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kote
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Einstein, champion of the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, wrote a letter to Schrodinger describing a situation where gunpowder is in a half-exploded half-stable state. This was a reductio ad absurdum argument for the incompleteness of QM, since, according to Einstein, "in reality there is just no intermediary between exploded and not-exploded."
Schrodinger reformulated this reductio ad absurdum argument against the completeness of QM as the famous cat paradox.
How is it, that 80 years later, some physicists are still using this argument against QM to support such absurd unfalsifiable ideas as the existence of infinite multiple universes?
Is it understood that holding on to the completeness of QM means that it is in principle impossible to ever come up with a better theory? Do the same people who support the idea of a unified theory or theory of everything also believe (inconsistently) in multiple universes and the completeness of QM?
Are physicists just so personally tied to the theory of QM that they would believe, with no empirical evidence, in infinite multiple universes, before admitting QM's incompleteness? Isn't it infinitely more simple to just admit, even if a better theory is epistemologically beyond our grasp, that at least in principle it could be out there?
Clearly I've missed something here. So what is it? Why can't we admit, as we have with every other probabilistic theory in history, that QM is incomplete?
Please start with your basic assumptions. I think too much confusion in QM has already come from starting at misunderstood intermediate steps. I want to understand how I'm wrong.
Schrodinger reformulated this reductio ad absurdum argument against the completeness of QM as the famous cat paradox.
How is it, that 80 years later, some physicists are still using this argument against QM to support such absurd unfalsifiable ideas as the existence of infinite multiple universes?
Is it understood that holding on to the completeness of QM means that it is in principle impossible to ever come up with a better theory? Do the same people who support the idea of a unified theory or theory of everything also believe (inconsistently) in multiple universes and the completeness of QM?
Are physicists just so personally tied to the theory of QM that they would believe, with no empirical evidence, in infinite multiple universes, before admitting QM's incompleteness? Isn't it infinitely more simple to just admit, even if a better theory is epistemologically beyond our grasp, that at least in principle it could be out there?
Clearly I've missed something here. So what is it? Why can't we admit, as we have with every other probabilistic theory in history, that QM is incomplete?
Please start with your basic assumptions. I think too much confusion in QM has already come from starting at misunderstood intermediate steps. I want to understand how I'm wrong.