Quantum nonsense is my pet peeve, and with solid theoretical physics training from Stanford University, I am qualified to rant about it.
I am amazed that I've never seen anyone point out that THE CAT has MEASURED the wave function and "knows" whether it is alive or dead. (Unless you want to debate whether it is "conscious enough" to "collapse" the wave function. Have fun with that...) So there really is no paradox.
Put an inanimate object in there, instead of the cat, and the problem goes away, because no one "knows" the answer until someone looks. Coins in a closed box don't care whether they are heads or tails.
My professors did not find the cat paradox especially profound, and the term "consciousness" never came up in a full year of quantum mechanics courses. Their attitude was simply that the math works and we don't know why, and the cat paradox is simply one of many signs that we don't. Lay culture makes way too much of this and pays way too much attention to the few qualified personalities who want to talk woo about it (and the hordes of unqualified).
I read the first link, at least a once-over. I am in the same general school of thought. There may be some nuances where he has made more of what these physicists said than they were really trying to claim; that is what I usually find in these "debates." But I would need to read more carefully and see where he is getting his interpretations and understandings--what level of training he has, etc. He seems like a thoughtful guy, so I wouldn't want to discount any of it at this point.
Also, lay culture often misses the distinction between "finished" theories that we print in undergrad textbooks, vs. speculations by the egg-heads still figuring things out. There are full advanced courses on these speculations, simply because new scientists have to be brought into the endeavor, but that does not imply the theory "really works" yet. E.g., string theory. Nobel prizes can be awarded for influential thinking that clarifies these speculations, even if the theory ultimately fails. A lot of science is simply ruling out the ideas that don't work, which can take decades (e.g., string theory). There is no mistake in decorating the people who took a theory to its dead end, even if they personally believed in it. It's generally the believers who care enough to investigate, and we always learn something either way.
My pet-peeve part is this: The FIRST lesson in quantum mechanics is the "Correspondence Principle": any application of quantum mechanics to the macroscopic world MUST reduce to classical results. The Copenhagen crew agreed to DESIGN quantum mechanics this way, as a design principle from the beginning. All of their math reduces to the good-old classical math for "arbitrarily large N," where N is the number of particles in the system. A single electron does funky things, a baseball does not. If you see a baseball do something non-classical, it is ALSO NON-QUANTUM. Because a quantum baseball IS a classical baseball, BY DESIGN. *SMH* at how often this is overlooked by people who ought to know better. But then, a lot of smart scientists are terrible at epistemology and other theoretical foundations. Those were the boring chapters they snoozed through, waiting to get their hands on test tubes and coils and publish a paper.
Quantum nonsense is my pet peeve, and with solid theoretical physics training from Stanford University, I am qualified to rant about it.
I am amazed that I've never seen anyone point out that THE CAT has MEASURED the wave function and "knows" whether it is alive or dead. (Unless you want to debate whether it is "conscious enough" to "collapse" the wave function. Have fun with that...) So there really is no paradox.
Put an inanimate object in there, instead of the cat, and the problem goes away, because no one "knows" the answer until someone looks. Coins in a closed box don't care whether they are heads or tails.
My professors did not find the cat paradox especially profound, and the term "consciousness" never came up in a full year of quantum mechanics courses. Their attitude was simply that the math works and we don't know why, and the cat paradox is simply one of many signs that we don't. Lay culture makes way too much of this and pays way too much attention to the few qualified personalities who want to talk woo about it (and the hordes of unqualified).
“the math works and we don't know why”
curious about your thoughts on the mathis links.
So am I! :D
I read the first link, at least a once-over. I am in the same general school of thought. There may be some nuances where he has made more of what these physicists said than they were really trying to claim; that is what I usually find in these "debates." But I would need to read more carefully and see where he is getting his interpretations and understandings--what level of training he has, etc. He seems like a thoughtful guy, so I wouldn't want to discount any of it at this point.
Also, lay culture often misses the distinction between "finished" theories that we print in undergrad textbooks, vs. speculations by the egg-heads still figuring things out. There are full advanced courses on these speculations, simply because new scientists have to be brought into the endeavor, but that does not imply the theory "really works" yet. E.g., string theory. Nobel prizes can be awarded for influential thinking that clarifies these speculations, even if the theory ultimately fails. A lot of science is simply ruling out the ideas that don't work, which can take decades (e.g., string theory). There is no mistake in decorating the people who took a theory to its dead end, even if they personally believed in it. It's generally the believers who care enough to investigate, and we always learn something either way.
My pet-peeve part is this: The FIRST lesson in quantum mechanics is the "Correspondence Principle": any application of quantum mechanics to the macroscopic world MUST reduce to classical results. The Copenhagen crew agreed to DESIGN quantum mechanics this way, as a design principle from the beginning. All of their math reduces to the good-old classical math for "arbitrarily large N," where N is the number of particles in the system. A single electron does funky things, a baseball does not. If you see a baseball do something non-classical, it is ALSO NON-QUANTUM. Because a quantum baseball IS a classical baseball, BY DESIGN. *SMH* at how often this is overlooked by people who ought to know better. But then, a lot of smart scientists are terrible at epistemology and other theoretical foundations. Those were the boring chapters they snoozed through, waiting to get their hands on test tubes and coils and publish a paper.