Manfred comments on The Born Probabilities - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 May 2008 05:50AM

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Comment author: Manfred 06 April 2011 06:37:27PM *  1 point [-]

Nope. Vacuum fluctuations happen because the field that tells you whether there's a particle there or not behaves like a quantum thing and not a classical thing, and you end up with a non-boring vacuum state for the same reason atoms have non-boring ground states rather than collapsing in on themselves. Weird as all get out, but not quantum-mechanics-breaking, and measured reasonably well by the Casimir effect (though also horribly wrong because of the cosmological constant problem, but that's a problem for quantum gravity to sort out, not one that can be solved by big changes to already-tested parts of quantum mechanics).