Recent content by Gary Venter

The wave function includes coordinates for position in space. For two distant but correlated particles, do their distances and paths of movement used in the wave function follow the curved space-time of general relativity, or is Euclidean distance assumed in QM?

Yes and sorry if something I said implied that QM was such. Both QM and GR have aspects that work as math but do not have any worked-out mechanisms for how the results get carried out. That's something they have in common.

Good point. I was thinking too narrowly. Both are mechanisms that can have effects. For purely predictive purposes just the math is enough but a lot of people like to be able to have a mechanism for it. That's the problem some people have with non-locality. The math works fine but there is no...

Supporting case a mentioned above. The original question seems to imply there is a problem with QM. Also related discussions of "the measurement problem" that assert that QM is not enough are part of the context for the original question..

Sorry. I was trying to get to the implications of impossible things, which is always a fraught project. Got you now. Forget what I said about what would happen if impossible things were done. I'm just saying that as long as measurements have uncertainty, as predicted by the wave function, and...

Yes. But the wave function describes a wave that stays a wave.

I thought I was just applying logic to known facts. Who are "we" by the way? Is this a committee?

Forces acting on things is standard causation, so apparently that is still operative in quantum gravity. I'm not so sure it is in general relativity. Matter does not curve space-time through the action of forces and apparently gravitational waves in GR do not require forces either. In force...

I thought it was well known that the wave equation is deterministic and that measurements always have a distribution. Is any of that new?

Are you saying we would be able to explain measurement deterministically with the wave equation even if we could measure the location of a particle with zero uncertainty? I don't follow your question. What do you mean by "this?" Are you asking if the particle still follows the wave equation does...

No. With not just better but perfect measurement with no uncertainty at all (less than 10^-billion or 10-trillion, etc. cm), we would not have the determinism of the wave equation, and would need randomness. But such measurements are physically impossible so we are always within the realm of the...

@renormalize and @Ibix answer this in terms of gravitational waves, which in quantum gravity are waves in the gravitational field. But in General Relativity, I assume that these waves are ripples in the curvature of space-time, not propagated by any force. Is that right? Is cause and effect...

A Qbit with up probability 1 - (10^-75) would most likely still produce a reading of up, so an up reading does not mean that the up probability is 1.0 to millions of decimal places. The spin detector is a physical device made of atoms. None of its surfaces are pure mathematical planes or...

There is always measurement error, so the photon does not arrive at a point, but at a distribution. Thus it still has a degree of uncertainty and there is no reason to believe that this uncertainty departs from the mathematics of the wave equation. There is no evidence of a random choice being made.

I thought our best models no longer postulated a force of gravity. Mass makes space-time curve, which produces measurements that seem like a pull of gravity, but actually agree better with experimental data. When we feel a downward pull when walking up or down a hill, that is due to acceleration...