[SEQ RERUN] Quantum Explanations

MinibearRex

Today's post, Quantum Explanations was originally published on 09 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Quantum mechanics doesn't deserve its fearsome reputation. If you tell people something is supposed to be mysterious, they won't understand it. It's human intuitions that are "strange" or "weird"; physics itself is perfectly normal. Talking about historical erroneous concepts like "particles" or "waves" is just asking to confuse people; present the real, unified quantum physics straight out. The series will take a strictly realist perspective - quantum equations describe something that is real and out there. Warning: Although a large faction of physicists agrees with this, it is not universally accepted. Stronger warning: I am not even going to present non-realist viewpoints until later, because I think this is a major source of confusion.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

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 Belief in the Implied Invisible, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Quantum Explanations was originally published on 09 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Quantum mechanics doesn't deserve its fearsome reputation. If you tell people something is supposed to be mysterious, they won't understand it. It's human intuitions that are "strange" or "weird"; physics itself is perfectly normal. Talking about historical erroneous concepts like "particles" or "waves" is just asking to confuse people; present the real, unified quantum physics straight out. The series will take a strictly realist perspective - quantum equations describe something that is real and out there. Warning: Although a large faction of physicists agrees with this, it is not universally accepted. Stronger warning: I am not even going to present non-realist viewpoints until later, because I think this is a major source of confusion.

what's his relativistically invariant mathematical model of world splitting for multiple spacelike-separated events?

I don't think Eliezer (or Everett or Deutsch) thinks "worlds" are ontologically fundamental. You just have an amplitude distribution on your Hilbert space that changes with time. This can (and does) happen in a Lorentz invariant way.

The "worlds" are a phenomenon that appear at a higher level. If you take each blob (i.e. concentrated region) and call it a "world" then they split in the same way that a large raindrop might split into two smaller ones. In particular, two quantum coin flips occurring at spacelike separated points would look like a single blob splitting into four (if we look in a frame where the flips are not simultaneous then we would see it split into two, and then each small blob would again split).

I'm not sure if this is the same as what Luke_A_Somers says in the comment sibling to this one, that comment is trying to describe how splitting looks from the inside.

I don't think Eliezer (or Everett or Deutsch) thinks "worlds" are ontologically fundamental.

Neither is the wave function collapse, but it is much simpler a concept. The most common objection "how does it do that?" is now irrelevant, since the collapse is not "ontologically fundamental".

The "worlds" are a phenomenon...

And now you are talking about it like it is some real thing, not an emotional crutch.

0Luke_A_Somers14y

Bingo.

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