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Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by bawolff on Thursday October 20, 2022 @02:17AM (#33271434)
I don't understand what the thesis of this article is.

What is quantum monism? what is the soul of physics? Why does the soul of physics need saving? What does it need saving from?

After reading this article i still have no idea. Did this make sense to anyone else? Am i just dense?

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by Schiphol on Thursday October 20, 2022 @02:49AM (#33271590)
>the soul of science [is] the conviction that there is a unique, comprehensible and fundamental reality.

>According to quantum monism, the fundamental layer of reality is not made of particles or strings but the universe itself—understood not as the sum of things making it up but rather as a single, entangled quantum state.

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by joe-collins on Thursday October 20, 2022 @03:22AM (#33271758)
That sounds rather similar to superdeterminism.
Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by texaslonghorn5 on Thursday October 20, 2022 @03:26AM (#33271785)
Not really, superdeterminism postulates that the measurement outcomes are guaranteed.

Here, you could imagine the universe as being operated on by some giant Hamiltonian operator with a basis of eigenstates, and then the amplitudes will just deterministically evolve according to the Schrödinger equation. But the amplitudes only reveal information about probabilities of measurement, not measurement outcomes themselves.

[How such a measurement could occur (coming from outside this universe system) isn't physically clear to me but isn't relevant either.]

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by bawolff on Thursday October 20, 2022 @04:32AM (#33272126)
How is this not begging the question? "The universe is the universe" is not a satisying answer to, well, any question really.
Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by slowmovintarget on Thursday October 20, 2022 @05:50AM (#33272541)
It is not expressing a tautology, it is saying the universe is a single quantum field. Basically, a single coordinate in some Hilbert space.
Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by bawolff on Thursday October 20, 2022 @06:00AM (#33272574)
And the consequences of that are what precisely? For that matter, what would the consequences be if it wasn't true?
Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by ur-whale on Thursday October 20, 2022 @06:22AM (#33272695)
>It is not expressing a tautology, it is saying the universe is a single quantum field

Probably should have said that, then.

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by slowmovintarget on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:14AM (#33273474)
Well... it did. I couldn't distinguish quantum monism from Everettianism with my lay-person's understanding of the physics. I've gobbled up Sean Carroll's Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series on YouTube, and read his popular books on the matter, but that's the extent of my knowledge.
Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by mxkopy on Thursday October 20, 2022 @07:07AM (#33272947)
X = X doesn’t seem to be either, but it took some thousands of years for us to grasp the ramifications of such a statement