Re: Is State Vector Reduction a 'Process'?
- From: rof@xxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 21:02:06 +0000 (UTC)
Arnold Neumaier <Arnold.Neumaier@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>rof@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> Aaron Bergman <abergman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>
>>>In article <1116090071.291677.269500@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
>>>"Souvik" <souvik1982@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>>>Is state-vector reduction (or collapse of the wavefunction) a physical
>>>>process?
>>
>>>No one knows.
>>
>> Indeed, although there are a lot of people who claim they do. Quantum
>> mechanics has a psychological effect similar to metaphysics - when
>> otherwise honest people talk about it, they omit, distort and twist
>> the truth to promote their own interpretation. They'll give you
>> a firm but confusing answer, without informing you that a significant
>> fraction of physicists (say, over 50%) disagree with it.
>Do you think truth is a matter of majority votes???
>Truth is rather a matter of listening to the different sides
>of a controversy and then choosing the best.
There are some things, like the canon of mathematics, classical
mechanics, and the formalism of quantum mechanics which are
well-established. There are other things, like the interpretation
of quantum mechanics, which aren't. It is difficult for a non-expert
to know in advance which areas are well-established, where is no
controversy, and in which areas there is a controversy among experts. If
such a person asks a question like "Is state-vector reduction a
physical process?", then a physicist who responds by saying "No it
isn't," without adding that this answer is merely his own opinion,
is doing the inquirer a disservice.
Most questions about physics have a clear, well-established
answer which can be found simply by asking a physicist, and only
the expert can be expected to know which questions are
exceptions to this general rule. A physicist who gives an
apparently straightforward, if slightly confusing, answer
to a question about physics, without making it clear that
this question has an unusual status in physics, that,
unlike most questions in physics, this one has no
well-established answer, is implicitly telling the
person that this question is just like other questions
in physics, that is has a well-established answer, and
that in fact the answer being given is the well-established
one.
Now this is what you did, and you interpreted my post as an attack
on you, became angry, and treated me to three question marks and a
lecture about how everything is mere opinion and belief:
>Everything called
>knowledge is in fact a set of beliefs of the person claiming it.
Readers of this post will be very well aware that certain knowledge,
for example knowledge of definitions, of mathematical theorems of
which one has seen the proof, and of many statements about physics,
are not merely beliefs. When I say that Newton's third law states
that action and reaction are equal in magnitude, I am not merely
expressing my personal belief, for that is exactly what the third
law says. When I say that a Banach space is a normed, complete
vector space, I am not merely giving my opinion on the matter.
Claiming that everything is opinion and nothing is well-established
is a practice of those who oppose science. "Evolution is a theory
not a fact," they say.
This is, of course, all beside the point, but serves to illustrate
my original point, which was that, when it comes to interpreting
quantum mechanics, otherwise honest people become less honest. I
noticed this first in myself and then in others. Only by explicitly
acknowledging this and trying to overcome it are we likely to make
progress. Pretending that it's not true and trying to promote our
own views through fighting against others with aggressive punctuation
only makes the situation worse.
R.
.
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