Slashdot Mirror
A Boost For Quantum Reality
Eponymous Hero sends this excerpt from Nature:
"The philosophical status of the wavefunction — the entity that determines the probability of different outcomes of measurements on quantum-mechanical particles — would seem to be an unlikely subject for emotional debate. Yet online discussion of a paper claiming to show mathematically that the wavefunction is real has ranged from ardently star-struck to downright vitriolic since the article was first released as a preprint in November 2011. ... [The authors] say that the mathematics leaves no doubt that the wavefunction is not just a statistical tool, but rather, a real, objective state of a quantum system."
It certainly knows.
It knows, but you don't. You don't because you haven't measured it yet. And until you measure it, the answer is not the simplified version of the cat being dead and alive at the same time, but that there's a probability it's dead, and a probability it's alive, but it'll never be more than probability until you actually confirm it. Once you confirm it by measurement, the probability of one state goes to one, and the probability of the other state goes to zero.
This goes back to the age-old question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It certainly makes a noise, but does it make a sound?
If there's nothing to observe reality, does it still exist? That's the essence of Schrodinger's cat.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
the mathematics leaves no doubt that the wavefunction is not just a statistical tool, but rather, a real, objective state of a quantum system.
If that's the case, I would suppose that wavefunctions have wavefunctions.
Yes. That's known as second quantization.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.