In summary, Richard Feynman described the mystery of wave-particle duality in the double-slit experiment as impossible to explain in a classical way and the heart of quantum mechanics. The information-theoretic principle of Information Invariance & Continuity as justified by the relativity principle provides a solution to this mystery. While SR is accepted without a constructive account, the addition of gravity may require an interpretation of constraints as emergent. However, a constructive account of SR is possible within an information theoretic paradigm without the need for an ether.
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RUTA
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In Chapter 37 of “The Feynman Lectures on Physics Volume 1,” Richard Feynman famously wrote that the mystery of wave-particle duality in the double-slit experiment is:
a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by “explaining” how it works. We will just tell you how it works. In telling you how it works we will have told you about the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics.
In this Insight, I want to show you how Brukner and Zeilinger’s information-theoretic principle of Information Invariance & Continuity as justified by the relativity principle solves this mystery. In How Quantum...


[url="https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/how-quantum-information-theory-solves-the-only-mystery-of-quantum-mechanics/"]Continue reading...
 
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RUTA said:

I like the treatise and distinction between constructive or principal methods but...

"No one disputes what the postulates of SR are telling us about Nature, even though there is still today no constructive account of time dilation and length contraction, i.e., there is no “interpretation” of SR. Indeed, every introductory physics textbook introduces SR via the relativity principle and light postulate without qualifying that introduction as somehow lacking an “interpretation.” With few exceptions, physicists have come to accept the principles of SR without worrying about a constructive counterpart."

In SR the symmetries between intertial observers are not explained, they are used as a constraint or tool to help find the correct theory of interactions - given the spacetime. This seems very reasonable all the way up to QFT, so I think this is why it isn't required to be "interpreted".

But when one adds gravity, it's not clear if it makes sense to consider some spacetime as a given background. We then needs find/explain both the correct spacetime, and the correct theory of interactions in such dynamic spacetime. Then the principal arguments that works within the classical spacetime, doesn't have the same power. So taking these same constraints as constructing principles for a unified theotry including gravity, is at least not obvious. So some sort of "interpretation" of the former constraints then indirectly enters the picture. Can "constraints" be emergent? what would that mean, conceptually?

But I think a constructive account of SR, doesn't need to involve strange ether arguments or so, I think it could be possible still within an information theoretic paradigm, where spacetime is still "relations" encoded in the parts(agents, observer, matter), so no "ether filling space" seems conceptually required for such a constructive account. But it's of course a fact that we still lack this.

/Fredrik
 

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