My reading of the piece is that it ascribes to the Copenhagen interpretation an anti-realist perspective - that is, the theory is nothing other than the ability to predict the results of experiments. In this view, there is no wave-function in reality: it is just a mathematical tool that appears to predict the dots on the screen well.
Scientific Realism holds that in some sense scientific theories approximate the world, not just in what the experiments observe, but also in the content of their explanations (precisely, you gain knowledge not just about observables, but also non-observables: things that the theory requires to be true, but can't show). The article ascribes this view to Einstein, who presumably thought that there was a such thing as space-time, and it does actually curve under the influence of mass - despite only seeing things that are explained by the curvature, and not the curvature, or the space-time, itself.
The article then goes on to say that the anti-realist approach (dominated by not-undeserving practical concerns and application) focuses on computation: the mathematics is good so long as it gets the right answers in the end, and the end justifies the means. Therefore, it doesn't matter what contrivances must be dealt with in-between: if you get a better prediction, or can do a new exciting thing, then that was always the aim.
Thus, I read the article as advocating a stepping back from this view: it blames this focus on sheer mathematical sophistication as the route to truth as the source of profound disinterest in philosophy by physicists (it is important to note that I think that aeon is a philosophy newsletter!). Earlier and contemporary physicists (prominently, Einstein) had an interest in not just what their theories produced, but what they explained the world to be, and the article decries the modern lack of this.
I recommend the SEP article on scientific realism, which is dense but on a brief reading gives enough of the context to recognise the article. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/ (Although it is even more philosophically focused).
NB. I'm not a physicist or philosopher either, so grains of salt! My only self-endorsement is that I spent the last year reading a bit of philosophy, so perhaps I can be at least a stepping-stone to better resource.
You should question how it works. And test whether it works. Or find a simpler theory that works as well. Or a theory that can explain more. Postulating that there must be a better theory is pointless.
Bell's theorem was never a pointless philosophical issue. It is physics and that is why it can be tested experiementally.
First: no one presumed Einstein to be senile.
He was sceptical about qm, and being sceptical is good.
He also agreed with Bohr that what mattered was results of experiements. That is why they came up with all those brilliant thought-experiements that could only become real experiements much later.
Theories that cannot predict anything in the real world might be interesting, but it is not physics. ( I did study at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen a long time ago)
I don’t think Kantian idealism is really idealism in the traditional sense, but it’s essentially just the idea that the world humans can know is not the world as it is, but rather just a subset or interpretation which, in all likelihood, bares little resemblance to the world as it is.
The purpose of fluffy thinking in science is clear to anyone who's heard even a few original thinkers talk about where they got their hard theories from, which is as a way for a worker to be slightly more likely to guess the right equation than if they were literally just guessing.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding some of the philosophical aspects here, but the Copenhagen interpretation seems to just a label for the (now) undisputed basic facts of quantum mechanics, so the "interpretation" part of it seems to be a bit historical now. The Wikipedia page gives the following "principles" of the interpretation:
> Quantum mechanics is intrinsically indeterministic.
> The correspondence principle: in the appropriate limit, quantum theory comes to resemble classical physics and reproduces the classical predictions.
The Born rule: the wave function of a system yields probabilities for the outcomes of measurements upon that system.
> Complementarity: certain properties cannot be jointly defined for the same system at the same time. In order to talk about a specific property of a system, that system must be considered within the context of a specific laboratory arrangement. Observable quantities corresponding to mutually exclusive laboratory arrangements cannot be predicted together, but considering multiple such mutually exclusive experiments is necessary to characterize a system.
These are universally accepted facts now (it would be silly for any physical theory to contradict the second one). Even a kind of "out there" theory like many worlds theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation) would not dispute these facts (it just reinterprets the indeterminism of quantum mechanics as taking different "branches" in a multiverse). The "interpretation" part of it is a bit historical, as no "interpretation" should contradict these facts (a la Bell's theorem).
Edit: As a philosophy, any "interpretation" built off of these facts is cool, but until you calculate anything, it's essentially useless as a physical theory.
Interesting, although I struggle to see how this could be. The collapse (from our point of view, at least) of the wave function is pretty necessary in the math of QM. You can only observe the eigenstates of a wavefunction, which is what collapse is. To me, it seems that other theories are just disputing what the "collapse" fundamentally means. For example, Many Worlds theory (from my admittedly limited understanding) says that the wave function's eigenstates each become the new reality in different universes. Please correct me if I'm wrong here though.
Decoherence is the normally proposed solution. Unlike collapse, it wouldn't be the only non-linear, non-unitary, discontinuous operator in all of quantum mechanics. It doesn't give Born's rule, but as long as we're allowed to derive Born's rule by saying "and the wavefunction obeys Born's rule" that's not a mark against it.
The main problem with the Copenhagen interpretation is it's too vague. Some say it up involves collapse as a physical process, some say it doesn't. Whatever collapse is in Copenhagen, it is fundamental.
In many worlds, collapse is a subjective and approximate phenomena, not something fundamental.
> For example, Many Worlds theory (from my admittedly limited understanding) says that the wave function's eigenstates each become the new reality in different universes
That's perhaps the Narcissistic Many Worlds interpretation. Another way of thinking about Many Worlds is that there's only one universe, in which: after measuring a particle in a superposition of two states, you are now in a superposition of two states. Each of the superimposed you states thinks your instrument measured a single clear result.
The wavefunction of the universe goes on propagating as usual, including both of the superimposed yous, but within each of the superimposed states, that you thinks that it has witnessed wavefunction collapse.
It annoys me that you really have to dig into Many Worlds for a while before someone says outright what you're saying here. I guess it's because to someone already familiar with QM, decoherence is more about explaining why the newly different portions of the wavefunction don't interact than that there's a superposition at all, but to the layman the takeaway should really be exactly what you wrote.
> The collapse (from our point of view, at least) of the wave function is pretty necessary in the math of QM.
The measurement results are mathematically necessary. The Copenhagen interpretation, that this means there is a physical collapse in the wavefunction, is not.
> To me, it seems that other theories are just disputing what the "collapse" fundamentally means.
If you substitute "collapse" for "measurement" this is pretty much true. What else could "different interpretations of a theory" mean?
I think that QM is actually covering two very distinct things.
One is about what actually happens. This contains Shrodinger equation and similar things.
The other is about what results will we get if we poke the particles with macroscopic objects disturbing them beyond recognition. That's the all math where the word "measurement" is used.
Somehow we think the science of what happens to a frog when you poke it with a knife is a part of zoology. It's important, it might be even more important than zoology, but that's a different domain of science.
That's all well and good in zoology, but since both the experiment and experimenter are quantum systems, QM has to explain any and all interactions between the two. Measurement can't be some extraneous thing to what's happening, since it too is happening. I think decoherence gets some points on that mark, I'd be shocked if anyone really thought collapse wasn't the product of some yet undiscovered (or at least unconsidered) aspect of quantum physics.
Once I was present at a discussion between a seasoned quantum optics expert
and a group of aspiring physicists, and he asked us which interpretation
of quantum mechanics do we prefer. Some chose the standard Copenhagen interpretation,
others chose the Many Worlds interpretation, or an interpretation
with hidden variables, and so on. But just over half of those present agreed
on the standard interpretation.
And the expert agreed - why? Because, as he put it, everything that had ever
been done in the field of quantum physics had been done using the Copenhagen interpretation.
The way I see it, other interpretations have no purpose except to reconcile
what we observe on small scales with incorrect statements such as
"electron is a tiny ball", or "electron is a wave in the three-dimensional space",
or "an observer which are themselves composed of quantum mechanical particles
is independent of the system, and exerts free will to choose measurements
while the observed system is purely deterministic".
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is the root of the Copenhagen interpretation.
The uncertainty principle says you can never know both the location and the momentum of a particle. This stems from the fact that because spacetime is the way it is, knowing either one of those things requires having made a measurement, which by its nature, prevents the measurement of the other thing.
The act of measurement is independent of there being an "observer" in the sense of some sort of intelligence or consciousness. The use of the word observer in early communications led to all sorts of woowoo garbage later on.
More recent interpretations suggest that instead of the requirement that particles be in a singular state, perhaps their fundamental nature is probabilistic. The wave function is the thing, the particle at a singular place and time is an illusion. There's no need for wave functions to collapse, and that view seems to be an imposition of human scale expectations on the quantum universe. An electron exists as a point cloud - what we observe is an artifact of the observation, not a fundamental property of the particle.
I am fond of the "universe is made of math" view suggested by Max Tegmark.
We did not evolve to perceive the universe as it is. We have limitations built into the mechanics of our existence that have to be overcome and understood at every level of abstraction that our tools of reason and technology provide. The more degrees of separation between our evolved tools of perception and extrapolated and abstracted concepts about how the universe works, the more it will diverge from human experience and seem to be "weird." When we try to make weird things make sense to our monkey brains, we introduce a bias that can lead us astray.
The Copenhagen interpretation is an attempt to make monkey sense of something that has no direct input into any of our tools of perception.
The Everett interpretation recognizes that any observation has to include the quantum states of the mechanism doing the measuring, the environment in which the mechanism resides, and the entities in proximity to the environment, and planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe - that by existing inside the universe, you are subject to the influence of everything else that exists within the universe, and that quantum states are one of the proxies we have for predicting the results of interactions between the states.
Stephen Hawking was an Everettian, and discounted the Copenhagen interpretation.
Tldr; there's no such consensus on Copenhagen, and the many worlds interpretation is gaining precedence, because it's got the most rigorous basis in mathematics.
Not sure if it applies here, also not a physicist, so just some food for thought:
I've noticed that many of humanity's models try to simplify things into neat models and that results in either
- many specific models, each focusing on a specific macro-behaviour
- one statistical model which basically describes the underlying process as non-deterministic
Couple that with performance debugging 101:
Measuring the performance of a function changes the performance of a function
(Fudamentally because you can't see without interacting, and sometimes that interaction creates weird results)
And the conclusion is that Quantum Mechanics is a statistical model of a complex hot path which we're trying to measure, so of course it's going to be weird and hard to so.
It's painfully easy to have a clear intuitive picture of quantum physics. You just have to ditch one concept.
Universe is not made of little balls.
Particles ARE their wave functions. Nothing less, nothing more.
Sometimes those two wavevy objects interact as if two little balls bounced at one point, but that's only "accidental" similarity between the way they exchange the energy (and momentum) and the way macroscopic balls exchange the energy. Yes. It's not deterministic, what will be the parameters of that interaction. At what spot exactly will it seem to have happened, how much energy will be exchanged and how will it reshape and redirect the inital wavy objects. But thanks to our math we can predict likelyhood of everything that might happen.
Well, not exactly accidental because the way macroscopic balls bounce comes out of the exchange of energy by microscopic wavy objects bound tightly together. Same way that macroscopic magnetic interactions come from microscopic interactions of many thightly bound and oriented particles.
Wave functions never collapse into little balls, they just interact as if two balls bounced, and they get reshaped to be smaller and less fuzzy, but that's it. You can easily spread them back by interacting with them again in a different manner.
There's no such thing as a measurement. Measurement is just interaction with large rigidly bound chunk of matter which reshapes the measured particle because any interaction always reshapes.
There's really no reason to think that particles are little balls or matrial points or anything similar.
Initially people thought that because of photoelectric effect. That energy is transferred in quanta. But it's not hard to imagine this as purely fuzzy, wavy phenomenon where electrons are stuck around the nucleus in a sort of "harmonic" and they can't jump up to the place half-way to their next more energetic harmonic. Check out how orbitals look (and Chladni figures) if what I wrote seems unclear.
If you know any reason to think particles are little pointlike objects please let me known because I couldn't find any.
26 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 78.6 ms ] threadScientific Realism holds that in some sense scientific theories approximate the world, not just in what the experiments observe, but also in the content of their explanations (precisely, you gain knowledge not just about observables, but also non-observables: things that the theory requires to be true, but can't show). The article ascribes this view to Einstein, who presumably thought that there was a such thing as space-time, and it does actually curve under the influence of mass - despite only seeing things that are explained by the curvature, and not the curvature, or the space-time, itself.
The article then goes on to say that the anti-realist approach (dominated by not-undeserving practical concerns and application) focuses on computation: the mathematics is good so long as it gets the right answers in the end, and the end justifies the means. Therefore, it doesn't matter what contrivances must be dealt with in-between: if you get a better prediction, or can do a new exciting thing, then that was always the aim.
Thus, I read the article as advocating a stepping back from this view: it blames this focus on sheer mathematical sophistication as the route to truth as the source of profound disinterest in philosophy by physicists (it is important to note that I think that aeon is a philosophy newsletter!). Earlier and contemporary physicists (prominently, Einstein) had an interest in not just what their theories produced, but what they explained the world to be, and the article decries the modern lack of this.
I recommend the SEP article on scientific realism, which is dense but on a brief reading gives enough of the context to recognise the article. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/ (Although it is even more philosophically focused).
NB. I'm not a physicist or philosopher either, so grains of salt! My only self-endorsement is that I spent the last year reading a bit of philosophy, so perhaps I can be at least a stepping-stone to better resource.
So my take now is that as long as it works no one is questioning why or how it works. Which is what you'd expect scientists to be doing.
> Quantum mechanics is intrinsically indeterministic.
> The correspondence principle: in the appropriate limit, quantum theory comes to resemble classical physics and reproduces the classical predictions. The Born rule: the wave function of a system yields probabilities for the outcomes of measurements upon that system.
> Complementarity: certain properties cannot be jointly defined for the same system at the same time. In order to talk about a specific property of a system, that system must be considered within the context of a specific laboratory arrangement. Observable quantities corresponding to mutually exclusive laboratory arrangements cannot be predicted together, but considering multiple such mutually exclusive experiments is necessary to characterize a system.
These are universally accepted facts now (it would be silly for any physical theory to contradict the second one). Even a kind of "out there" theory like many worlds theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation) would not dispute these facts (it just reinterprets the indeterminism of quantum mechanics as taking different "branches" in a multiverse). The "interpretation" part of it is a bit historical, as no "interpretation" should contradict these facts (a la Bell's theorem).
Edit: As a philosophy, any "interpretation" built off of these facts is cool, but until you calculate anything, it's essentially useless as a physical theory.
In many worlds, collapse is a subjective and approximate phenomena, not something fundamental.
That's perhaps the Narcissistic Many Worlds interpretation. Another way of thinking about Many Worlds is that there's only one universe, in which: after measuring a particle in a superposition of two states, you are now in a superposition of two states. Each of the superimposed you states thinks your instrument measured a single clear result.
The wavefunction of the universe goes on propagating as usual, including both of the superimposed yous, but within each of the superimposed states, that you thinks that it has witnessed wavefunction collapse.
The measurement results are mathematically necessary. The Copenhagen interpretation, that this means there is a physical collapse in the wavefunction, is not.
> To me, it seems that other theories are just disputing what the "collapse" fundamentally means.
If you substitute "collapse" for "measurement" this is pretty much true. What else could "different interpretations of a theory" mean?
One is about what actually happens. This contains Shrodinger equation and similar things.
The other is about what results will we get if we poke the particles with macroscopic objects disturbing them beyond recognition. That's the all math where the word "measurement" is used.
Somehow we think the science of what happens to a frog when you poke it with a knife is a part of zoology. It's important, it might be even more important than zoology, but that's a different domain of science.
The way I see it, other interpretations have no purpose except to reconcile what we observe on small scales with incorrect statements such as "electron is a tiny ball", or "electron is a wave in the three-dimensional space", or "an observer which are themselves composed of quantum mechanical particles is independent of the system, and exerts free will to choose measurements while the observed system is purely deterministic".
The uncertainty principle says you can never know both the location and the momentum of a particle. This stems from the fact that because spacetime is the way it is, knowing either one of those things requires having made a measurement, which by its nature, prevents the measurement of the other thing.
The act of measurement is independent of there being an "observer" in the sense of some sort of intelligence or consciousness. The use of the word observer in early communications led to all sorts of woowoo garbage later on.
More recent interpretations suggest that instead of the requirement that particles be in a singular state, perhaps their fundamental nature is probabilistic. The wave function is the thing, the particle at a singular place and time is an illusion. There's no need for wave functions to collapse, and that view seems to be an imposition of human scale expectations on the quantum universe. An electron exists as a point cloud - what we observe is an artifact of the observation, not a fundamental property of the particle.
I am fond of the "universe is made of math" view suggested by Max Tegmark.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypoth...
We did not evolve to perceive the universe as it is. We have limitations built into the mechanics of our existence that have to be overcome and understood at every level of abstraction that our tools of reason and technology provide. The more degrees of separation between our evolved tools of perception and extrapolated and abstracted concepts about how the universe works, the more it will diverge from human experience and seem to be "weird." When we try to make weird things make sense to our monkey brains, we introduce a bias that can lead us astray.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/where-quantum-probability-com...
The Copenhagen interpretation is an attempt to make monkey sense of something that has no direct input into any of our tools of perception.
The Everett interpretation recognizes that any observation has to include the quantum states of the mechanism doing the measuring, the environment in which the mechanism resides, and the entities in proximity to the environment, and planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe - that by existing inside the universe, you are subject to the influence of everything else that exists within the universe, and that quantum states are one of the proxies we have for predicting the results of interactions between the states.
Stephen Hawking was an Everettian, and discounted the Copenhagen interpretation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
Tldr; there's no such consensus on Copenhagen, and the many worlds interpretation is gaining precedence, because it's got the most rigorous basis in mathematics.
I've noticed that many of humanity's models try to simplify things into neat models and that results in either - many specific models, each focusing on a specific macro-behaviour - one statistical model which basically describes the underlying process as non-deterministic
Couple that with performance debugging 101: Measuring the performance of a function changes the performance of a function
(Fudamentally because you can't see without interacting, and sometimes that interaction creates weird results)
And the conclusion is that Quantum Mechanics is a statistical model of a complex hot path which we're trying to measure, so of course it's going to be weird and hard to so.
Universe is not made of little balls.
Particles ARE their wave functions. Nothing less, nothing more.
Sometimes those two wavevy objects interact as if two little balls bounced at one point, but that's only "accidental" similarity between the way they exchange the energy (and momentum) and the way macroscopic balls exchange the energy. Yes. It's not deterministic, what will be the parameters of that interaction. At what spot exactly will it seem to have happened, how much energy will be exchanged and how will it reshape and redirect the inital wavy objects. But thanks to our math we can predict likelyhood of everything that might happen.
Well, not exactly accidental because the way macroscopic balls bounce comes out of the exchange of energy by microscopic wavy objects bound tightly together. Same way that macroscopic magnetic interactions come from microscopic interactions of many thightly bound and oriented particles.
Wave functions never collapse into little balls, they just interact as if two balls bounced, and they get reshaped to be smaller and less fuzzy, but that's it. You can easily spread them back by interacting with them again in a different manner.
There's no such thing as a measurement. Measurement is just interaction with large rigidly bound chunk of matter which reshapes the measured particle because any interaction always reshapes.
There's really no reason to think that particles are little balls or matrial points or anything similar.
Initially people thought that because of photoelectric effect. That energy is transferred in quanta. But it's not hard to imagine this as purely fuzzy, wavy phenomenon where electrons are stuck around the nucleus in a sort of "harmonic" and they can't jump up to the place half-way to their next more energetic harmonic. Check out how orbitals look (and Chladni figures) if what I wrote seems unclear.
If you know any reason to think particles are little pointlike objects please let me known because I couldn't find any.