Submitted by BernardJOrtcutt t3_10df9ua in philosophy
el_miguel42 t1_j5ck05l wrote
Reply to comment by Perrr333 in /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 16, 2023 by BernardJOrtcutt
LOL! I know what you mean, ive seen some crazy explanations for quantum phenomena and some of them are pretty nuts. The issue isnt quantum mechanics, its the interpretations of it.
Essentially what physics has done is observe a bunch of stuff, and then see if its possible to get maths to fit the observations. In some cases the maths is elegant, in other cases its crazy and messy.
The issue is it seems to work. Here's the important part. We don't know Why it works, we just know it does. We know it does, because we have observed and tested it - loads, but the why of it eludes physicists. The reason why some of the explanations (quite a lot of them) appear nonsensical is because when you take the maths, and try and turn it into physical reality its just... weird. The problem is, unless your a physicist people want examples, they want a demonstration, an analogy, and there just isn't a very good one, because its so weird. As such you end up with this often talked about, but little understood topic. This is especially common when people talk about anything to do with superposition, collapsing a wavefunction, observers etc and leads to crazy analogies like disappearing moons and cats which are neither alive nor dead etc.
I will try and clarify most of this stuff in a small example. If I give you $5 and $10 and ask you for the total. You will answer $15. This is a mathematical expression to which you have a numeric answer.If I am about to roll a dice and ask you which number will it land on, in that scenario your answer will be "I dont know". Now you could absolutely give me a probability - you could say "its a 1/6 chance of landing on a number between 1-6". Essentially rather than give me a numerical answer, you have to give me a function as an answer, and as this function will give you a probability we call it a probability function.So there is no way to know which number the dice will land on, but you do know the probability function of the dice and you can tell me there's a 1/6 chance of it landing on any of its sides.So now we roll the dice, once its stopped rolling and we then look at the dice, you can now tell me the numbers its on! You no longer have a probability function anymore because you can now observe the actual value.
This is in essence what most of the misunderstanding of quantum physics is about. We have observed that the probability function of a lot of quantum events happens to be in the form of a wave. So while the quantum event is happening the prediction of its position, or momentum, or energy etc is a probability function. We dont know what the number is, but we know the likelihood of it being certain values. Then when we observe the event, its like looking at the dice after its finished rolling, now we have a specific value. In physics this is given the fancy sounding term of "wavefunction collapse".
So when you come across the nonsense descriptions they're normally trying to say that until you "measure" or "observe" the quantum object, it will be in a "superposition of states" and is in neither one state nor another. (essentially while the dice is rolling its value is not a 2 or a 4 yet, its a probability function). Once you measure or observe it, then the wavefunction collapses and then you can observe its state. (once the dice stops rolling you'll have an actual value rather than a probability)
Hence the cat is neither alive nor dead until you open the box, the moon isnt there until you observe it etc etc. Its just people taking the maths probability stuff in a literal sense and applying it to absurd examples.
Perrr333 t1_j5e62x5 wrote
Yeah. But it's also important not to stray too far into instrumentalism, the idea that none of the mathematics of physics needs to correspond to anything in physical reality, it's just an accurate prediction apparatus. Because the only reason a prediction apparatus can be consistently successful is if it is latching on to some elements of reality which follow constant, or at least very slowly changing, laws. There was a course I didn't have the time to attend covering the span of the history of physics from start to now, expounding the idea that while it has never been an entirely correct reflection of reality, it is an ever-evolving dialogue with reality. As we make new discoveries we refine our understanding of the world. Maybe at some point we will understand its true nature - maybe we already do, in the sense that there won't be any serious rewriting of the current mathematics, only the addition of new elements for e.g. new particles. There is a reality to the quantum realm as with everything else, and maybe one of the current interpretations will prove true, or maybe our dance with reality will give rise to new mathematics and new "interpretations". Because while physicists might call them interpretations due to the often sole dependence on the current mathematics, they are in fact hypotheses about the world, which ultimately have to prove true or false. We often forget that the theory of atoms used to just be an "interpretation" stemming from the mathematics of chemistry.
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