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Need the struggle to reconcile classical with quantum mechanics end in science’s assisted suicide?

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soap bubbles/Timothy Pilgrim

From some thoughts on by Peter Woit at :

Part of the problem with this good vs. evil story is that, as the book itself explains, it’s not at all clear what the “Copenhagen interpretation” actually is, other than a generic name for the point of view the generation of theorists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Wigner and von Neumann developed as they struggled to reconcile quantum and classical mechanics. They weren’t solipsists with poor reasoning skills, but trying to come to terms with the extremely non-trivial and difficult problem of how the classical physics formalism we use to describe observations emerges out of the more fundamental quantum mechanical formalism. They found a workable set of rules to describe what the theory implied for results of measurements (collapse of the state vector with probabilities given by the Born rule), and these rules are in every textbook. …

As usual these days, the alternative to Copenhagen being proposed is a simplistic version of Everett’s “Many Worlds”: the answer to the measurement problem is that the multiverse did it. The idea that one would also like the measurement apparatus to be described by quantum mechanics is taken to be a radical and daring insight. The Copenhagen papering over of the measurement problem by “collapse occurs, but we don’t know how” is replaced by “the wavefunction of the universe splits, but we don’t know how”. Becker pretty much ignores the problems with this “explanation”, other than mentioning that one needs to explain the resulting probability measure. More.

Get used to it The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide and the proponents do not intend to allow adherents a means of coming back.

See also: Peter Woit: 15th anniversary of multiverse mania, “a concerted attack on conventional notions of science”

and

The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

Comments
In corollary to ppolish's point, it is interesting how A/Mats would constrain the possibility of a single universe being intentionally planned and created by a higher Being on the basis of its scale, but let a single clever ape unwittingly generate 4 of the same scale by being pokey in ordering their lunch.LocalMinimum
March 25, 2018
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Quantum Mechanics becomes mathematical overkill when an Omniscient Being is part of the equation. The cat is both alive and dead until you open the box? Nope, the Omniscient Being knows before you open. An Omniscient Being knows which of 5 salad dressing choices you will put on your Wendy’s Salad before you open the packet (while at the same letting you choose). There aren’t 5 different salad worlds for crying out loud. “But where is your evidence of this Omniscient Being waawaa?” Look, make “Being” a verb not a noun. And the fact there aren’t 5 salad worlds is ample evidence.ppolish
March 25, 2018
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