xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse
xkcd 3134: Wavefunction Collapse
Title text:
Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.
Transcript:
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Source: https://xkcd.com/3134/
you don't have a soul, but the particle detector does
Superdeterminism FTW; it makes the same predictions as all other quantum interpretations, but makes me feel good about the universe (e.g. doesn't have this wavefunction collapsing from observations weirdness), so I stick to it. I may be slightly autistic.
Nothing has driven my desire to learn physics more than the urge to get rid of all the randomness in it. It's bloody irksome.
My issue with the orthodox interpretations is not that they are random but that they contain miracles. This was John Bell's original criticism that people seem to have forgotten. The Copenhagen interpretation says that there is a quantum world until you measure it, then a miracle happens, and you have a classical result, but it does not tell you at all how this process actually works. The Many Worlds Interpretation, which is the second most popular, just denies that the classical world made up of observable particles in 3D space where experiments actually have outcomes actually even exist and posits it's a grand illusion created by the conscious mind, but also cannot explain how this illusion can possibly come about and just vaguely gestures to it having something to do with consciousness. They just punt the miracle over to neuroscience and ultimately do not answer anything either. A lot of people think Einstein wasn't the biggest of quantum mechanics due to the randomness, but if you actually read his works, he was clear the issue was that it does not give you a coherent complete picture of reality, so he just thought it was incomplete, an approximation of a more fundamental theory that we have yet to discover.
Quantum Mechanics doesn’t have to be random. Look up bohmian quantum mechanics which is a fairly simple hidden variable model and is deterministic.
Well, there's not really any randomness, we just can't ever have enough data to determine exactly what will happen. Which is why we have the Uncertainty Principle. If we both had a functioning Grand Unified Theory and total knowledge of all the particles in a system, we could simulate what would happen in the system with perfect accuracy.
Superdeterminism to me is the worst. It basically means the Universe looks the way it does because it just is. Like it's not because particles move, interact, based on a set of fundamental laws and that ultimately gives rise to the universe we see. No, superdeterminism means there's no rules, the universe is just made like this. Every particle is meticulously put into place to make it look as if there are physical laws, like a grand conspiracy.
It's kinda like last-Tuesdayism.
That's not really related to the idea of superdeterminism. Superdeterminism literally just posits that the choice on which experiments are to be performed is determined by the same universe and its rules as the outcome of those experiments. The universe still has an initial state and a set of laws it obeys, it just does so deterministically.
You are part of the wavefunction. There is no collapse, just entanglement.
I'm just going to leave this here: Wigner's friend.
In Timelike Infinity, there's a group following that logic through to its conclusion, committing a bit of terrorism on the galactic scale to make Ultimate Observer-senpai notice them from the end of time and the universe.
Batshit insane, 10/10, one of Baxter's tamer plotlines.
Isn’t it lawful neutral chaotic
This reminds me of this old hacker koan:
Well it'll work, until the unfixed root cause break the machine again.
what if the root cause was some system variable, which got reset on boot and never happens again (for example some code you wrote accidentally triggered lower voltage for your cpu, and you have hitches)
Just ask Tom to reboot it again.
You don't really know it will cause it to break again with no understanding of what is going on.