quantum mechanics: answers? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, September 14, 2013, 20:12 (3878 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: So if Alice sends him a dollar, he can't receive more than a dollar. Hardly worth making a song and dance about. And I still don't know what "information causality" means, or why you find it so important that you put it in bold.-Because I think the universe runs on information supplied by the Creator.-
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> Dhw: On the contrary, these folks REJECT the idea that all of this represents "something real out in the world", and insist that the constructs are subjective! Ruth regards quantum states as "ontologically real possibilities existing in a pre-spacetime realm [...] These possibilities are taken as real because they are physically efficacious, leading indeterministically to transactions which give rise to the empirical events of the spacetime theatre." And the problem of subjectivism "evaporates" because the transaction "is simply observed differently by the different observers" (which in my book = subjectivism). Yes, I am mightily confused.-Again, these folks don't know or care about Ruth's concepts. I don't think they reject as ignore other approaches.-
> dhw: I like the image of the semi-permeable membrane, which is far more comprehensible than what seem to me to be contradictory and often nebulous arguments that even you obviously find difficult to clarify. Your syntax above is misleading. Perhaps it WOULD all make sense if we could reside on the other side, but we can't, so it doesn't...... I'm beginning to suspect that the scientists themselves quite literally don't "know" what they're talking about.-I take you back to Feynman. Paraphrased: If someone tells you they understand quantum theory, they lie. The amazing part is that the formulas work.