Yeah, in a book for a slightly more advanced audience, it would definitely be good to include a chapter on decoherence for just the reason you state. However, this would be almost exclusively polemical -- explaining how, despite the apparently widespread belief to the contrary, decoherence does...
Some years ago now, I was a regular reader and poster here and had a lot of fun arguing about the meaning of Bell's theorem, the relative merits of different "interpretations" of QM, etc. I just popped in for the first time in a long time, and it is nice to see some familiar faces (and many new...
Unfortunately, the first thing you'll write down on your paper is "P(A..." and then you'll realize that there's trouble, since "A" here refers to the actual outcome of an experiment -- something you've said isn't part of your instrumentalist version of QM at all. How can the probabilities...
Tomorrow my regular teaching duties resume, so I won't have time to continue posting on this thread with anything like the frequency of the last week (and perhaps not at all). Thanks to all of you for the stimulating discussion. I learned about a few new things, one of which turned out to be a...
I think I do understand it. For you, QM is *merely* a mathematical algorithm for generating statistical predictions. It is not actually a *physical theory* at all. I'm not sure that's the wrong way to understand "ordinary QM". It wasn't Bohr's way, for sure. But in many respects it is more...
Yes, obviously this is a complex issue. Is the white color of the flag intrinsic in the flag, or is it somehow a relational property between the flag and my sensory apparatus, or what? All of these sorts of things are tricky and subtle and probably none of us want to get into them here! My...
Rubi... It's clear we are not on the same page here. I've basically already said, as clearly as I know how, what I think is wrong with your position. I will try here to briefly clarify some points of apparent miscommunication, but there is no point continuing to argue about the central point...
Cool. =)
Here is something else closely related to this for you and others to consider. Assuming we adopt Bell's definition of locality, and restricting our attention to the case where Alice and Bob measure along parallel axes (which is completely equivalent to the red/green balls), we have...
That last is what I (and Bohr) disagree(s) with. The individual outcomes absolutely do exist according to Copenhagen QM. They weren't *predictable* (with certainty) prior to the measurement, but once the measurement happens, one of the results *really occurs*. Yes, which one occurs is...
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that QM cannot account for the fact that something like a pointer (or a table or a cat or a planet) exists with definite properties.
You're getting lost in questions like whether/how the "cut" can be pushed around so that macroscopic stuff is...
Actually what stevendaryl wrote was exactly right. Once you conditionalize on λ (a *complete* description of the state of the balls prior to measurement) all the probabilities are either 0 or 1 since there is no fundamental randomness here according to the theory in question (which is "common...
Thanks for taking the time to do that and for sharing your comments here.
I agree that some things in the "Bell's concept..." paper are not as mathematically precise as one could wish. This is in part because it's a pedagogical paper (for physics students and teachers) and partly because I...
I have no doubt that "the theory exists" in the sense that people have written some papers about it, etc. But whether it is genuinely a "working theory" or not is a different question. To me it is telling that even you -- who raised it and apparently thinks it's a counterexample to my claims...