Re:Thirty Years of ‘Against Measurement’
by tsimionescu on Friday December 04, 2020 @06:23PM
(#25309665)
> With the exception of gravity, the behavior of macroscopic objects is pretty well understood in a quantum sense.
The rules of motion of quantum mechanics say that particles move according to the Schrödinger equation, AND that once a particle is measured (i.e. it interacts with a macroscopic device) the particle can be found in some particular place with some probability that can be computed from the Schrodinger equation.
So QM has 2 rules of motion: one for particles which interact only with other particles (the completely deterministic Schrödinger equation) and a different one for particles interacting with macroscopic objects (the Born rule, which assigns probabilities based on the Schrodinger equation).
Exactly what counts as a macroscopic object, i.e. when the Born rule needs to be applied, is an open problem (or if there is some way to account for experimental results without this rule). Until we have some answer to this problem, I wouldn't make too many pronouncements about how QM applies to the macroscopic world.
The rules of motion of quantum mechanics say that particles move according to the Schrödinger equation, AND that once a particle is measured (i.e. it interacts with a macroscopic device) the particle can be found in some particular place with some probability that can be computed from the Schrodinger equation.
So QM has 2 rules of motion: one for particles which interact only with other particles (the completely deterministic Schrödinger equation) and a different one for particles interacting with macroscopic objects (the Born rule, which assigns probabilities based on the Schrodinger equation).
Exactly what counts as a macroscopic object, i.e. when the Born rule needs to be applied, is an open problem (or if there is some way to account for experimental results without this rule). Until we have some answer to this problem, I wouldn't make too many pronouncements about how QM applies to the macroscopic world.