Is locality an illusion?

ольга said:
This is because you don't know all the parameters of the system, wich is the whole universe. Determinism has not been abolished. Without it, all other laws of physics will collapse.
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QM would say strict determinism does not appear to hold. Einstein was wrong, it seems: God apparently does play dice.
 
exchemist said:
Someone inside the box with the cat won’t describe its state as a mixture of alive and dead. That description is for people outside the box. So you can get the wrong idea by thinking the wave function for a system IS such and such, as if it is an absolute, immutable characteristic of the system.
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Question 1: Does that not basically describe General Relativity?

Did Einstein not illustrate this with his example of the man in the elevator? Does the light travel in a straight line or as a curve?

Question 2: Does superposition collapse into a single state or does it depend on POV of the observer?

How many stars can we observe which have gone nova billions of years ago and no longer exist at all? Yet they "appear" to exist in our reality. When we observe the universe today, our reality consists of an indeterminate number of superpositions that have collapsed but not become observable yet.

imho, reality becomes expressed only at the very quantum moment of the actual quantum collapse of the wavefunction, completely independent of any observation from any relative POV. Every moment thereafter is only a view into the past and as reality has already unfolded.

From a human POV, we can make wave functions collapse (as in double slit) , but if it is observable, it has already collapsed.
 
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Write4U said:
Question 1: Does that not basically describe General Relativity?

Did Einstein not illustrate this with his example of the man in the elevator? Does the light travel in a straight line or as a curve?

Question 2: Does superposition collapse into a single state or does it depend on POV of the observer?

How many stars can we observe which have gone nova billions of years ago and no longer exist at all? Yet they "appear" to exist in our reality. When we observe the universe today, our reality consists of an indeterminate number of superpositions that have collapsed but not become observable yet.

imho, reality becomes expressed only at the very quantum moment of the actual quantum collapse of the wavefunction, completely independent of any observation from any relative POV. Every moment thereafter is only a view into the past and as reality has already unfolded.

From a human POV, we can make wave functions collapse (as in double slit) , but if it is observable, it has already collapsed.
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Irrelevant rambling garbage.
 
ольга said:
Why do you think determinism stops working at the quantum level? There must be a reason for this. Do you know such a reason?
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Yes. It's because QM says there is an intrinsic lack of definition in the universe, due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

The reason for it is that, as has been explained earlier in the thread, pairs of conjugate variables (e.g. position - momentum, energy - lifetime, angular momentum - orientation) are Fourier transforms of each other. That has the result that the more precision you have on one, the less well-defined the other is. This is not an issue of observation or measurement. It is intrinsic to nature.
 
Pinball1970 said:
I thought that was the point. Nothing is decided till the measurement is made. The particles are effectively one system?
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They are, to someone in a given informational environment. Just as the cat is, to someone outside the box. But to someone inside the box with the cat? Nope.

The actual point, as I understand Rovelli, at least, is that there can be more than one wave function for the same system, depending on viewpoint. So you can't make a statement like yours without qualification. (Er, I think...I am not any way an authority on all this).
 
exchemist said:
They are, to someone in a given informational environment. Just as the cat is, to someone outside the box. But to someone inside the box with the cat? Nope.

The actual point, as I understand Rovelli, at least, is that there can be more than one wave function for the same system, depending on viewpoint. So you can't make a statement like yours without qualification. (Er, I think...I am not any way an authority on all this).
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Ok, like I said it has given me an incentive. I hope my brain is still malleable.
 
Pinball1970 said:
Ok, like I said it has given me an incentive. I hope my brain is still malleable.
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One has to try to think of it like in special relativity. The length of an object and the rate of a clock depends on frame of reference. Though it seems to me that for virtually all normal applications of QM one can ignore all this. I think it's useful to resolve paradoxes like entanglement at a distance and Schrödinger's Cat, but in regular physics or chemistry there is no distinction one needs to keep in mind in the way one must with relativity in, say, cosmology.
 
As I see it, the cat is not both alive and dead. It's just that we won't know if we need to dig a grave or fill a saucer full of milk until we open the box. But then, I'm a retired software engineer who majored in music and audio engineering. What do I know about it?

Can someone here recommend a QM 101 book for non-scientist that doesn't fall into the Dr Quantum "consciousness causes collapse" stuff?
 
gmilam said:
As I see it, the cat is not both alive and dead. It's just that we won't know if we need to dig a grave or fill a saucer full of milk until we open the box. But then, I'm a retired software engineer who majored in music and audio engineering. What do I know about it?

Can someone here recommend a QM 101 book for non-scientist that doesn't fall into the Dr Quantum "consciousness causes collapse" stuff?
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All the physicists I talk to always recommend Ballentine
 
gmilam said:
As I see it, the cat is not both alive and dead. It's just that we won't know if we need to dig a grave or fill a saucer full of milk until we open the box. But then, I'm a retired software engineer who majored in music and audio engineering. What do I know about it?

Can someone here recommend a QM 101 book for non-scientist that doesn't fall into the Dr Quantum "consciousness causes collapse" stuff?
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Also Leonard Susskind paper back, Quantum Mechanics - Theoretical minimum. Cheaper option
 
gmilam said:
Thank you! I will look into those.

Side note: I see that Rick Wakeman is coming to Manchester in Oct. I seem to recall you being a fan.
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There's another Wakeman fan out there? I thought I was the only one? :)

(I confess, I doubt I'd like his concerts. His style has changed dramatically. He went from prog rock to what I can only describe as elevator music sometime in the middle 80's.)
 
gmilam said:
As I see it, the cat is not both alive and dead. It's just that we won't know if we need to dig a grave or fill a saucer full of milk until we open the box. But then, I'm a retired software engineer who majored in music and audio engineering. What do I know about it?

Can someone here recommend a QM 101 book for non-scientist that doesn't fall into the Dr Quantum "consciousness causes collapse" stuff?
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Это вообще не про кошку. Это про проблему измерения.
 
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