Ruth & Rindler (General)

by dhw, Thursday, August 08, 2013, 12:30 (3920 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: [...] the answer to your problem is contained in the discussion and in the mathematician's comment I just reproduced.(2013-08-07, 15:02) Quanta exist, but are undescribable in their totality with our current senses. Therefore, we can only nibble at thier properties, eventually see all of the reality one bite at a time. Most of the incongruities are obviated by Ruth's approach. They are all interconnected and reacting together at random in their on realm.-This is clear, thank you. But these generalizations don't cover the specific questions I asked in my Rindler post of 3 August at 11.43. For instance, the fact that we can only see reality 'one bite at a time' does not explain to me how the problem of dependence on the observer to identify the properties and even the existence of quanta "evaporates", because in both cases "a transaction occurs" which is "simply interpreted differently by the different observers". I need to stress once more with maximum emphasis that I'm in no position to challenge these arguments. I find the above confusing, and am simply hoping that clarification will be useful for Ruth's new book as well as for lay people like myself.
 
DAVID: Mathematicians comment on QM:
"MAX TEGMARK: Quantum mechanics famously threw that monkey wrench into the old idea of causality when it turned out there are certain experiments where you can't say for sure what's going to happen. But you can take a purely mathematical description, known as the Schrödinger equation, and say that it always applies to everything, so there is no random or indeterminate thing about that. It just means that the actual full reality is bigger than the reality that we can see.-TKF: Are you saying that to us it feels subjective and random, but above it all there is this order that we just can't perceive?-The all-important answer here is "yes". I shan't quote the rest.
 
http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/kavli-origins-of-math-I read this with interest, but again it doesn't answer my specific questions, and as usual the experts don't agree among themselves: Tegmark and Hellerman are physicists who consider maths to be integral to the nature of the universe, and Butterworth and Nunez as cognitive scientists see it as part of the human tendency to impose patterns on Nature. Causality is another of the subjects I would like to get onto in my study of Ruth's Chapter 7.