Timeline for Is the Copenhagen interpretation falsifiable?
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12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 9, 2018 at 8:22 | comment | added | S. McGrew | Decoherence is an interesting and debatable concept. It could easily be interpreted simply as spreading-out of entanglement due to interactions, such that if the whole system is taken into account, there is no gain or loss of information. | |
| Mar 9, 2018 at 6:24 | comment | added | The_Sympathizer | statistically totally infeasible, but nonetheless that doesn't mean there might not still be a possibility of detecting a discrepancy. So it's not necessarily a very good test but it's a test that in theory could falsify one in favor of another. (This also wouldn't distinguish one specific interpretation from another, e.g. Copenhagen vs. another collapse interpretation or MWI vs Bohm but would distinguish collapse vs. non-collapse interpretations) | |
| Mar 9, 2018 at 6:23 | comment | added | The_Sympathizer | In particular, when you introduce collapsing interpretations you are changing the dynamic laws because you are adding the notion that on measurement the dynamics is discontinuous, whereas in non-collapsing interpretations you have a continuous law (Schrodinger) only . And wouldn't that theoretically make a difference? The probability distributions for subsequent measurements will be based on a chopped wavefunction in one case and one that is not chopped in another. Of course one could argue that the when-time of the disappearance is suitably late post-measurement as to make it | |
| Mar 9, 2018 at 6:20 | comment | added | The_Sympathizer | happens early enough (i.e. before it is suitably "mature", that is, before the branches have become suitably widely separated), then it could potentially produce a detectable alteration in the statistics for repeated close-in-time measurements due to altered interference patterns with future waves (gone in Copenhagen and other collapse style interpretations, persistent in MWI, Bohm, etc.)? | |
| Mar 9, 2018 at 6:18 | comment | added | The_Sympathizer | In particular, in all these interpretations measurement devices decohere to superpositions of simple classic states corresponding to their discrete set of possible outcomes ("pointer states"), since the decoherence is part of the Schrodinger equation itself and not any interpretation, but only in some interpretations is there an elimination of other branches of the device (namely Copenhagen) at some unspecified point in time, whereas in others those branches persist. Though decoherence means they eventually stop interfering, isn't it possible that if the elimination of the alternative waves | |
| Mar 9, 2018 at 6:14 | comment | added | The_Sympathizer | However, I've heard some ideas that suggest something to the effect of (if I remember right) that the discontinuous changes in wave functions imagined by the Copenhagen interpretation might have an effect on subsequent measurements versus other interpretations like many-worlds, Bohm, etc. due to possible interference effects between other branches that are cut out (which may be very subtle, and/or require very close subsequent measurements to pick out so the empty waves are still close to each other) so would not happen in Copenhagen but would in many worlds.What is the status of these claims? | |
| Mar 8, 2018 at 19:50 | comment | added | lurscher | journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041013 | |
| Mar 8, 2018 at 19:46 | comment | added | lurscher | Many Interacting Worlds is a subtle way to reconstruct Bohm quantum mechanics from many classical worlds interacting by some simple pair-wise interactions, and in principle can be distinguished from the other theories | |
| Mar 8, 2018 at 16:09 | comment | added | S. McGrew | The Many Worlds interpretation feels almost believable to me - smooth and describable by continuous equations; the Copenhagen interpretation feels kind of clunky and discontinuous. But experiments, so far, are unable to distinguish between the two. | |
| Mar 8, 2018 at 16:05 | comment | added | S. McGrew | The wave equation is deterministic. The Many Worlds interpretation also is deterministic because it keeps the whole wavefunction. The Copenhagen interpretation is not deterministic because every time there is a measurement, the wavefunction is reset to exclude everything inconsistent with the outcome of the measurement. | |
| Mar 8, 2018 at 15:34 | comment | added | asmani | It "seems" to me that Ockham's Razor favors none of them. My interpretation is that the world is deterministic, and the probabilities arise from lack of enough knowledge to predict the states. Isn't this interpretation simpler? Is this also a common view among quantum scientists, I mean the determinism? | |
| Mar 8, 2018 at 15:08 | history | answered | S. McGrew | CC BY-SA 3.0 |