Re: confused w/ decoherence

Thanks very much for all those illuminating points. There are two more
questions:

1) So you say that in the "frictionless case," (4) is correct for a
pure state. Then it means that the results of successive experiments
are independent of the previous ones (or am I wrong?) Then there is no
wave function reduction at this level at all, whatever interpretation
we choose. This is weird (and perhaps measurable), though I don't know
whether those traditional experiments have really tested this.

By the way, honestly, what you/they are doing here is giving up the
concept of wave function reduction (which is not a unitary operation
and can't be achieved by Hamiltonian time evolution) but then
postulating a new principle, namely (4), which is again non-unitary
(as opposed to (2) which is the Hamiltonian evolution). I mean
measurement still remains weird. I think the solution should have been
to abandon the entire concept of measurement in the "frictionless"
world: It must necessarily be a decoherent process.

2) Is there a proof that for complicated enough entanglements, (6)
resembles what we would expect from wave function collapse? As this
might be a limiting proof (full resemblance only when N --- the number
of environment's components --- goes to infinity), are there testable
disagreements with the wave function reduction principle?

Thanks again for attention.

.

Relevant Pages

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