3 ms·

If you mean "what has led you to think they're further away from consensus": mostly just gut feeling, as a (younger) member of that community. I've not seen any

by n4r9 11y ago

If you mean "what has led you to think they're further away from consensus": mostly just gut feeling, as a (younger) member of that community. I've not seen any rigorous and comprehensive studies of which interpretations garner the most support, but it does seem like popularity is currently divided between the orthodox and several other interpretations that have evolved from "niche" to "significant minority" in recent years. If instead you mean "by what process are they further away from consensus": I would suggest that the recent surge of research in quantum information theory has stimulated a greater interest in foundational issues, which in turn has led to an invigoration of the interpretations debate.

gfodor 11y ago
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most... In short Copenhagen still (sadly) rules the day, followed by many worlds and QIT.
- n4r9 11y ago
  I meant "rigorous and comprehensive" to include "representative of the entire quantum community". That poll was conducted at a single conference and had 33 participants. The bias inherent in this approach can be seen when the same poll was conducted at two other conferences: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2719 http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2719 http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.4646 http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.4646 In both cases, de-Broglie Bohm interpretations ruled the day. As the abstract of the latter paper states: > ...the results do strongly suggest several interesting cultural facts -- for example, that there exist, within the broad field of "quantum foundations", sub-communities with quite different views, and that (relatedly) there is probably even significantly more controversy about several fundamental issues than the already-significant amount revealed in the earlier poll.
  - gfodor 11y ago
    My bad, on a phone and recalled the link from a while back to share it.
  - williamjennings 11y ago
    My opinion is that the Copenhagen interpretation does not contradict DeBroglie in terms of nuclear chemistry, but solely thermodynamics. The Copenhagen interpretation makes a leap of faith with the Born Rule as it is based on Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. The work of t'Hooft is a more modern alternative for ensembles where the outcome is stochastic, rather than probabilistic. Photosynthesis has that property, as do many other enzymatic systems.
    - n4r9 11y ago
      Not sure what you mean by "contradict". Certainly you won't easily find experiments for which the two offer different predictions. They are very different in terms of their ontology though: DeBroglie states that particles have definite positions and momenta at all times whereas Copenhagen does not.
      - williamjennings 11y ago
        Most of the contradictions arise as epistemological forks in the context of molecular spectroscopy with nuclear decay events. Thusly, it is a question of whose theories to use, and the Born rule is moot when the distribution of particles is not gaussian. DeBroglie himself states that matter waves propagate according to a defined distribution; whereas Copehagen interprets that they are probabilistically distributed. In the former case there is a stochastic process, whereas it is only a random process in the latter case.
        n4r9 11y ago
        What do you mean by "moot"? The Born rule is simply that the probability of measuring a particle to be in a certain location is given by the squared amplitude of the wavefunction. This squared amplitude will generate the same predictions whether you are using deBroglie-Bohm or "Copenhagen" to imagine your underlying ontology. The difference in ontology being that deBroglie-Bohm is deterministic, i.e. particles have definite positions of which we are merely ignorant, whereas "Copenhagen" is (usually) non-realist, i.e. it is not meaningful to talk about the positions of particles until the moment we measure it.

by n4r9 11y ago

gfodor 11y ago

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most... In short Copenhagen still (sadly) rules the day, followed by many worlds and QIT.

n4r9 11y ago
I meant "rigorous and comprehensive" to include "representative of the entire quantum community". That poll was conducted at a single conference and had 33 participants. The bias inherent in this approach can be seen when the same poll was conducted at two other conferences: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2719 http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2719 http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.4646 http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.4646 In both cases, de-Broglie Bohm interpretations ruled the day. As the abstract of the latter paper states: > ...the results do strongly suggest several interesting cultural facts -- for example, that there exist, within the broad field of "quantum foundations", sub-communities with quite different views, and that (relatedly) there is probably even significantly more controversy about several fundamental issues than the already-significant amount revealed in the earlier poll.
- gfodor 11y ago
  My bad, on a phone and recalled the link from a while back to share it.
- williamjennings 11y ago
  My opinion is that the Copenhagen interpretation does not contradict DeBroglie in terms of nuclear chemistry, but solely thermodynamics. The Copenhagen interpretation makes a leap of faith with the Born Rule as it is based on Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. The work of t'Hooft is a more modern alternative for ensembles where the outcome is stochastic, rather than probabilistic. Photosynthesis has that property, as do many other enzymatic systems.
  - n4r9 11y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "contradict". Certainly you won't easily find experiments for which the two offer different predictions. They are very different in terms of their ontology though: DeBroglie states that particles have definite positions and momenta at all times whereas Copenhagen does not.
    - williamjennings 11y ago
      Most of the contradictions arise as epistemological forks in the context of molecular spectroscopy with nuclear decay events. Thusly, it is a question of whose theories to use, and the Born rule is moot when the distribution of particles is not gaussian. DeBroglie himself states that matter waves propagate according to a defined distribution; whereas Copehagen interprets that they are probabilistically distributed. In the former case there is a stochastic process, whereas it is only a random process in the latter case.
      - n4r9 11y ago
        What do you mean by "moot"? The Born rule is simply that the probability of measuring a particle to be in a certain location is given by the squared amplitude of the wavefunction. This squared amplitude will generate the same predictions whether you are using deBroglie-Bohm or "Copenhagen" to imagine your underlying ontology. The difference in ontology being that deBroglie-Bohm is deterministic, i.e. particles have definite positions of which we are merely ignorant, whereas "Copenhagen" is (usually) non-realist, i.e. it is not meaningful to talk about the positions of particles until the moment we measure it.