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I have a particle physicist friend I asked this very question to last year. He laughed and told me that this is not something that keeps physicists up at night.
by f154hfds 5y ago
I have a particle physicist friend I asked this very question to last year. He laughed and told me that this is not something that keeps physicists up at night. After doing a fair bit of my own research and watching a lot of PBS Spacetime it does make more sense to me. Someone with more knowledge please check my understanding: Quantum Field Theory treats everything as a wave and 'particles' arise as a result of a 'collapse' of that more fundamental wave (probability distribution) as we decide to probe our uncertainty budget by getting specificity on the locality of the particle. It can also collapse of course by interacting with a combinatorial explosion of other particles (such as the back wall of the double slit experiment).
If the above is accurate I still think the collapse is a strange phenomenon that we shouldn't just take on faith (without probing deeper of course) - the disagreement between Copenhagen and Many Worlds (and the lack of a testable hypothesis) seems to indicate the collapse itself isn't well understood [1]. Many Worlds seems to have an elegant solution but it needs experiment and wasn't (and probably still isn't) 'accepted' by the overall community.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse#History_and_context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse#History...
- FeepingCreature 5y agoThere is no experiment that can settle this - collapse can be shown to exist, but it cannot be shown to not exist, just not for a particular system at a particular scale. In other words, experimenters can push the possible size of a quantum superposition upwards, but they will never be able to disprove the claim "if it were but a bit bigger, it would collapse."
- rocqua 5y agoI remember a Physics PhD who thought that 'waveform collapse' was not a transition from 'waveform' to measurement. Instead, he felt that 'measurement' was just becoming entangled with the wider world, which causes the waveform to converge to a dirac-delta distribution. Are there reasons to assume that 'random' entanglements cause the waveform to 'concentrate'? it would need to be that the probability of concentration at a given 'point' is proportional to the square magnitude of the waveform? Has this been studied?
- ajkjk 5y agoThat is the correct model of what wavefunction collapse is. And yes, there are huge amounts of research in how the effects of random entanglements -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence is the general concept.
- rocqua 5y agoVery cool, thanks!
- criddell 5y agoIf I have some system in a quantum superposition state and I simultaneously measure it in n different ways, will all n measurements produce the same result?