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Most of these things are misunderstandings of quantum mechanics, as we know it today. The main thing that is at the root of all of them is the word "things". I
by simiones 1y ago
Most of these things are misunderstandings of quantum mechanics, as we know it today.
The main thing that is at the root of all of them is the word "things". In QM, the ground truth of the world is the wavefunction of the system. The wavefunction assigns some amplitude (potentially 0) to any possible state of the system that it describes. It then evolves purely deterministically from past to future, according to Schrodinger's equation (or Dirac's equation, if you want to discuss speeds close to that of light). The only kink is interaction with a measurement device (what constitutes a measurement device is one of the big mysteries that we don't yet have an answer for). After a measurement, the wavefunction collapses non-deterministically to one of the states that the measurement device was set up to detect, with a probability that is proportional to the amplitude of the wave function of that state.
Now, this is the "ground truth" of QM. Everything else, such as particles and space-time and so on are just stories we tell to make sense of the wavefunction and its behavior. Sometimes those descriptions break down, and they start assigning weird fanciful ideas, such as retrocausality etc - but these just prove that the stories are wrong, that they are misinterpreting the math of the wavefunction.
I'd also note that the main "time is weird" factoid you encounter related to QM experiments, the delayed-choice quantum eraser, is mostly a misunderstanding / sensationalization of the actual physics and the experiment. It again only proves that certain interpretations of what the wavefunction and its collapse represent are not temporally consistent, but the direct conclusion from this should be that the interpretations are wrong, not that "cause and effect goes for a toss, as behavior of time is different".
- zkmon 1y agoIf we can't even define a "thing", by identifying inside and outside of it, what it is and what it is not, where it is and where it is not, that itself a big contrast with Newtonian (human scale) mechanics. Everything one can talk about Quantum mechanics is coompletly alien to the human perceived world. That should justify the distinction by scale.