Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

jadbox

How does "quantum darwinism" effectively select a state? Like how does that work in principle- what is the selection criteria.

Nevermark

> None of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or that a mysterious process causes quantumness to spontaneously collapse. Actually, the "many worlds" "interpretation", simply treats the highly successful equations as meaning what they say. And it is misnamed. The field equations describe a highly interconnected "web universe" of "tangles" (what I call spans of entangled interactions) and "spangles". (My shorthand for superpositions, i.e. disjoint interactions of particles. Think of all the alternate lines leading from and two distinguishable states, like star patterns.) Basically, a graph of union and intersection relations where all combinations, individually and en masse, are determined exactly by the laws of conservation. That's an amazingly good property for a theory. And we have it. By including all consistent versions, no external information is required by the theory. It is informationally complete. A successful objective explanation. With deep experimental support that entanglement and superposition actually exist, because their interactions are easily testable. In fact, entanglement doesn't "violate" locality, it is the more general case which explains locality. Locality is just tightly coupled entanglement/interaction. Not a fundamental constraint on connections. There is no fundamental "distance", just loose and dense connections. Locality is just what we see wherever there are patterns of dense connections. They are an effect, not a constraint. Even in the classical world of large (highly tangled) objects, we take it for granted that dependent objects can separate over arbitrarily vast dimensions of space and time and yet return together. If that isn't entanglement over vast distances, what is it? It is a basic property of classical physics. Quantum mechanics reveals more subtlety in those maintained connections, including interactions between connections, but it didn't originate them. Forces disappear. They become passive in an interesting way. Histories where information cancel, leave structured distribution patterns behind, which to us look like forces. Cancellation is just information being conserved. Not an active force. But the results appear active. In a similar way to how the evolutionary umbrella seems very smart and creative, when really, it is just poorly adapted individual creatures independently cancelling themselves out blindly, leaving a distributional improvement behind. There is no additional information needed to explain the effect of quantum "collapse" because it is already explained by the fast bifurcation of disjoint tangles when lots of particles interact in an unorganized manner. It is thermodynamics being thermodynamics. Anyone attempting to invent a mechanism for "collapse" is like someone trying to explain why the spherical Earth appears "flat" by introducing additional speculative theories. Despite the spherical world theory already explaining why it looks flat locally. And the only reason to not take the experimentally verified field equations as a plain reading, is the result is "too big" for someone's imagination. Our everyday experience doesn't limit reality, despite humans having trouble with theories that reveal a bigger reality, over and over and over. Bluntly: The total field equations preserve information - that is the plain implication and guarantee for having both unions (tangles) and intersections (spangles) of interactions. Anything else requires a universal firehose of magically appearing information to choose collapses, i.e. particular interactions, in order to explain something already explained. In other words, dressed up voodoo. And by "re-complicating", uh, "re-explaining" the already explained, introduces a ridiculous new puzzle: Where does all that pervasively intrusive relentless injection of information (that determines every single extricable particle interaction!), come from? (Occam is spinning like a particle accelerator in his grave.) Saying it "Just Happens" is like someone "explaining" their pet version of a creator with "Just Is". It is a psychological non-taulogy for "Don't Ask Questions".

lukol

opens coat Hey kid, wanna try some superdeterminism?

general_reveal

Quite frankly, Quantum is probably known or solved by a nation state (probably the United States). Similar to AI, they will release it in a safe roll out (as they deem it).

borissk

Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve? I don’t think so. Zurek’s Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism is thought-provoking, but it’s still speculation without broad buy-in from researchers. We might need ASI to crack these mysteries — our brains weren’t built for this kind of problem.

Noaidi

"Thus the wave function can’t tell us what the quantum system is like before we measure it. " Nothing is a particle, all measured things are a probability that we make a certainty when we measure them. When you stop looking at things as things, but instead, see them as probabilities, it will all make sense. My hand and the beer bottle I pick up are both probabilities. Since the mind cannot navigate the world based on probabilities it turns them into certainties. Physical science is is the only way we can perceive quantum science. There is no "collapse" outside of our brains perception.

artrockalter

It would be interesting if most of our confusion with quantum mechanics came from treating probabilities as independent when they are actually highly correlated. I don’t really know any physics, but I’m familiar with probability and this type of problem seems to be the most common error in interpreting probabilities.

yoyohello13

Im fully willing to believe I just don’t “get it” but I took a pretty deep dive into quantum computing and the underlying mechanics and I kind of got the sense (with QC) that nobody really knows what they are talking about. I got this feeling so strongly that stopped studying the topic all together. I’m probably way off base and I’m probably missing some insights that I could get by going to school or something but that’s was just my experience with the subject.

kikokikokiko

To me, the fact that quantum mechanics is intrinsically "random" and unknowable beforehand, is what makes living bearable in this universe as a sentient being. If we, two legged viruses that we are, could reach a level of understanding that could show the universe to be fully deterministic and every future state to be knowable given that you know the current states, then this human condition would be impossible to stand. I love the fact that we just can't predict the future. It's what makes existing be a good thing instead of a bad one.

anotherpaulg

Zurek published a book about Quantum Darwinism about a year ago. It is a text book, not a popular treatment, but it is quite a good read. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decoherence-and-quantum...

scotty79

> How, for example, are we supposed to think about the domain in which all possibilities still exist before decoherence? How “real” is it? The quantum function is the real object. Little balls we like to imagine the particles as are just perception of quantum functions very narrowed down by entangling with macroscopic objects. The way we measure anything is through the entanglement between the measured entity and our macroscopic instruments.

danbruc

Do I get this right? Wave function collapse due to measurements is not real, the wave function evolves unitarily all the time. But as quantum states get amplified into the macroscopic world, superposition states are somehow amplified asymmetrically which makes it look like wavefunction collapse.

outlace

Highly recommend looking at Jacob Barandes’ formulation of quantum mechanics as non-Markovian stochastic processes. It was the first introduction to quantum mechanics I could actually follow. https://www.jacobbarandes.com/

Veedrac

Maybe I am just out of my depth, but I don't understand what problem quantum Darwinism is solving. The Schrödinger equation already explains why observers seem to agree: the ones that don't are separated from each other. This article is making some pilot-wave-like claim on top of quantum Darwinism that while the Schrödinger equation is real, all the 'real realness' exists in some pointer to a specific location inside it. Why does it do this? Where does this claim come from? At least collapse theories allow that the thing the Schrödinger equation is modelling is actually real up until the part God gets out his frustum culler.

kordlessagain

I've been noodling on this: https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/das-eimerargument

chiengineer

Any experts or professionals willing to check out my new quantum project Born after 1 hour of prompting back and forth learning all I can about quantum Then came up with this idea https://github.com/zerocool26/Quantum-Observability-Contract...

cpncrunch

Here is an earlier article which explains it better: https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-darwinism-an-idea-to-... I feel that it really just gives an explanation of decoherence, but doesnt offer any testable hypothesis for darwinian pruning and collapse to pointer states.