Re:Struggles with the Continuum
by musgravepeter on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @11:23AM
(#12444134)
Together with "There are no particles, only fields" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4616) at the top of my web reading list.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
While I agree with that paper, I was unsatisfied with it. He simply hand waved away the measurement problem, which is the single largest conceptual issue with the idea that everything is waves. To be fair, he explicitly says that he will not address the measurement problem, but I think if it weren't for the measurement problem there wouldn't be any issue believing that everything is made of waves. In particular, position eigenvector collapse is what causes the appearance that things are made of localized particles, but we don't actually know how it works. We have all sorts of interpretations, none of them confirmed, and many of them nonsensical. Plug for my favorite hypothetical mechanism, Einselection. It's so boring and straightforward-ish that I think it has a good chance of being the right idea.
Aha! Thank you for this, I had forgotten that it existed!
Some further discussion is available here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12377393