Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Quantum Weirdness

Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by pdonis on Friday October 21, 2022 @12:26PM (#33289822)

> You can derive if from the MWI.

Not as an actual physical process, no. "Collapse" in the MWI just means that, once the "worlds" have decohered, within each "world" the wave function can be collapsed to the one that describes the measurement result observed in that "world", for purposes of predicting future results. But in the MWI this is just a mathematical convenience and doesn't correspond to anything physically happening.

In the theories being tested by the experiments described in this article, though, collapse is an actual physical process: there is only one "world". This contradicts the MWI.

> They've detected the other branches, albeit in a very indirect way.

What experiments are you referring to here?

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Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by whimsicalism on Friday October 21, 2022 @01:43PM (#33290847)

> doesn't correspond to anything physically happening

It corresponds to the inner product of the two branches of the wavefunction going to 0 due to physical phenomenon.

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Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by pdonis on Friday October 21, 2022 @01:47PM (#33290893)

That is decoherence, not collapse. Collapse, as a physical process, would be all of the branches but one ceasing to exist.

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Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by whimsicalism on Friday October 21, 2022 @01:57PM (#33291035)

Oh I misread your comment - I thought you were referring to decoherence as the mathematical convenience. Now that I see that it was collapse, definitely agree.

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