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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
One of the most striking features of quantum theory is that its predictions are, under virtually all circumstances, probabilistic. If you set up an experiment in a laboratory, and then you use quantum theory to predict the outcomes of various measurements you might perform, the best the theory can offer is probabilities—say, a 50 percent chance that you'll get one outcome, and a 50 percent chance that you'll get a different one. The role the quantum state plays in the theory is to determine, or at least encode, these probabilities. If you know the quantum state, then you can compute the probability of getting any possible outcome to any possible experiment.
But does the quantum state ultimately represent some objective aspect of reality, or is it a way of characterizing something about us, namely, something about what some person knows about reality? This question stretches back to the earliest history of quantum theory, but has recently become an active topic again, inspiring a slew of new theoretical results and even some experimental tests.
If it is just your knowledge that changes, things don't seem so strange.
To see why the quantum state might represent what someone knows, consider another case where we use probabilities. Before your friend rolls a die, you guess what side will face up. If your friend rolls a standard six-sided die, you'd usually say there is about a 17 percent (or one in six) chance that you'll be right, whatever you guess. Here the probability represents something about you: your state of knowledge about the die. Let's say your back is turned while she rolls it, so that she sees the result—a six, say—but not you. As far as you are concerned, the outcome remains uncertain, even though she knows it. Probabilities that represent a person's uncertainty, even though there is some fact of the matter, are called epistemic, from one of the Greek words for knowledge.
This means that you and your friend could assign very different probabilities, without either of you being wrong. You say the probability of the die showing a six is 17 percent, whereas your friend, who has seen the outcome already, says that it is 100 percent. That is because each of you knows different things, and the probabilities are representations of your respective states of knowledge. The only incorrect assignments, in fact, would be ones that said there was no chance at all that the die showed a six.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2017, @04:16PM (1 child)
Can't we say that we simply don't understand (can't see) the root mechanisms of QM and that probability-based models are the best models we have right now?
Until the math behind gravity was understood, nested epicycles were the best model of the time to "explain" orbits, or at least model them. We probably are just missing some key clues and/or haven't spotted a key relationship yet, and thus are mucking around with probabilities and ghost multiverses. Probabilities could be our generation's epicycles. ("Dark-matter" could be in a similar boat.)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 03 2017, @10:35PM
Probabilistic behaviour isn't the real problem. The real problem is that one can mathematically prove that anything following the rules of quantum mechanics has to violate at least one of the conditions that one would expect to hold. The debate essentially is which of those is the right one to drop.
Basically those conditions are:
Quantum mechanics essentially says: Realism, Locality, Single world: Choose two. And the experiments confirm it.
Moreover, and related to this, there is the measurement problem: Quantum mechanics has two qualitatively different sets of rules: One set that describes what happens when you don't observe a system, and one that describes what happens on observation. The first one is deterministic, the second one probabilistic. The problem here is that ultimately observations are ultimately also just normal physical interactions, and therefore one would expect the rules for unobserved evolution to also apply to observations. But that would contradict the rules for observation; in particular you'll never get a definite measurement result out of unobserved evolution.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.