8 ms·

> What he didn't seem to realize was that the thing he was attacking me for was presented as a straw man. There's a lengthy introduction where I said, "The thin

> What he didn't seem to realize was that the thing he was attacking me for was presented as a straw man. There's a lengthy introduction where I said, "The thing I am about to tell you is clearly false, but it seems to follow logically from the things they tell you in quantum mechanics 101. Could you give me a time stamp for that? When I originally watched that video I didn't catch that, and I can't find it now going back through. I thought you were just describing the "rabbithole" and what going down and coming up taught you. So I thought you clearly understand much more about QM than most software people, but also said blatantly wrong and unsubstantiated things. And I think you are also missing Motl's final point. He gets the core idea of what you were trying to do, but thought that it made a poor presentation. > At that moment, I became totally unable to say which of his statements he made are meant seriously and which of them are ironic or statements he wants to disprove. I suppose he essentially understands those things, he just encapsulates them in a completely confused story.

lisper 9y ago
> Could you give me a time stamp for that? 5:20 "I will show you how that story can't possibly be true." 25:10 "So that is the end of step 1, I am now going to go on to step 2 and show you why the story that I have just told you can't possibly be true." 28:13 "The story I have told you up until now is in fact wrong." (And you should listen for another minute to the answer to the subsequent question." I honestly can't imagine how I could possibly have made it any clearer. If you have a constructive suggestion I'm all ears.
- thethirdone 9y ago
  I thought your original quote was direct quote which is why I was confused. If it was a direct quote I likely would have had a very different interpretation of what the presentation. I would like to give constructive criticism, but feel I still don't understand exactly what what you are trying to say in the presentation. As it stands the message you seem to be trying to convey in the presentation is that the Copenhagen interpretation leads to a contradiction. This comes from having the "clearly false result" followed by the "Copenhagen is untenable" later. But it seems like from "The thing I am about to tell you is clearly false, but it seems to follow logically from the things they tell you in quantum mechanics 101. The trick is to figure out where the flaw in the reasoning lies" that your true belief is that there is a flaw in the logic instead which changes the meaning of the presentation dramatically. So is your intent that everything after 28:00ish is completely accurate? Because that is the sense I get from it, and I think there are issues after that point. At 43:19, you say that the Copenhagen interpretation is scientifically untenable. My understanding is that all the different accepted interpretations are mathematically equivalent so if you are trying to say something true "scientifically untenable" is a very poor choice of words.
  - lisper 9y ago
    > I thought your original quote was direct quote Actually, what I actually said is more accurate than my off-the-cuff paraphrase in the above comment. There is no flaw in the reasoning. The reasoning is correct, and I say that in the presentation too. It is the premises that are false. > your true belief is that there is a flaw in the logic No. See above. > My understanding is that all the different accepted interpretations are mathematically equivalent Yes, that's true. The part of the Copenhagen interpretation that is scientifically untenable is the non-mathematical part, the part that says that there is this physical phenomenon called the collapse of the wave function which is non-unitary and outside the scope of the theory, but which causes real measurable effects (i.e. the destruction of interference). That part is demonstrably false, notwithstanding that it is a fair approximation to the truth in many interesting cases, which is the reason that it has survived as long as it has despite being demonstrably false. What is also false (and the reason I have such a bee in my bonnet about all this) is all the pedagogical baggage associated with the Copenhagen interpretation, how it's intractably weird, and no one understands it, and you shouldn't even try to understand it because you'll "go down the drain" (Feynman's words). That's all bullshit. QM is not hard to understand. The key is that measurement is just large-scale entanglement, and there are no particles. That's it. That's the big reveal. This has been know for decades. I learned it 17 years ago and it was considered old news even then. There's some evidence that Heisenberg knew it but didn't want to advance the hypothesis because there was no way to settle the question experimentally at the time. But since Bell and Aspect and Zurek (and Cerf and Adami) there is no question that it is true. It is as well established a result as any in science, and has been for decades. But for some unfathomable reason it's still controversial.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Who is opposed to the idea that measurement is entanglement?
      - lisper 9y ago
        Anyone who defends the Copenhagen interpretation. To be more precise, anyone who thinks that the "measurement problem" is still an unresolved problem, or anyone who defends the concept of "wave function collapse" as having any scientific or pedagogical merit whatsoever, except as a historical example of how science can go badly wrong. Richard Feynman would be the poster child for this point of view were he alive today. Freeman Dyson defended it to me the last time I spoke to him, but that was 20 years ago so maybe he's come around. According to a poll taken in 2013 [1] Copenhagen was the most popular interpretation among physicists. Sean Carroll apparently thinks Copenhagen is tenable [2] along with many of his commenters. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069 https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069 [2] 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...

lisper 9y ago

> Could you give me a time stamp for that? 5:20 "I will show you how that story can't possibly be true." 25:10 "So that is the end of step 1, I am now going to go on to step 2 and show you why the story that I have just told you can't possibly be true." 28:13 "The story I have told you up until now is in fact wrong." (And you should listen for another minute to the answer to the subsequent question." I honestly can't imagine how I could possibly have made it any clearer. If you have a constructive suggestion I'm all ears.

thethirdone 9y ago
I thought your original quote was direct quote which is why I was confused. If it was a direct quote I likely would have had a very different interpretation of what the presentation. I would like to give constructive criticism, but feel I still don't understand exactly what what you are trying to say in the presentation. As it stands the message you seem to be trying to convey in the presentation is that the Copenhagen interpretation leads to a contradiction. This comes from having the "clearly false result" followed by the "Copenhagen is untenable" later. But it seems like from "The thing I am about to tell you is clearly false, but it seems to follow logically from the things they tell you in quantum mechanics 101. The trick is to figure out where the flaw in the reasoning lies" that your true belief is that there is a flaw in the logic instead which changes the meaning of the presentation dramatically. So is your intent that everything after 28:00ish is completely accurate? Because that is the sense I get from it, and I think there are issues after that point. At 43:19, you say that the Copenhagen interpretation is scientifically untenable. My understanding is that all the different accepted interpretations are mathematically equivalent so if you are trying to say something true "scientifically untenable" is a very poor choice of words.
- lisper 9y ago
  > I thought your original quote was direct quote Actually, what I actually said is more accurate than my off-the-cuff paraphrase in the above comment. There is no flaw in the reasoning. The reasoning is correct, and I say that in the presentation too. It is the premises that are false. > your true belief is that there is a flaw in the logic No. See above. > My understanding is that all the different accepted interpretations are mathematically equivalent Yes, that's true. The part of the Copenhagen interpretation that is scientifically untenable is the non-mathematical part, the part that says that there is this physical phenomenon called the collapse of the wave function which is non-unitary and outside the scope of the theory, but which causes real measurable effects (i.e. the destruction of interference). That part is demonstrably false, notwithstanding that it is a fair approximation to the truth in many interesting cases, which is the reason that it has survived as long as it has despite being demonstrably false. What is also false (and the reason I have such a bee in my bonnet about all this) is all the pedagogical baggage associated with the Copenhagen interpretation, how it's intractably weird, and no one understands it, and you shouldn't even try to understand it because you'll "go down the drain" (Feynman's words). That's all bullshit. QM is not hard to understand. The key is that measurement is just large-scale entanglement, and there are no particles. That's it. That's the big reveal. This has been know for decades. I learned it 17 years ago and it was considered old news even then. There's some evidence that Heisenberg knew it but didn't want to advance the hypothesis because there was no way to settle the question experimentally at the time. But since Bell and Aspect and Zurek (and Cerf and Adami) there is no question that it is true. It is as well established a result as any in science, and has been for decades. But for some unfathomable reason it's still controversial.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Who is opposed to the idea that measurement is entanglement?
    - lisper 9y ago
      Anyone who defends the Copenhagen interpretation. To be more precise, anyone who thinks that the "measurement problem" is still an unresolved problem, or anyone who defends the concept of "wave function collapse" as having any scientific or pedagogical merit whatsoever, except as a historical example of how science can go badly wrong. Richard Feynman would be the poster child for this point of view were he alive today. Freeman Dyson defended it to me the last time I spoke to him, but that was 20 years ago so maybe he's come around. According to a poll taken in 2013 [1] Copenhagen was the most popular interpretation among physicists. Sean Carroll apparently thinks Copenhagen is tenable [2] along with many of his commenters. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069 https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069 [2] 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...