Recent content by gentzen

  1. gentzen

    Is the quantum wave function a real object or a mathematical tool?

    No, my opinion is that the number ##3+i1## is not an element of reality. And if it would occur as an entry in a density matrix? Still no, because it would only be an artifact of a specific choice of basis.
  2. gentzen

    Graduate Exploring Implicit Assumptions and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

    No, you probably don't. Only peer reviewed publications count as references here (or text-books for well-known stuff). He is asking you not to include personal speculation (like "this lock can be opened with a key called an "adiabatically variable metric"") in discussions here. If you are...
  3. gentzen

    Is the quantum wave function a real object or a mathematical tool?

    "Density Matrix Realism" by Eddy Keming Chen (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01025)
  4. gentzen

    Is the quantum wave function a real object or a mathematical tool?

    Independent of whether the wave function is real, it is certainly not an object. Just like an electric field is not an object either, despite being quite real.
  5. gentzen

    Graduate Sidney Coleman's opinion on interpretation in his Dirac lecture

    I finished browsing Albert's "Quantum Mechanics and Experience" book, and studying its last chapter "8. Self-Measurement", where his "definiteness" operator D gets discussed (even so is neither called "definiteness" operator nor abbreviated with D). The discussion is in the typical style of...
  6. gentzen

    Graduate Understanding Barandes' microscopic theory of causality

    iste is talking about Barandes' formalism. In your example, Barandes talks about the normal Hilbert space formalism of QM. This doesn't help with the unclear distinction between his (or Morbert's?) interpretation of QM and (Barandes' formulation of) the math of indivisible stochastic processes.
  7. gentzen

    Graduate Understanding Barandes' microscopic theory of causality

    I guess, the biggest contribution of Barandes' "interpretation" is that it shows just how difficult it is to convincingly "disprove" an interpretation, or at least to nicely explain why it feels really unsatisfactory (in its current form). You might think that Copenhagen and Bohmian mechanics...
  8. gentzen

    Graduate Understanding Barandes' microscopic theory of causality

    I remember that he recently switched to a new attack on BM: The local phase of the wavefunction is a gauge freedom, but the actual BM trajectories depend crucially on that local phase.
  9. gentzen

    Graduate Understanding Barandes' microscopic theory of causality

    But Barandes attacks MWI as untenable, so this can't be an excuse for him. I would have to lookup the detailed reasons for Barandes' opposition to Bohmian mechanics. I guess he went with "BM is unable to handle relativistic QFT, and especially fundamentally unable to handle fermionic fields"...
  10. gentzen

    Graduate Sidney Coleman's opinion on interpretation in his Dirac lecture

    Thanks for trying to drive this forward to closure. Your "more general version of your argument" nicely captures the reasons why However, this only convinces me that Coleman's argument is too weak, in the way he presented it. The concrete weak point is pointed out here: The problem is that...
  11. gentzen

    Graduate Sidney Coleman's opinion on interpretation in his Dirac lecture

    For "my fixed version of" Demystifier's simplified scenario, L was defined as The "more mundane measurement operators" would just measure a single classical state. For example, an operator M_{iL,nR} could be defined via M_{iL,nR} |neutral_L, neutral_R⟩ = 0 M_{iL,nR} |ionized_L, neutral_R⟩ =...
  12. gentzen

    Graduate Sidney Coleman's opinion on interpretation in his Dirac lecture

    Turns out L should be consistent with those more mundane measurement operators. They should be a simple refinement of L. (I have no opinion about D, because it feels complicated and hard to define to me.)
  13. gentzen

    Graduate Sidney Coleman's opinion on interpretation in his Dirac lecture

    The observation is just the eigenvalue and its associated eigenspace. Even so there is a state after measurement, I don't always learn that state during measurement. If there were only one eigenvector corresponding to the measured eigenvalue, then I would learn the state after measurement. But...
  14. gentzen

    Graduate Sidney Coleman's opinion on interpretation in his Dirac lecture

    Because he cares about the state of the cloud chamber, i.e. the state of the measurement apparatus. And if the possible dots constitue the measurement apparatus, then both "no dots" and "two dots" are possible results, and both have corresponding states.