For those interested in the ongoing mysteries and discoveries in quantum physics, this article may be of interest. Measurement is a crucial concept in quantum mechanics, because it doesn’t work like the traditional measurements of classical physics. In the old days everybody thought objects had properties, like the way a coin can show heads or tails. You find out which property it is showing by looking at it. But in quantum mechanics, the property doesn’t exist before the measurement. Quantum particles, such as photons or electrons, are like spinning coins, neither heads nor tails until you catch one. ... For the traditional “Copenhagen” interpretation, Weinberg notes, that collapse just expresses a “mysterious division between the microscopic world governed by quantum mechanics and a macroscopic world of apparatus and observers that obeys classical physics.” Hence some experts wonder whether the state vector is actually representative of reality at all. If it is, some have argued, then all the various possible outcomes must actually occur in some universe — “the endless creation of inconceivably many branches of history,” as Weinberg puts it. In other words, some important football games would have ended differently because the other team won the overtime coin toss. -Tom Siegfried And, here are the two papers cited in the article: arxiv.org/pdf/1405.3483v1.pdf (Steven Weinberg) and arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1548v1.pdf (Gerard t Hooft)
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 17:13:58 +0000
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