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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: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday May 03 2017, @11:32PM (1 child)
It's much worse than that. If all knowledge is only about what we know about things, then we can't say anything about things as such. Including that things as such exist.
This is related to the interpretations of quantum theory, and why, e.g., it's impossible to rule out Solipsism.
What we can say about a physical theory is that the evidence is consistent with certain interpretations. In quantum theory those interpretations include the (EWG) Multi-world hypothesis, Solipsism, a kind of pre-determinism, and several other interpretations that seem, on the surface, to be quite different. But even though they look quite different in English, they could all reasonably yield the same observed effects. My favorite interpretation is that the state vector never collapses, but that by observing we can determine certain features localizing our position in a branch of the state. But I can't rule out naive realism, or any of the other choices. The available evidence not only doesn't let you figure out which is correct, it doesn't even let you figure out the probability of one of the interpretations being correct.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:52PM
If all knowledge is only about what we know about things, then we can't say anything about things as such.
It's not. Math is the huge exception to that. Nothing in math actually exists except as representations. But once you have a representation, no matter how convoluted or obscure - even if no one, universe-wide is ever aware of it, then the consequences follow.
But even though they look quite different in English, they could all reasonably yield the same observed effects.
Any theories with the same observed effects are the same. Then it just becomes a matter of what is more convenient to use to explain what we see.