Comment on Electrons are easy
bunchberry@lemmy.world 5 months agoIf you suggest every observation is an interaction then you inherently are getting into the relational interpretation. Which I am not saying you’re wrong to do so, I think it is the most intuitive way to think about things, but it is not a very popular viewpoint.
peto@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Do expand, please. It has been a while since I have studied this seriously. Do you have any examples of observations that don’t involve interacting with the system?
bunchberry@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s not what I’m saying. My point is just that observation = interaction has a lot of implications. Particles are always interacting, so if the wave function represented some absolute state of all systems, then the statement would just be incorrect because the wave function would be incapable of ever “spreading out” as it is constantly interacting with a lot of things.
The only way it can be made consistent is to then say that wave functions are not absolute things but instead describe something relative to a particular system, sort of like how in Galilean relativity you need to specify a coordinate system to describe certain properties like velocity of systems. You pick a referent object as the “center” of the coordinate system which you describe other systems from that reference frame.
You would have to treat the wave function in a similar way, as something more coordinate than an actual entity. That would explain why it can differ between context frames (i.e. Wigner’s friend), and would explain why you have to “collapse” it when you interact with something, as the context would’ve changed so you would need to “zero” it again kinda like tarring a scale.
peto@lemm.ee 5 months ago
AHH, I think I see what you have misunderstood. I am not saying all interactions are observations, rather that observations are a subset of interactions, hence uncertainty.
Furthermore I think it would be more useful to say that the wave function only collapses when it is actually necessary to the interaction rather than when it interacts with ‘us’. Unless you can provide a counterexample. Privileging observations made by humans reeks of mysticism in my opinion and is the cause of a lot of the misunderstandings about quantum physics among laypeople.
bunchberry@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Saying that observations are a special kind of interaction does seem to be privileging humans, though? What is different from measurements/observations and any other interaction?