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xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse
Title text:
Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3134/
This reminds me of this old hacker koan:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. [Tom] Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Well it'll work, until the unfixed root cause break the machine again.
what if the root cause was some system variable, which got reset on boot and never happens again (for example some code you wrote accidentally triggered lower voltage for your cpu, and you have hitches)
Just ask Tom to reboot it again.
You don't really know it will cause it to break again with no understanding of what is going on.
"Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves."
I thought there was a chance that AlexisFR would respond without realizing that I was repeating the important part of the koan as a joke, because you don't always see the context when looking at replies to your comments. But I didn't expect that a random person who had apparently just read the koan 5 seconds earlier would already have forgotten it.
you don't have a soul, but the particle detector does
I'm just going to leave this here: Wigner's friend.
In Timelike Infinity, there's a group following that logic through to its conclusion, committing a bit of terrorism on the galactic scale to make Ultimate Observer-senpai notice them from the end of time and the universe.
Batshit insane, 10/10, one of Baxter's tamer plotlines.
Superdeterminism FTW; it makes the same predictions as all other quantum interpretations, but makes me feel good about the universe (e.g. doesn't have this wavefunction collapsing from observations weirdness), so I stick to it. I may be slightly autistic.
Superdeterminism to me is the worst. It basically means the Universe looks the way it does because it just is. Like it's not because particles move, interact, based on a set of fundamental laws and that ultimately gives rise to the universe we see. No, superdeterminism means there's no rules, the universe is just made like this. Every particle is meticulously put into place to make it look as if there are physical laws, like a grand conspiracy.
It's kinda like last-Tuesdayism.
That's not really related to the idea of superdeterminism. Superdeterminism literally just posits that the choice on which experiments are to be performed is determined by the same universe and its rules as the outcome of those experiments. The universe still has an initial state and a set of laws it obeys, it just does so deterministically.
That's not it. You are just describing determinism, not superdeterminism. Superdeterminism says not only are the observations performed by you and your partner determined, but they are also determined in such a way to make quantum entanglement looks real. i.e. there's no quantum entanglement, the particles are independent, but the universe conspires to make you measure in such a way that your results appear correlated.
And if you generalize measurement to mean any interaction you have with the world, you get what I described earlier.
Nothing has driven my desire to learn physics more than the urge to get rid of all the randomness in it. It's bloody irksome.
My issue with the orthodox interpretations is not that they are random but that they contain miracles. This was John Bell's original criticism that people seem to have forgotten. The Copenhagen interpretation says that there is a quantum world until you measure it, then a miracle happens, and you have a classical result, but it does not tell you at all how this process actually works. The Many Worlds Interpretation, which is the second most popular, just denies that the classical world made up of observable particles in 3D space where experiments actually have outcomes actually even exist and posits it's a grand illusion created by the conscious mind, but also cannot explain how this illusion can possibly come about and just vaguely gestures to it having something to do with consciousness. They just punt the miracle over to neuroscience and ultimately do not answer anything either. A lot of people think Einstein wasn't the biggest of quantum mechanics due to the randomness, but if you actually read his works, he was clear the issue was that it does not give you a coherent complete picture of reality, so he just thought it was incomplete, an approximation of a more fundamental theory that we have yet to discover.
The thing is we have no fucking clue what happens down there. The Copenhagen interpretation is just the “default” one because it’s the one that got taught.
All of the possible interpretations require on massive leaps of faith, miracles, hidden variables etc.
That's the thing, though. Einstein's interpretation did not require a "miracle" because his interpretation was merely to believe quantum mechanics is incomplete because we don't currently fully understand "what happens down there." It was more of a statement of "I don't know" and "we don't have the full picture" rather than trying to put forward a full picture. Most people agree that GR is merely an approximation for a more fundamental theory and there is a lot of work on speculative models to potentially replace it one day, like String Theory or Loop Quantum Gravity. But it has become rather taboo to suggest that maybe quantum mechanics is not the most fundamental "final" theory either and that maybe potential speculative replacements for it should be studied as well.
Those were the kinds of things that interested Einstein in his later years. He had published a paper "Does Schrodinger’s Wave Mechanics Completely Determine the Motion of a System, or Only Statistically?" where he proposed an underlying model similar to pilot wave theory, although later retracted it because it was later showed to him to be nonlocal and he hoped to get rid of then nonlocal aspect of it. He had published a paper earlier titled "Does Field Theory Offer Possibilities for the Solution of the Quantum Problem?" in which he had hoped to figure out if you could use an overdetermined system of differential equations to restrict the possible initial configurations of the system such that it would not be physically possible for the experimenter to choose the initial conditions of the experiment freely. If he was still alive today, he would probably take interest in the works of people like Gerard 't Hooft.
Quantum Mechanics doesn’t have to be random. Look up bohmian quantum mechanics which is a fairly simple hidden variable model and is deterministic.
Well, there's not really any randomness, we just can't ever have enough data to determine exactly what will happen. Which is why we have the Uncertainty Principle. If we both had a functioning Grand Unified Theory and total knowledge of all the particles in a system, we could simulate what would happen in the system with perfect accuracy.
You are part of the wavefunction. There is no collapse, just entanglement.
It's the equipment used.
Isn’t it lawful neutral chaotic