Comment #231
December 8th, 2023 at 5:57 am
After watching the interview, I decided to read Feynman’s
Simulating Physics with Computers from June 1982. Wow, I didn’t expect that he would spend so much time talkling about
negative probabilities (and even less that this predates his longer exposition from 1987). Looks like when it comes to interpretations of quantum mechanics, Feynman is on the “let’s try to better understand quantum mechanics” (and especially how its “probabilities” differ from probabilities) side
we always have had a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that quantum mechanics represents. At least I do, because I’m an old enough man that I haven’t got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me. Okay, I still get nervous with it. And therefore, some of the younger students … you know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there’s no real problem. It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m note sure there’s no real problem. So that’s why I like to investigate things. Can I learn anything from asking this question about computers–about this may or may not be mystery as to what the world view of quantum mechanics is?
and not so much on the many-worlds side
There are all kinds of questions like this, and what I’m trying to do is to get you people who think about computer-simulation possibilities to pay a great deal of attention to this, to digest as well as possible the real answers of quantum mechanics, and see if you can’t invent a different point of view than the physicists have had to invent to describe this. In fact the physicists have no good point of view. Somebody mumbled something about a many-world picture, and that many-world picture says that the wave function ψ is what’s real, and damn the torpedos if there are so many variables, NR. All these different worlds and every arrangement of configurations are all there just like our arrangement of configurations, we just happen to be sitting in this one. It’s possible, but I’m not very happy with it.
And that is basically what I wanted to learn from reading it, namely whether this close connection between MWI and QC was there already before David Deutsch.