Recent content by koantum

“Things” like electrons are neither particles nor waves, and this not merely in the sense that they behave neither like traditional particles nor like traditional waves, but in the more radical sense that they lack intrinsic behavior. Classically conceived particles or waves behave the way they...

Recommended Wikibook Take a look at this Wikibook. It's far from complete, but it helps reduce the initial slope of the learning curve.

There is no such thing as matter in physics. That is to say, there is no symbol for matter in the entire formalism of physics. There is a symbol for mass, which isn't the same as matter. Basically mass and energy are the same thing, simply measured in different units. The natural units for...

http://in.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0607005 Start with the last section entitled Discussion.

And if it's interesting enough, it may get banished to the philosophy forum! :biggrin:

We had a long discussion about this. You still haven't gotten my point. Of course there is more than the algorithm. How else could there be so much stuff on my website about the ontological implications of the mathematical formalism of the theory? What I object to is the naive transmogrification...

Absolutely. They are weighted averages over possible measurement outcomes. The outcomes are real, the weights (probabilities) are real, so the expectation value has to be real. By the way, this is why the operators associated with observables are self-adjoint. The eigenvalues of operators...

MWI is what you get if you reject the symptom (the collapse postulate) without rejecting the underlying disease, which is the belief that quantum states or wave functions represent evolving instantaneous states of affairs. The time dependence of a quantum state is the dependence of an algorithm...

A universe with one particle is no universe at all. :bugeye: All positions, all momenta, are relatively defined. In a universe with only one particle there are neither positions nor momenta. And so there is no space. And so there is no universe. Besides, it is time that we learn to distinguish...

There are no interactions that don't involve measurements. :bugeye: Our description of the quantum world is entirely in terms of correlations between measurement outcomes. If two systems interact, it means that their probability distributions over the possible outcomes of possible measurements...

I expected this answer. So what are the conditions of negligibility?

And how do we know the electron is a tiny little thing? Does it have a shape? Does it have a size? :confused:

Hi Vanesch, in my previous post I just collected my thoughts on the subject; I didn’t mean they are all equally relevant to your challenge, though they certainly have a bearing on it. I just had a look at what must be your bible (I'm kidding) - The many-worlds interpretation of quantum...

Hi vanesch, let me begin by noting a few points. They may have been raised already in this thread, but if so they bear repetition. As said, there is no commutation relation for energy and time operators because there is no time operator. All measurements are ultimately position measurements...

Please lock this thread, too, ZapperZ. Once again you make me say what I didn’t. In your place I would have asked whether I think that surgery is too important to be left to the surgeons. (Of course I could then have countered that ethical issues are involved, and that surgeons are certainly...