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To save others some time. Input 1: authors check out (PRL, Nature pubs). Not a one-off crazy posting to arXiv. Input 2: Unless this your field, I'd be surpris

To save others some time. Input 1: authors check out (PRL, Nature pubs). Not a one-off crazy posting to arXiv. Input 2: Unless this your field, I'd be surprised if you get much from the paper other than interpretation of quantum mechanics is still an active field and information theory / thermodynamics has an important role in that field. Input 3: After a few reads, I don't like the phrasing the authors put on Type-II interpretations. They say "Another class sees quantum probabilities as not directly dealing with intrinsic properties of the world but with relational experiences between an observer and the world." Another way to say it may be that it's impossible to separate observation from the intrinsic properties of the world. That is, reality is tightly bound up with observation and trying to separate the two is artificial. But I'd be happy to hear what others think about it.

danharaj 11y ago
> Another way to say it may be that it's impossible to separate observation from the intrinsic properties of the world. I think it is more parsimonious to say that there are no intrinsic properties of the world that are not relational, not that they are impossible to separate from observation. It defeats the purpose of interpretations like relational quantum mechanics to hold on to the concept of an intrinsic reality when the interpretation makes such a concept superfluous. I would say that it is impossible to disentangle the intrinsic properties of the world from observations in the same way that going north of the North Pole is impossible.
- rubidium 11y ago
  "no intrinsic properties of the world that are not relational." I like that better. Thanks!
tjradcliffe 11y ago
I agree on the phrasing issue. Both there "types" seem to require Bohr's classical observer, but as soon as you assume that observers are classical you've swept the big question under the carpet, which is, "Why is there a classical world at all?" Decoherence and similar approaches at least try to address this question, and don't fit at all well with their two-Type scheme. Or to put it another way: observers are intrinsic to reality as well as the systems under observation, and any attempt to treat them separately will fail. But this is uninteresting, because any interpretation is going to have to acknowledge this at some level (as Bohr correctly pointed out quite a long time ago.)
- n4r9 11y ago
  If you've got Many Worlds at the back of your mind there, rest assured (!) that the lead author considers it to be a Type-I interpretation See http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.04711v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.04711v1.pdf

danharaj 11y ago

> Another way to say it may be that it's impossible to separate observation from the intrinsic properties of the world. I think it is more parsimonious to say that there are no intrinsic properties of the world that are not relational, not that they are impossible to separate from observation. It defeats the purpose of interpretations like relational quantum mechanics to hold on to the concept of an intrinsic reality when the interpretation makes such a concept superfluous. I would say that it is impossible to disentangle the intrinsic properties of the world from observations in the same way that going north of the North Pole is impossible.

rubidium 11y ago
"no intrinsic properties of the world that are not relational." I like that better. Thanks!

tjradcliffe 11y ago

I agree on the phrasing issue. Both there "types" seem to require Bohr's classical observer, but as soon as you assume that observers are classical you've swept the big question under the carpet, which is, "Why is there a classical world at all?" Decoherence and similar approaches at least try to address this question, and don't fit at all well with their two-Type scheme. Or to put it another way: observers are intrinsic to reality as well as the systems under observation, and any attempt to treat them separately will fail. But this is uninteresting, because any interpretation is going to have to acknowledge this at some level (as Bohr correctly pointed out quite a long time ago.)

n4r9 11y ago
If you've got Many Worlds at the back of your mind there, rest assured (!) that the lead author considers it to be a Type-I interpretation See http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.04711v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.04711v1.pdf