Re:Quantum observers with knowledge of quantum mechanics bre...
by ColanR on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @04:08PM
(#18027301)
To satisfy my own curiosity, do you have a source on that issue with the Everett interpretation? I'd love to read up on what you were talking about in that second paragraph.
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Re:Quantum observers with knowledge of quantum mechanics bre...
by ummonk on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @04:18PM
(#18027367)
I don't have a summary offhand that would be better than anything you can Google up, but this post by Sean Carroll explains the issue and details one possible answer: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/07/24/why-prob...
Re:Quantum observers with knowledge of quantum mechanics bre...
by amluto on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @04:19PM
(#18027378)
I don’t have a real source, but the basic problem is somewhat straightforward. Suppose I have a particle in the state |0> + |1>. (I’m ignoring overall normalization.). After the measurement, the state is (|0>|I measured 0>) + (|1>|I measured 1>). This is a pure (deterministic) state.
It would be nice to say that there’s a 50% chance that I measured 0, but how exactly do you get that in a rigorous way from the state vector above?
To make everything complicated, the answer should not treat the experimenter part of the universe specially.
Re:Quantum observers with knowledge of quantum mechanics bre...
by monktastic1 on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @07:11PM
(#18028395)
Your second state is only pure if no information has leaked into the environment. The chance of a human-sized object measuring a state without any stray photons or air molecules interacting is basically zero.
As for why 50%, why not the Born rule? Or are you asking how we derive the Born rule?
Re:Quantum observers with knowledge of quantum mechanics bre...
by amluto on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @08:11PM
(#18028678)
> Your second state is only pure if no information has leaked into the environment.
Not true in a many-worlds model. The “I measured” part is intended to account for the environment, at least initially.
> Or are you asking how we derive the Born rule?
More or less. In a many-worlds interpretation, there is no Born rule per se. I’m saying it’s not entirely trivial to recover the statistics that the Born rule would give.