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Sabine Hossenfelder reassures us that Schrodinger’s cat is still not dead

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In the most widely taught interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, the question what state the cat is in before you measure it is just meaningless. You’re not supposed to ask. The same is the case in all interpretations according to which quantum mechanics is a theory about the knowledge we have about a system, and not about the system itself.

In the many-worlds interpretation, in contrast, each possible measurement outcome happens in a separate universe. So, there’s a universe where the cat lives and one where the cat dies. When someone opens the box, that decides which universe they’re in. But for what observations are concerned, the result is exactly the same as in the Copenhagen interpretation.

Pilot wave-theory, which we talked about earlier, says that the cat is really always in only one state, you just don’t know which one it is until you look. The same is the case for spontaneous collapse models. In these models, the collapse of the wave-function is not merely an update when you open the box, but it’s a physical process.

It’s no secret that I myself am signed up to superdeterminism, which means that the measurement outcome is partly determined by the measurement settings. In this case, the cat may start out in a superposition, but by the time you measure it, it has reached the state which you actually observe. So, there is no sudden collapse in superdeterminism, it’s a smooth, deterministic, and local process.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Schrödinger’s Cat – Still Not Dead” at BackRe(Action)

The cat is not dead as long as people keep talking about him.

See also: Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Do complex numbers exist? The people who don’t think complex numbers really exist would probably not be happy with quantum mechanics being even more non-local without them. But of course, if complex numbers really do exist, then immaterial things really exist. Not a good time to be a hard core materialist.

Comments
She says “partly determined by the observation” it absolutely is not partly determined by the observation she doesn’t even understand her own damn theory that she signed up for Where does she get the idea that it’s “partly determined” it’s not The observation itself was predetermined by the big bang as well as the outcome If the observation doesn’t happen the outcome will still happen if it was pre-determined by the Big Bang Everything from the observation to the outcome is pre-determined by the big bang as one static event She’s falling into the category of idiot And that is immensely disappointing So is her science and everything else so she should probably just retire and give up but I guess she can’t help that either But if she truly believes that super determinism is exactly what is going on here, then she needs to give up, because her opinion and everybody else’s doesn’t really exist! it’s just a predetermined action calculated by the beginning of the universe no different than an acid and a base creating a precipitantAaronS1978
March 14, 2021
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as to:
Pilot wave-theory, which we talked about earlier, says that the cat is really always in only one state, you just don’t know which one it is until you look. The same is the case for spontaneous collapse models. In these models, the collapse of the wave-function is not merely an update when you open the box, but it’s a physical process. It’s no secret that I myself am signed up to superdeterminism, which means that the measurement outcome is partly determined by the measurement settings. In this case, the cat may start out in a superposition, but by the time you measure it, it has reached the state which you actually observe. So, there is no sudden collapse in superdeterminism, it’s a smooth, deterministic, and local process.
Although the scientific box which contains Hossenfelder's Pilot Wave/Superdeterminsitic model may be both alive and dead as a viable scientific option before we peer into the scientific box, when we peer into the scientific box of the Pilot Wave/Superdetermism model we find Hossenfelder's model to be thoroughly, and completely, dead. First off, as to Hossenfelder's claim that, , "there is no sudden collapse in superdeterminism, it’s a smooth, deterministic, and local process." That claim of her's has now been, for all intents and purposes, experimentally falsified. Specifically, as far as experimental accuracy will allow us to measure, quantum wave collapse is now shown to be a non-local, instantaneous, affair and it is not a "smooth, deterministic, and local process" affair as Hossenfelder had claimed.
Experimental test of the collapse time of a delocalized photon state - 2019 Excerpt: The present paper concerns an experiment able to test whether the state vector collapse for a single particle, being not instantaneous, takes a time, in particular when the system is spatially delocalized. This is the first time that an experiment of this kind is performed using a single particle state instead of entangled EPR pairs: the use of single particle states is important to check whether the collapse process involving the actual displacement of the particle between the distant places requires a time, and could point out a possible difference with respect to EPR pairs, where only internal degrees of freedom are correlated like in EPR experiments.,,, Discussion The experimental data show clearly that the spatial collapse of the photon state takes a time shorter than the time resolution of our experiment, given the maximum available distance. This allows us to put an upper limit on the collapse time, and hence on its speed. If a nonzero collapse time is actually present, its duration ? has to be shorter than 60 ps, which is the time resolution of the experiment. The maximum length for the detector arm in the experiment was L = 20.04?m (±1?cm) so the maximum investigated distance between the two ends of the arms was 2???=28.4m (2 square root of L=28.4m). We can therefore put a lower bound to the collapse speed c? of 1550 times c, since any other less direct path followed by the wavefunction would result in a higher collapse speed. This value is about one order of magnitude smaller than the best current results on the speed of the spooky action at a distance of refs6,7, but complementary to that, giving information on the behaviour of a single delocalized particle rather than the correlations of internal degrees of freedom as in entangled EPR pairs. In order to improve the present bound, an upgraded version of the experiment is being developed in which distances are increased up to the kilometric scale as done for EPR pairs4,7. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-48387-8
And here is another earlier experiment that is along the same line
Experimental proof of nonlocal wavefunction collapse for a single particle using homodyne measurements - 24 March 2015 Abstract: A single quantum particle can be described by a wavefunction that spreads over arbitrarily large distances; however, it is never detected in two (or more) places. This strange phenomenon is explained in the quantum theory by what Einstein repudiated as ‘spooky action at a distance’: the instantaneous nonlocal collapse of the wavefunction to wherever the particle is detected. Here we demonstrate this single-particle spooky action, with no efficiency loophole, by splitting a single photon between two laboratories and experimentally testing whether the choice of measurement in one laboratory really causes a change in the local quantum state in the other laboratory. To this end, we use homodyne measurements with six different measurement settings and quantitatively verify Einstein’s spooky action by violating an Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen-steering inequality by 0.042±0.006. Our experiment also verifies the entanglement of the split single photon even when one side is untrusted. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150324/ncomms7665/abs/ncomms7665.html
Again, as far as experimental accuracy can allow us to tell, wave-function collapse is found to be a instantaneous, non-local, affair, not a "smooth, deterministic, and local process" affair as Hossenfelder had claimed. And I firmly believe, (as has been the consistent history of experimental advances in Quantum Mechanics), that improved experimental accuracy will only make the situation all that much worse for the Atheistic Naturalist who is adverse to accepting the obvious Theistic implications of "spooky action at a distance.' I believe this following video touches upon a bit of the history,
Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism (v2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0IKLv7KrE
Moreover, as if that was not bad enough for Hossenfelder, her appeal to superdeterminism undermines science in the most fundamental way possible. Superdeterminism, (in what should make any physicist worth his salt cringe in horror), ends up denying that we can trust what our experimental results are telling us. Basically, with the closing of the setting independence and/or ‘free will’ loop hole, by Zeilinger and company, the Atheistic naturalist is now reduced to arguing that “a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure.”
Closing the ‘free will’ loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem – February 20, 2014 Excerpt: Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains; physicists refer to it as “setting independence,” or more provocatively, “free will.” This loophole proposes that a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure — a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting. Such a scenario would result in biased measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics than classical physics. “It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” says MIT’s David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and senior lecturer in the Department of Physics. “Before we make the leap to say the equations of quantum theory tell us the world is inescapably crazy and bizarre, have we closed every conceivable logical loophole, even if they may not seem plausible in the world we know today” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm
And now the setting independence and/or free will loop-hole has been pushed back to at least 7.8 billion years ago, (basically all the way back to the creation of the universe itself)
Significant-loophole-free test of Bell’s theorem with entangled photons – Dec. 2015 Excerpt page 5: By closing the freedom-of-choice loophole to one natural stopping point—the first moment at which the particles come into existence—we reduce the possible local-realist explanations to truly exotic hypotheses. Any theory seeking to explain our result by exploiting this loophole would require to originate before the emission event and to influence setting choices derived from spontaneous emission. It has been suggested that setting choices determined by events from distant cosmological sources could push this limit back by billions of years [46]. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03190.pdf Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Abstract: This experiment pushes back to at least approx. 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403
Thus, instead of believing what the experimental results of quantum mechanics are actually telling us, (i.e. that free will is a real and tangible part of reality),, the Determinist, and/or Atheistic Naturalist, is now forced to claim, via ‘superdeterminism’, that the results of the experiments were somehow ‘superdetermined’ at least 7.8 billion years ago, (basically all the way back to the creation of the universe itself), and that the experimental results are now merely "conspiring", i.e. ‘fooling us’, into believing that our experimental results in quantum theory are trustworthy and correct and that we do indeed have free will. To call such a move on the part of Atheistic Naturalists, (i.e. the rejection of experimental results that conflict with their apriori philosophical belief in ‘determinism’), unscientific would be a severe understatement. It is a rejection of the entire scientific method itself. To repeat, Atheistic Naturalists, in their appeal to ‘superdeterminism’, are basically arguing that we cannot trust what the experimental results of quantum mechanics themselves are telling us because events in the remote past ‘conspired’ to give us erroneous experimental results today. Erroneous experimental results that are merely ‘fooling us’ into believing that we have free will. As should be needless to say, if we cannot trust what our experimental results are actually telling us, then science is, for all practical purposes, dead. Atheistic Naturalists, in their rejection of experimental results that conflict with their a-priori belief in determinism and/or materialism, have become ‘science deniers’ in the truest sense of the term ‘science denier’. Flat earthers would be proud of Hossenfelder and company's super-deterministic position that clings to an a-priori belief in the face of experimental results that directly conflict with their a-priori atheistic belief. Moreover, as Concealed Citizen touched upon, the denial of free will is simply insane. If we do not have free will in some real and meaningful sense, then logical argumentation is completely undermined. Perhaps no better example of this catastrophic failure in logical argumentation exists than Jerry Coyne's following self-refuting statement,
"Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it." - Jerry Coyne - Professor of Evolution
That statement should literally be the number 1 example of a self-refuting argument that is given in Philosophy 101 classes. Of supplemental note, (and as I mentioned on the Chaitin thread earlier this morning), allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here is a video where I defend my claim that Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides a much better resolution to the ‘theory of everything’ than string theory does, (a position that Hossenfelder, (author of "Lost In Math"), may, surprisingly, find agreeable with her previous work that found string theory to be severely wanting as the supposed 'theory of everything.)
Jesus Christ as the correct “Theory of Everything” – video https://youtu.be/Vpn2Vu8–eE
Verse:
Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
bornagain77
March 14, 2021
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It’s no secret that I myself am signed up to superdeterminism
Which, of course, means that she believes that the universe was "fixed" at the Big Bang, and denies any free will whatsoever, or that anything could be any different (including the development of sentient life capable of "thinking" about all of this in the reverse direction. Quite a feat for whatever caused this fixed universe.) (I think Hawkings was one of those.) These determinist types can't explain the persistent knotty problem of consciousness: what it is, and how it "flows" through "time" at a single "point in time." In other words, (assuming they are not zombies), the determinist types deny the primary facts of their own existence, for the inferences of mere reason which are necessarily secondary. At any rate, superdeterminsim isn't science. And it's a bit bizarre to hear her say she is "signed up for it" in light of everything she says about everything else. (E.g, the Multiverse is not science.) In one video, she goes on about how she thinks differential equations imply determinism. But that only applies to General Relatity which she acknowledges elsewhere cannot be completely correct given Quantum Mechanics. (Shrug.) P.S. her videos are generally enjoyable to watch.Concealed Citizen
March 14, 2021
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All of those interpretations have been experimentally demonstrated incorrect: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/ Essentially, two different observers "in the same universe" are observing the box. When it is opened, one sees a dead cat, the other sees a live one. Both are factually correct. This result is inexplicable under any interpretation of quantum physics other than(at least currently) MRT, which allows for two people to experience each other and have factually contradictory experiences regarding some aspect of what we call, under other theories, "the objective world external of mind."William J Murray
March 14, 2021
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Schrodinger's cat, as intended, makes for interesting fiction, but there it nothing scientific about it. Change it from multiverse to something like alien life, it works out rather well. Aliens either exist or do not exist, neither of which has any real bearing on anything.BobRyan
March 14, 2021
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Reality is always in one state. Reality. Period.polistra
March 13, 2021
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