not investigated" - it just means no articles.