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dvasya comments on Common sense quantum mechanics - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: dvasya 15 May 2014 08:10PM

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Comment author: dvasya 17 May 2014 05:19:31PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: private_messaging 18 May 2014 04:16:37AM *  1 point [-]

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.