8 ms·
Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?
- jadbox 7mo agoHow does "quantum darwinism" effectively select a state? Like how does that work in principle- what is the selection criteria.
- thyristan 7mo agoEnergy.
- jadbox 7mo agoDo you mean Energy conservation? That's interesting and would make sense as a successful evolution of pattern replications.
- goatlover 7mo agoThe article asks the same question in the last part, wondering whether it's just randomly selected. MWI proponents have always argued decoherence leads to the entire world being put into superposition as decoherence just spreads entanglement to the environment. The math never says entanglement destroys superposition beyond a certain point of complexity (many different entangled systems forming the environment). The author does say the approach is a combination of Copenhagen and MWI, removing the outlandish parts of both. Seems to preserve the randomness of the former though.
- flockonus 7mo agoRandom is a very interesting concept. In relation to nature we seem to use "random" as anything we can't or are currently unable to model. To call something random doesn't mean it's impossible to model, in fact all sorts of natural facts seemed random one day before being covered by a model. One very relatable example example is the motion of stars in the the night sky, which seemed random for ages, until the Copernican revolution. The fact we have access to random() function in programming seems to trip many people. random() is a particular model implementation of random, but stuff in nature isn't random(). My point is, using "just random" to do work in any scientific explanation is a clutch.
- staticassertion 7mo agoThere's disagreement on this. You seem to just be saying that brute facts or brute contingencies don't exist, but I suspect most scientists would disagree with that.
- Maxatar 7mo agoIn science randomness is usually used to abstract over a large number of possible paths that result in some outcome without having to reason individually about any specific path or all such paths. It does not have to mean something inherently non-deterministic or something that can't be modelled, although it certainly is the case that if something is inherently non-deterministic then it would necessarily have to be modelled randomly. Modelling things as a random process is very useful even in cases where the underlying phenomenon has a fully understood and deterministic model; a simple example of this would be chess. It's an entirely deterministic game with perfect information that is fully understood, but nevertheless all the best chess engines model positions probabilistically and use randomness as part of their search.
- srean 7mo ago> Modelling things as a random process is very useful even in cases where the underlying phenomenon has a fully understood and deterministic model Output of of a pseudorandom generater is a good example.
- Nevermark 7mo agoI am not sure why you are being downvoted. The use of "random" as explanation or characterization in science has certainly spanned everything from "we don't know", to "there is inherent indivisible physical randomness". And I would agree, in the latter case it is a crutch. A postulate that something gets decided by no mechanisms whatsoever (randomness obeying a distribution still leaves the unexplained "choice"). It is remarkable that people still suggest the latter, when the theory, both in theory and experiment, doesn't require a physical choice at all (even if we experience a choice, that experience is explained without the universe making a choice).
- Joker_vD 7mo ago> MWI proponents have always argued decoherence leads to the entire world being put into superposition as decoherence just spreads entanglement to the environment. Well, duh. It's not like classic objects actually exist, or the classical/quantum divide: everything is quantum, including the "observers". The "classical observer" is a crude approximation that breaks down to a pointy enough question. Just like shorting the perfect battery (with zero internal resistance) with a perfect wire (with zero external resistance) — this scenario is not an approximation of any possible real scenario so it's paradoxicality (infinite current!) is irrelevant.
- superposeur 7mo agoIt doesn’t. Decoherence is the technical step in the Everett picture defining what a “classical branch” even is and explaining how the state vector branches. Every claim that “Decoherence” somehow offers a distinct interpretation to Everett is pure confusion.
- Nevermark 7mo ago> None of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or that a mysterious process causes quantumness to spontaneously collapse. Actually, the "many worlds" "interpretation", simply treats the highly successful equations as meaning what they say. And it is misnamed. The field equations describe a highly interconnected "web universe" of "tangles" (what I call spans of entangled interactions) and "spangles". (My shorthand for superpositions, i.e. disjoint interactions of particles. Think of all the alternate lines leading from and two distinguishable states, like star patterns.) Basically, a graph of union and intersection relations where all combinations, individually and en masse, are determined exactly by the laws of conservation. That's an amazingly good property for a theory. And we have it. By including all consistent versions, no external information is required by the theory. It is informationally complete. A successful objective explanation. With deep experimental support that entanglement and superposition actually exist, because their interactions are easily testable. In fact, entanglement doesn't "violate" locality, it is the more general case which explains locality. Locality is just tightly coupled entanglement/interaction. Not a fundamental constraint on connections. There is no fundamental "distance", just loose and dense connections. Locality is just what we see wherever there are patterns of dense connections. They are an effect, not a constraint. Even in the classical world of large (highly tangled) objects, we take it for granted that dependent objects can separate over arbitrarily vast dimensions of space and time and yet return together. If that isn't entanglement over vast distances, what is it? It is a basic property of classical physics. Quantum mechanics reveals more subtlety in those maintained connections, including interactions between connections, but it didn't originate them. Forces disappear. They become passive in an interesting way. Histories where information cancel, leave structured distribution patterns behind, which to us look like forces. Cancellation is just information being conserved. Not an active force. But the results appear active. In a similar way to how the evolutionary umbrella seems very smart and creative, when really, it is just poorly adapted individual creatures independently cancelling themselves out blindly, leaving a distributional improvement behind. There is no additional information needed to explain the effect of quantum "collapse" because it is already explained by the fast bifurcation of disjoint tangles when lots of particles interact in an unorganized manner. It is thermodynamics being thermodynamics. Anyone attempting to invent a mechanism for "collapse" is like someone trying to explain why the spherical Earth appears "flat" by introducing additional speculative theories. Despite the spherical world theory already explaining why it looks flat locally. And the only reason to not take the experimentally verified field equations as a plain reading, is the result is "too big" for someone's imagination. Our everyday experience doesn't limit reality, despite humans having trouble with theories that reveal a bigger reality, over and over and over. Bluntly: The total field equations preserve information - that is the plain implication and guarantee for having both unions (tangles) and intersections (spangles) of interactions. Anything else requires a universal firehose of magically appearing information to choose collapses, i.e. particular interactions, in order to explain something already explained. In other words, dressed up voodoo. And by "re-complicating", uh, "re-explaining" the already explained, introduces a ridiculous new puzzle: Where does all that pervasively intrusive relentless injection of information (that determines every single extricable particle interaction!), come from? (Occam is spinning like a particle accelerator in his grave.) Saying it "Just Happens" is like someone "explaining" their pet version of a creator with "Just Is". It is a psychological non-taulogy for "Don't Ask Questions".
- lukol 7mo agoopens coat Hey kid, wanna try some superdeterminism?
- A_D_E_P_T 7mo agoThe Block Universe Theory, which relativity all but demands, makes that a pretty potent drug!
- lukol 7mo agoBut remember, don't (super)determine and drive
- AnimalMuppet 7mo ago> which relativity all but demands Hardly. Some philosophers say that. But I don't take much from philosophers reasoning about physics.
- taneq 7mo agoSuperdeterminism is just “a wizard did it” in a lab coat.
- general_reveal 7mo agoQuite frankly, Quantum is probably known or solved by a nation state (probably the United States). Similar to AI, they will release it in a safe roll out (as they deem it).
- andirk 7mo agoMaybe, but the AI we see in the mainstream today -- generative image/video/text creations and Large Language Model chatbots -- were done via non-governmental public and private companies. And a lot of the work hitting the scene loudly and somewhat prematurely. My understanding is the amount of and type of compute needed for Quantum is pretty intense, so there'd be a huge footprint from its manufacturing to keep it hidden.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- borissk 7mo agoAre the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve? I don’t think so. Zurek’s Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism is thought-provoking, but it’s still speculation without broad buy-in from researchers. We might need ASI to crack these mysteries — our brains weren’t built for this kind of problem.
- wongarsu 7mo agoWhat we need are tractable experiments to test these theories. Maybe ASI can help design these. Until it can, it will just be another voice arguing for one position over another on pretty weak arguments. Right now my money would be more on human researchers finding those experiments, but even among those few are even trying
- vladms 7mo agoI think the brains of our stone age ancestors were not built for relativity either. In the end the normal sequence of generations (having children and then die at some point) offers "re-trainings" of the brains. So, besides waiting/hoping for artificial intelligence, we should continue to make (and train) children. Worked great so far.
- Noaidi 7mo ago"Thus the wave function can’t tell us what the quantum system is like before we measure it. " Nothing is a particle, all measured things are a probability that we make a certainty when we measure them. When you stop looking at things as things, but instead, see them as probabilities, it will all make sense. My hand and the beer bottle I pick up are both probabilities. Since the mind cannot navigate the world based on probabilities it turns them into certainties. Physical science is is the only way we can perceive quantum science. There is no "collapse" outside of our brains perception.
- tux1968 7mo agoWhy does a probability taste so good after work on a hot day?
- artrockalter 7mo agoIt would be interesting if most of our confusion with quantum mechanics came from treating probabilities as independent when they are actually highly correlated. I don’t really know any physics, but I’m familiar with probability and this type of problem seems to be the most common error in interpreting probabilities.
- Findeton 7mo agoI wonder how this work relates to Jacob Barandes’s indivisible stochastic processes.
- butILoveLife 7mo agoI don't have any skin in the game, but people should be aware of Induction vs Deduction. Induction had the earth at the center of the solar system and had the best calculations to predict where Mars was. Copernicus said earth was at the center, the equations were simpler, but were worse at predicting the location of planets.(until we figured out they moved in ellipses) When we say "All swans are white, because I've never seen a black swan." Its probabilistically true. That is induction. If we found swans didn't have the gene to make black feathers, that would be deduction. Deduction is probably the most true, if it is true. (But it is often 100% wrong) Induction is always semi true. Quantum mechanics seems to be in the stage of induction. Particles are like the earth at the center of the solar system. We need a Copernican revolution.
- yoyohello13 7mo agoIm fully willing to believe I just don’t “get it” but I took a pretty deep dive into quantum computing and the underlying mechanics and I kind of got the sense (with QC) that nobody really knows what they are talking about. I got this feeling so strongly that stopped studying the topic all together. I’m probably way off base and I’m probably missing some insights that I could get by going to school or something but that’s was just my experience with the subject.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 7mo ago>nobody really knows what they are talking about The mathematics of QM works extremely well. The interpretations of what the math is saying happens a varied and sometimes contradictory. We can predict what's going to happen extremely well, we just can't tell the story of what's happening. And there's been a century of trying to avoid the weirdness and failing. The problem might just be our brains evolved in a world that behaves so much differently that we can't understand.
- Terr_ 7mo agoI often observe that humans are wired to create causal stories, whether we intend to or not, even in circumstances, we know are false. A great example involves flipping a coin. Even people who know it's basically an independent 50/50 chance every time get drawn into thinking about "hot streaks" and "overdue for the opposite." It's arguably a superpower that has given us lots of agriculture and tools and technology and culture, but like hunger and obesity we can't just turn it off when it gets maladaptive.
- colechristensen 7mo agoPhilosophy calls this a "just so" explanation Humans are very good at pattern matching and explanation and that's what's given us success, but false-positive matches sometimes are the result and need to be corrected down a bit
- kikokikokiko 7mo agoTo me, the fact that quantum mechanics is intrinsically "random" and unknowable beforehand, is what makes living bearable in this universe as a sentient being. If we, two legged viruses that we are, could reach a level of understanding that could show the universe to be fully deterministic and every future state to be knowable given that you know the current states, then this human condition would be impossible to stand. I love the fact that we just can't predict the future. It's what makes existing be a good thing instead of a bad one.
- kykat 7mo agoFully agree, feels good to say that it's all just kind of random.
- patcon 7mo agoagreed! and here you go! https://thoughtforms.life/symposium-on-the-platonic-space/ https://thoughtforms.life/symposium-on-the-platonic-space/
- phacker007 7mo agoI knew you were going to say that.
- lukol 7mo ago#1: You do not want randomness. You may believe you do until the Titanic crashes into your front yard and your significant vanishes into thin air. You want quite a lot of predictability, up to a degree where it might not even matter if things at the lowest level of existence are not perfectly deterministic. #2: What's so bad about thinking about life as an exciting rollercoaster ride? The tracks are laid but the ride is still fun.
- kikokikokiko 7mo agoIf everything is deterministic, i.e. determined, there's no free will, so you/I are just a NPC. I prefer to live in a universe where my conscious decisions matter, or at least can't be predicted beforehand.
- anotherpaulg 7mo agoZurek published a book about Quantum Darwinism about a year ago. It is a text book, not a popular treatment, but it is quite a good read. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decoherence-and-quantum-darwinism/E851B8F658044E4BF549AAEEB7B47B37 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decoherence-and-quantum...
- scotty79 7mo ago> How, for example, are we supposed to think about the domain in which all possibilities still exist before decoherence? How “real” is it? The quantum function is the real object. Little balls we like to imagine the particles as are just perception of quantum functions very narrowed down by entangling with macroscopic objects. The way we measure anything is through the entanglement between the measured entity and our macroscopic instruments.
- danbruc 7mo agoDo I get this right? Wave function collapse due to measurements is not real, the wave function evolves unitarily all the time. But as quantum states get amplified into the macroscopic world, superposition states are somehow amplified asymmetrically which makes it look like wavefunction collapse.
- superposeur 7mo agoYes, except for the “asymmetrically” part. In other words, Many Worlds.
- danbruc 7mo agoBut isn’t it conceivable, because the original quantum state contains probabilities of different outcomes, that one imprint might correspond to “up” and another to “down,” [...] [Zurek’s theory] predicts that all the imprints must be identical. Does this not imply that there is an asymmetry, one half of the state gets imprinted, the other half neglected? This however also raises the question about the basis, what is a superposition and what is not depends on the choice of basis. Is there a special basis just as pointer states are somehow special?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- superposeur 7mo agoThere are several layers of structure here. Indeed, as you say, Decoherence explains why certain bases are special: when a system is in a pointer basis state, it does not continue entangling with environment (or, at least, does so minimally). When a spinning particle enters a Stern-Gerlach apparatus oriented in z-direction, spin-z is the pointer basis of the system during its time in the apparatus. A spin-up or spin-down particle does not entangle with the environment, but spin +x state would quickly entangle with environment, placing environment in a superposition and "branching" the total state vector of all the stuff in the universe. Quantum Darwinism is just a refinement of this picture in which the "environment" interacting with the system is itself modeled a series of fragments (i.e. all the different photons that bounce off object). It turns out that the information about which pointer basis state the system is in (spin up or spin down) is redundantly encoded in each of these fragments. Hence, intercepting one photon that interacted with system and reveals "spin-up" (because the particle is in upper path) agrees with other photons that also bounce off object. BUT, of course, due to linearity of unitary time evolution, there is another "branch" in which spin-down was the outcome of the measurement and everyone agrees on spin-down. This is exactly the Everett picture.
- outlace 7mo agoHighly recommend looking at Jacob Barandes’ formulation of quantum mechanics as non-Markovian stochastic processes. It was the first introduction to quantum mechanics I could actually follow. https://www.jacobbarandes.com/ https://www.jacobbarandes.com/
- suhputt 7mo agomight make sense to link to the actual material you're referring to
- ur-whale 7mo ago> Highly recommend looking at Jacob Barandes’ formulation of quantum mechanics as non-Markovian stochastic processes. seconded >might make sense to link to the actual material you're referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshJyD0aWXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshJyD0aWXg In a fews sentences: the evolution of a physical system (quantum and classical) can very successfully be modeled as a stochastic process, and ... 1. state of the system is a real-valued "vector" (could be a vector of with continuous indices), or to put it another way, a "point" in state space. 2. system evolution is described by a real-valued "matrix" (matrix in quotes because it is also possibly a matrix with continuous indices), defined by the laws physics as they apply to the system 3. evolution of the system is modeled by repeatedly applying the matrix to the system (to the vector), possibly with infinitesimal steps. The major discovery Jacob made is that, historically, folks working on stochastic processes had restricted themselves to studying "markovian" stochastic processes, where the transformation matrix has specific mathematical properties, and this fails to be able to properly model QM. Jacob removes the constraint that the matrix should obey markovian constraints and lands us in an area of maths that's woefully unexplored: non markovian stochastic processes. The net result though: you can model quantum mechanics with simple real-valued probabilities and do away entirely with the effing complex numbers. The whole thing is way more intuitive than the traditional complex number based approach. Jacob also apparently formally demonstrates that his approach is equivalent to the traditional approach. Really worth taking a read/listen at.
- 7mo ago
- Veedrac 7mo agoMaybe I am just out of my depth, but I don't understand what problem quantum Darwinism is solving. The Schrödinger equation already explains why observers seem to agree: the ones that don't are separated from each other. This article is making some pilot-wave-like claim on top of quantum Darwinism that while the Schrödinger equation is real, all the 'real realness' exists in some pointer to a specific location inside it. Why does it do this? Where does this claim come from? At least collapse theories allow that the thing the Schrödinger equation is modelling is actually real up until the part God gets out his frustum culler.
- anon291 7mo agoI think the claim is this: the wave function never collapses. However, the effect of the wave function on the environment quickly converges to only one of the two states. We could not know the difference because we cannot directly observe the wave function. We only can see the result as it is magnified onto a macro scale by our observation equipment (or, lacking that, our eyes, which themselves turn a tiny microscopic phenomenon into macro signals). Once that particular outcome has been 'selected' for, the probability of the other outcome quickly becomes vanishingly small very fast. Thus, all future outcomes are that outcome, even though the underlying reality is still that fully entangled state. Photons (and other objects that seem to behave 'quantumly') do not seem subject to this (and thus we can use them to understand quantum behavior) because they have particular properties wherein their behavior is not as affected by these macroscopic drop-offs quite as badly.
- Veedrac 7mo agoMy confusion is that this is just Many Worlds / the Schrödinger equation, and Quantum Darwinism doesn't seem to add anything that wasn't already obvious by inspection. But after reading more, I think that's kind of the point? It's ultimately just an argument for why the Schrödinger equation produces these locally classical regions, plus a bunch of overly flowery prose and dressing up in invented jargon that can mostly be ignored. I think the article failed to ignore that second part and ended up confused.
- kordlessagain 7mo agoI've been noodling on this: https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/das-eimerargument https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/das-eimerargument
- chiengineer 7mo ago[dead]
- cpncrunch 7mo agoHere is an earlier article which explains it better: https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-darwinism-an-idea-to-explain-objective-reality-passes-first-tests-20190722/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-darwinism-an-idea-to-... I feel that it really just gives an explanation of decoherence, but doesnt offer any testable hypothesis for darwinian pruning and collapse to pointer states.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- taegee 7mo agoBetteridge's law of headlines -.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- lo_zamoyski 7mo agoOne interpretation that isn't well known is Aristotelian. Robert Koons at UT Austin has published work recently on the subject. [0] https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/prime_matter_and_quantum_dialogoi.pdf https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/prime_matter_... [1] https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/hyl_esc_acpq_17_koons.pdf https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/hyl_esc_acpq_... [2] https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/koons_the_many_worlds_interpretation_of_qm-_a_hylomorphic_critique_and_alternative.pdf https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/koons_the_man... [3] https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/ejps_quantum_powers.pdf https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/ejps_quantum_...