The “weirdness” of QM all stems from a belief in “value indefiniteness,” which is the idea that particles have no real properties when you are not looking at them, but suddenly acquire real properties when you look. If you believe that, then the question naturally arises, at what point do they acquire real properties precisely? What does “look” even rigorously mean? This issue was first brought up by John Bell in his article “Against ‘Measurement’”. The “answers” to this always fall into one of three categories:
- “Look” just means you become aware of it. This devolves into solipsism, because other people are also made up of particles, so they would have no real properties either until you become aware of them.
- “Look” is more of a specific physical process that measuring devices do. But this is vague without rigorously and mathematically defining what this physical process is, and if you do define it, then it’s provable that no definition can be consistent with the mathematics of quantum mechanics. If we agree with the premise that “quantum mechanics is correct,” then such an approach is trivially ruled out.
- There is no “look,” systems never acquire realm, observable properties at all. But then you run into Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem. If the mathematical model never predicts that a system acquires real properties, then you can never tie it back to any real-world observation.
The “weirdness” stems from starting with an assumption that is not logically possible to make consistent in the first place and then developing dozens of “interpretations” trying to make it consistent.
Feynman’s belief in “value indefiniteness” stems from an argument he made here regarding the double-slit argument and how probabilities should add together. I made a video here explaining why his argument does not work, but you can also read John Bell’s paper here because von Neumann made a similar flawed argument and Bell gave a similar rebuttal to it.
If you just drop off “value indefiniteness” as an assumption, which has no justification for it in the academic literature, then all the quantum woo around quantum mechanics disappears, and the arguments over interpretations like Copenhagen or Many Worlds or QBism simply become superfluous.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I can do (some of) the maths, but I definitely can’t explain why any of it is like that, or how it works.
minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world 3 days ago
We all end up looking at cats in boxes pictures on the internet whenever we start to try to understand oh wow this cat is funny.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
You know what, i keep thinking that maybe, our universe is the only universe that actually functions. Like, if the universe was in some different way, it either wouldn’t work and we would therefore not exist to observe it, or it would be equivalent to this universe, i.e. maybe not exactly equal, but similar in some way, sothat we could form abstractions and arrive at the same universal laws that we have today.
ranzispa@mander.xyz 3 days ago
I can tell a piece of software to do the maths for ms. Sometimes the results appear to work with reality.
People complain about LLMs hallucinating, but they have no idea of how many assumptions and just plain “everybody does it this way, I guess it works” are there in scientific research.
ptu@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
It’s called the heuristic method and those doing it know the limitations. Whereas LLMs will just confidently put out garbage claiming it true.
ranzispa@mander.xyz 3 days ago
Scientific calculations - and other approaches as well - put out garbage all the time, that is the main point of what I said above.
Some limitations are known, just like it is known that LLMs have the limitation of hallucinating.
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 3 days ago
The different domain though. LLM hallucinations may lead to catastrophe, while assuming infinite mass of an electron in absence of electromagnetic field is neat
ranzispa@mander.xyz 3 days ago
Calculations will happily tell you that an acutely toxic drug is the best way to cure cancer.
The reason why that does not lead to catastrophe is that there are many checks and safety nets in place in order not to blindly trust any result.
The exact same approach can be applied to an LLM.
Naz@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I like watching it in action. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but it gives me a strange kind of peace, and if you stare at it long enough, you trick yourself into thinking that it makes some kind of sense.