Timeline for Is the universe fundamentally deterministic?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 5, 2018 at 21:35 | comment | added | Nimrod | It's either mechanically deterministic with initial conditions of which we are ignorant (representing all of the non-determinism) or it is actually mechanically non-deterministic. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 17:30 | comment | added | Christopher King | @nervxxx in the quantum eraser, you are essentially unentangling things; is this right? | |
| Nov 14, 2013 at 23:29 | history | edited | Alex A | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
deleted 97 characters in body
|
| Nov 14, 2013 at 10:19 | comment | added | Jess Riedel | Other good references for understanding what decoherence can and cannot say about the measurement problem: Schlosshauer, Zurek. (That second one was my advisor.) | |
| May 18, 2013 at 8:02 | comment | added | nervxxx | Consider a system of radioactive atoms that decay. while decay rates can be calculated from QM, a reasonable classical model would simply be that each atom has some probability of decaying i.e. given by the half-life. I can't tell you which atom is going to decay precisely at what time, only that at some time later I can predict I will get roughly a certain number of radioactive atoms left. So it seems indeterminism also exists in the classical picture..? | |
| May 18, 2013 at 7:58 | comment | added | nervxxx | transformations, but in practice it's hard. anyway, in quantum decoherence (which i assume is the topic of the book you listed), there is no need for the idea of wavefunction collapse at all. It is simply not physical. Thus indeterminism of QM should not be attributed to this non-physical process of wf collapse (kind of like how results in QFT should not depend on the non-physical regulator or cutoff). Instead, indeterminism of QM is simply because the theory is probabilistic in nature. And in fact, you don't really need to invoke QM to see this indeterminism. | |
| May 18, 2013 at 7:54 | comment | added | nervxxx | I would argue that the idea of wavefunction collapse is just a tool to sweep things under the rug. A wavefunction only appears to collapse if you fixate your attention to one subsytem of the full system. But a measurement necessarily involves entangling the measured system and the measuring system, and in the process simply spreads the coherence from the initial state over both systems. There is no loss of information, as the wavefunction collapse picture would seem to imply - it's just that it's quite hard to unentangle the two systems. theoretically it's possible by some sequence of unitary | |
| May 8, 2013 at 19:14 | comment | added | BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft | @Walkerneo: According to the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, it does mean the universe is non-deterministic. There are other interpretations of QM which allow for determinism though. Which is the correct interpretation (if any)? Currently, no one knows. | |
| May 8, 2013 at 16:21 | comment | added | mowwwalker | Does this necessarily mean that the universe isn't deterministic though? Doesn't this just affect what we can determine based on what we can observe? | |
| May 8, 2013 at 14:46 | history | answered | Alex A | CC BY-SA 3.0 |