On 7/1/2014 2:18 PM, Mike Stay wrote:
On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 12:00 AM, Adam P. Goucher <apgoucher@gmx.com> wrote:
Isn't `wavefunction collapse' just a lazy shorthand for `the system we're interested in interacts with the observer, who is so huge and complex that decoherence occurs and thus the observer never sees the superposition'? That's not how it was originally proposed,
Orignally, i.e. by Bohr, QM was just about what we can calculate. He adopted a kind of mystical idea of "complementarity" which limited what we can say about the world. The classical world had to exist in order that we can have records/knowledge, there was no "quantum world", it was just a useful mathematical fiction. "Collapse" was just part of the mathematics. Heisenberg actually mentions the possibility that interaction with the environment defines the classical/quantum boundary, but he didn't work out decoherence. Brent
and not how some physicists like Penrose believe it happens. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_collapse_theory .