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private_messaging comments on Common sense quantum mechanics - Less Wrong Discussion
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As far as I can tell, it's highly misleading for laymen. The postulates, as verbally described ("reproducible" is the worst offender by far), look generic and innocent - like something you'd reasonably expect of any universe you could figure out - but as mathematically introduced, they constrain the possible universes far more severely than their verbal description would.
In particular, one could have an universe where the randomness arises from the fine position of the sensor - you detect the particle if some form of binary hash of the bitstring of the position of the sensor is 1, and don't detect when the hash is 0. The experiments in that universe look like reproducible probability of detecting the particle, rather than non-reproducible (due to sensitivity to position) detection of particle. Thus "reproducible" does not constrain us to the universes where the experiments are non-sensitive to small changes.
I'm not sure I understood you well, could you please elaborate? If the triggering of detectors depends only on the (known) positions of detectors then it seems your experiment should be well describable by classical logic.
Position of anything is not known exactly.
The point is, they say in their verbal description something like "reproducible" and then in the math they introduce a very serious constraint on what happens if you move a detector a little bit, or they introduce rotational symmetry, or the like. As far as looking at the words could tell, they're deriving the fundamental laws from the concept of "reproducible".
But what they really do is putting the rabbit into the hat and then pulling it back out.
Which is obvious, even. There's a lot of possible universes which are reproducible and have some uncertainty, where QM is entirely useless, and those aren't going to be rendered impossible by a few tricks. It could be very worthwhile to work out what is the minimal set of assumptions necessary - much more worthwhile than trying to pretend that this set is smaller than it is.