Asklemmy

Object permanence is technically an axiom. The idea that things exist even when we aren’t observing them.

If things do not exist exist when you're not looking at them, well, you are a thing, and so you do not exist when I am not looking at you. Denying object permanence inevitably collapses into solipsism.

There’s also a problem with terms, particularly related to quantum mechanics. It uses the term observer. To a layman, that’s a person watching. To a scientist its any collection of atoms/fundamental particles that can cause the quantum waveform to collapse.

This is patently false. Observer in quantum mechanics absolutely just refers to an experimenter watching. What you are repeating is a common myth and does not accurately reflect the dominant views among physicists in academia.

What you are talking about is a physical collapse theory. A physical collapse theory is impossible to be perfectly reconciled with the mathematics of quantum mechanics. You can reconcile it in a limiting case, and potentially all cases we can actually practical observe, but not in all possible conceivable cases, due to physical collapse breaking the linearity of the theory.

Physical collapse theories are thus not even quantum mechanics but brand new speculative physical models. Some physicists have proposed such models, like GRW theory or the Diosi-Penrose model, but these are alternative speculative models which lack broad support.

The dominant paradigm is the Copenhagen interpretation. The Copenhagen interpretation rejects that the collapse is a physical event that happens at all, but treats it as a subjective event. The collapse occurs in the mathematics, not in physical reality, as a means of the observer book-keeping the information they have on the system.

The Copenhagen interpretation absolutely does not posit that observation is "any collection of atoms/fundamental particles that can cause the quantum waveform to collapse," as this necessarily leads to the following question, "What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of 'measurer'? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system...with a PhD?"

The way you frame it naturally leads one to ask what rigorous mathematical definition actually qualifies a collection of atoms/fundamental particles to be able to cause the quantum waveform to (physically) collapse, but quantum theory alone does not tell you that, so you would have to go beyond it and introduce a new model. Copenhagen does not do that. It does not posit what you are claiming at all.

quantum mechanics being the oddball

Quantum mechanics is not an oddball at all. In any statistical theory, you track only the observer's knowledge of the state of the system, and thus do not actually include its definite state in the mathematics. But nobody interprets that to mean its definite state does not still exist in the real world, except in the case for quantum mechanics, when people insist we should suddenly do a 180 u-turn and interpret the statistics entirely differently.

The physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev published a paper back in the 1950s which already pointed this out, that the confusion around quantum mechanics all stems from insisting upon treating it as a non-statistical theory. Statistics deal with the observer's subjective knowledge, and so naturally statistical states vary based on an observer's subjective knowledge. If you insist that the statistical state is a physical state (and thus not "statistical" at all), then you end up with a picture whereby objective reality can change depending upon an observer's subjective knowledge, which leads entirely to a breakdown of any coherent notion of objective reality, as demonstrated in Eugene Wigner's famous "friend" paradox.

The reality is that no physicist has ever published a paper in the peer-reviewed literature actually establishing that quantum mechanics demands you believe that the quantum state is a physical state. This is just a very very popular belief. We should not treat the "academic consensus" as just "what most physicists happen to believe." If we are living in a country that is mostly Christian, one might find most physicists identify as Christian, but that would not make Christianity the "academic concensus."

The "academic consensus" should be established through a meta-analysis of the preponderance of findings in actual peer-reviewed, academic journals. Not just what physicists personally believe, but what they have actually published. Yet, no physicist has ever published a paper establishing this belief, despite its popularity.

Only one major paper I'm aware of even attempted to do so, that being the famous "PBR theorem." But if you read that paper, even the paper itself acknowledges it is not definitive, because their proof depends upon you believing that the way the particle responds to an interaction only depends upon its present state, a property called Markovianity. This assumption is necessary because their proof requires that the particles are prepared independently in the past then come together to interact in the present, with no information stored regarding their preparation existing in the present, and thus their behavior must be independent of their preparation. But if the outcome of the interaction has dependence upon the past, then you can trivially explain the same results, because the information would not need to exist in the present to influence the outcome of the present interaction.

Indeed, the physicist Jacob Barandes mathematically proved that quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent to a statistical theory that is non-Markovian, Hence, the "non-classicality" of quantum mechanics can be interpreted as not arising from particles existing in "multiple places at once," as if the quantum state is a physical state, but merely that when particles interact, the outcome of the interaction simply takes into account, on the level of the nomology, their statistical states into the past.

There is no definitive reason to take the quantum state as a physical state, and so there is no conflict or confusion between quantum theory and object permanence. It is just a very very popular belief among physicists. Physics is not entirely math and empirical evidence. It is also ideology.

This was something pointed out heavily by the physicist John Bell. In his paper "On the Impossible Pilot Wave," he points out that the physicist David Bohm had already proposed a model mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics and made all the same predictions, yet did not have these bizarre features, and so belief in those bizarre features is ultimately an ideological choice and not demanded by the empirical evidence or the mathematical model.

Indeed, Bell also published a paper "How to Teach Special Relativity" where he points out that the mathematics and empirical predictions of special relativity is actually perfectly compatible with a universe with absolute space and time, where the relativity of measurements of rods and clocks is an emergent and not fundamental feature, and so belief that space and time are really relative is ultimately an ideological position and not demanded by the mathematics or empirical evidence.

Too many physicists tend to struggle to separate the ideology from the mathematics and empirical evidence, and constantly conflate the first with the latter two, as if you must believe in their particular ideological viewpoint or else you're a crazy person, a "crackpot," who is denying the mathematics and empirical evidence. But it just does not logically follow. Nothing in the linear algebra of quantum mechanics demands you actually believe particles exist in multiple states at once. It is a perfectly consistent position to believe that particles always have a definite state, while also believing that the mathematical body of quantum mechanics is completely accurate, because nothing in the mathematics itself demands you take on a particular ideological position.

That is a choice you make outside of the mathematics. It is a particular ideological choice, imposed on top of the mathematics of quantum mechanics, which leads to a conflict with object permanence. It is not the mathematics of quantum mechanics itself which conflicts with it at all.

[I]n 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm. Bohm showed explicitly how[...]the subjectivity of the orthodox version,the necessary reference to the “observer,” could be eliminated. Moreover, the essential idea was one that had been advanced already by de Broglie(in 1927, in his “pilot wave” picture. But why then had Born not told me of this “pilot wave?” If only to point out what was wrong with it? Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing “impossibility”proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978? When even Pauli, Rosenfeld, and Heisenberg, could produce no more devastating criticism of Bohm’s version than to brand it as “metaphysical” and “ideological?” Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in text books? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?

John Bell

Does the concept of an axiom actually exist and make sense in physics? I thought we just had models.