Re:Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory
by ridewinter on Thursday July 06, 2017 @11:00AM
(#14710897)
It's more of a recognition that many-worlds actually has a physical basis to it, while the others talk about an obfuscated non-physical construction.
Re:Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory
by jerf on Thursday July 06, 2017 @11:13AM
(#14710998)
"Many worlds has a physical basis to it" has no physics-meaning that I can discern. In order to have one, it would have to deviate from the other isomorphisms and cease to be an isomorphism, and thus somehow be testable, which it isn't. (My previous post is word salad to some extent too, since I'm jamming it into an HN post. But the core insight there is basically, let the math be the math and stop imposing your globally-based ideas on the local world.)
It would have a "physical basis" to it if you could visit the alternatives somehow, in which case they could be demonstrated to physically exist and all doubt would be removed. But so far that is not on offer.
Re:Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory
by raverbashing on Friday July 07, 2017 @03:51AM
(#14716809)
Pretty much. Seems that the "shut up and do the math" QM interpretation is still the important one
Personally, I actually think retrocausality, once you twist your brain around it, is another perfectly sensible option that doesn't involve multiplying the universe into a near-infinity of inaccessible, unobservable parallels. The solution in my mind is that retrocausality actually isn't; what it means instead is that what "the present" is is even less like what you thought it was, and is even more of a partial order than relativity already told us it was. The answer to the "double-slit" experiment, to my mind, is that there simply isn't a "before" and "after" and some sort of "retrocausal self-interference" of the wave... the whole thing is simply one atomic event that doesn't have a before and an after, and your imposition of a temporal order on the events is much simplified from the reality. The mystery lies in your attempt to impose a global temporal order, which is appropriate enough at scale, onto a single local event where it doesn't apply in the way you expect. The results of the double-slit experiment itself is not that mysterious, merely counterintuitive, once you release the small scale from your imposed large-scale idea of how time flows.
It means that "the present" is actually quite complicated in a quantum universe with as many qubits as ours has, but, just as QM may be counterintuitive but eventually looks classical at a large enough scale, time may in fact be massively complicated but at scale it still works as we expect.