quantum mechanics: answers? (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, September 15, 2013, 17:17 (4088 days ago) @ David Turell

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.-DAVID: Because I think the universe runs on information supplied by the Creator.-I can't find any mention of a Creator in the article, but as I pointed out earlier, Fuchs insisted that these mathematical constructs are just a way to quantify "observers' personal information, expectations, degrees of belief." Presumably, then, "information causality" means whatever you want it to mean.-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!-DAVID: Again, these folks don't know or care about Ruth's concepts. I don't think they reject as ignore other approaches.-QUOTE: "He rejected the idea, held by many in the field, that wave functions, entanglement and all the rest represent something real out in the world." You could hardly have a more specific rejection. It links up with your own statement that quantum characteristics are not "totally part of our reality", but appears to contradict Ruth's description of 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."
 
Dhw: I'm beginning to suspect that the scientists themselves quite literally don't "know" what they're talking about.-DAVID: 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.-I do wish they would at least lie coherently.