Recent content by stevendaryl

This actually relates to @PeterDonis claim (in another thread) that by definition, different interpretations of QM must have the same observable consequences. I think that for what's called different interpretations of QM, there actually can be different predictions, but for all practical...

Presumably, the work of showing that Bohmian mechanics is equivalent to standard QM, including the apparent collapse, is probably the same work in showing that MWI makes the same predictions as standard QM. That isn't obvious, either, because MWI doesn't have collapse, either.

My point is that it isn't trivial to show that the Bohmian model reproduces the same results as standard QM. It isn't an immediate consequence of the model's construction. The operative word here is "trivial". I'm not denying that it's true, but I am denying that it's trivially true.:wink:

The business of collapse seems to me to be an ambiguity in the application of Bohmian mechanics. The wave function in Bohmian mechanics serves double duty: (1) It provides a "quantum potential" term to the equations of motion for a particle, and (2) Its square gives the initial probability...

In my opinion the equivalence between Bohmian mechanics and standard QM is not as trivial as that. Let me take as standard QM the following recipe (I think due to Von Neumann): We describe the system we are interested in as a wave function (or more generally, a density matrix, but I'm going to...

A topic can have substance without it being a testable (or falsifiable) theory. For example: the claim that scientific theory must be falsifiable is not itself a falsifiable theory. The theory of differential equations is not falsifiable.

Just a note about “superdeterminism” versus ordinary “determinism”. It’s easy to think that there is no distinction, that superdeterminism is just determinism assumed to apply to human choices. This leads to people to think that superdeterminism is only objected to for philosophical reasons...

Yes, but that’s an important contribution. I’m just saying that there is no substance (yet) to superdeterminism.

I would also point out that superdeterminism is not a theory. It is a class of theories. I would say that there isn’t actually a superdeterministic theory on the table for consideration. Just the idea that maybe it’s worth exploring.

I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s just popularity. MWI has been around for a long time, and even though the arguments for it haven’t convinced everyone, the arguments pro and con have been offered and rebutted. I don’t think that superdeterminism is in that position. Of course, things can...

It seems to me that superdeterministic requires arbitrarily much fine-tuning. Basically, the superdeterminism loophole for EPR is that if you assume that the choices made by the experimenters (Alice and Bob) are correlated with the initial setting of the hidden variable in the twin pair, then...

I don’t understand how the ensemble interpretation of QM is an interpretation. In classical statistical mechanics, the meaning of an ensemble of systems is a collection of systems that are macroscopically identical but microscopically different. But in quantum mechanics, an electron that is in...

The original paper can be found here: http://jamesowenweatherall.com/SCPPRG/EverettHugh1957PhDThesis_BarrettComments.pdf

Everett’s original paper on what came to be known as the “Many-Worlds Interpretation” didn’t talk about branching. It talked about the state of the rest of the world relative to the state of the observer.

I don’t have an answer, but I would like to point out that there could be a “many worlds” interpretation of classical probability, as well. To simplify things, let’s assume a world that is deterministic except for one thing: There is a coin that can be flipped so tgst the outcome, heads or...