Recent content by bhobba

As many here, including me, do. It's not at the HS level (it's graduate or senior undergraduate level), but if you go to a library, get a hold of a copy of Ballentine - QM A Modern Development, give Chapter 8 a read. You will likely still clean a lot of things that will prevent...

It does not imply the reality of the quantum state (nor can it, since QM is wrong). See the original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3328 'Here we present a no-go theorem: if the quantum state merely represents information about the real physical state of a system, then experimental...

Not when looked at carefully. What Bohr and some other adherents did say (unecessaryily IMHO) was it was complete. That Einsten, correctly IMHO took exception to. It is a myth that Einstein thought QM incorrect - he thought it correct (as far as it went) but incomplete. This led to the...

That you must interpret QFT - not QM. Art Hobson did that in his book I referenced. While I currently advocate that interpretation, it does have issues, e.g., exactly why it is probabilistic, and even why we get single outcomes from observations. Personally, while I believe what Art wrote...

The answer is interpretation-dependent. In many worlds, for example, it is fully deterministic. Copenhagen - no. Decoherent histories (favoured by Gell-Mann and, in his final days, Feynman) sort of has a bet each way (depending on your view of 'real' and 'potentially real'): First, I...

Interestingly, Sean Carroll thinks even that is a fiction that physicists tell themselves. He thinks it emerges from something deeper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.09780 At the lay level, see the following interesting discussion. Thanks bill

A really great book that integrates it with multivariable calculus and linear algebra is: https://matrixeditions.com/5thUnifiedApproach.html Can be done after Calc BC (or equivalent, e.g., specialist math in Australia). Here in Australia, my old HS (not when I went there, but now) allows you...

I only know of Wigner's version from a comment in Ohanian's Gravitation and Space-Time. It was actually my first serious book on GR after I graduated with my math degree. It's different in approach from other books like Wald (my favourite) and MTW (it's the standard). Thanks Bill

See: https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.182.1397 It's been on my to-do list for ages to get down to my old uni library to see the proof. Getting old and disabled these days - do not even have a car anymore. Thanks Bill

It doesn't contain anything new, and nothing I haven't seen before, but as people who have been around a while know, I have a bit of a fascination with 'justifications' for Maxwell's equations. I recently came acrossss the following...

Sorry. Yes, that is the paper. Thanks for picking it up. Thanks Bill

Like many things in QM, the situation is actually more nuanced than even standard QM textbooks sometimes suggest. The so-called measurement problem is viewed by some as a pseudo-problem and nothing to worry about. By others as a deep mystery. Mathematically, we know, in ordinary...

That is what the paper I linked to examines. Thanks Bill

Love it. My definition is 'Particles are excited states of an underlying physical field, often called field quanta'. If you want to delve into the issue of what a particle is at an advanced level, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02354 Personally, a much more interesting question is the...

Von Neumann's famous writing on this in his classic text on QM never really caught on (and when I first read it, it left me scratching my head for reasons like you mention, e.g., exactly what is consciousness), but it did catch on with his good friend Wigner. However, later in life, after von...