Seriously though, I don't actually know much about QM, I only know the One Thing that makes the rest of QM easy to understand (kind of like knowing Lisp makes the rest of computer programming easy to understand).
In case you want to know that One Thing, it's written up here: http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
There's also a movie version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc
When I first wrote the paper 15 years ago I submitted it to Physics Today. It was rejected, not because it was wrong, but because the reviewers thought that it was nothing new, that everyone already knew this stuff. Since then the physics community has bifurcated rather neatly into two camps: the ones who agree with the PT reviewers, and the ones who think I'm a "category 5 loon" (that was Lubos Motl's term). Personally, I think the existence of people like Motl and your anonymous "dismissive" QFT experts -- and the fact that I can still stump card-carrying physicists with the EPRG paradox -- falsifies the hypothesis that "everyone already knows this stuff."
I will also say, because I'm feeling rather annoying by all this, that in 15 years no one has ever pointed out any actual mistakes in the paper (except for a few typos).
So I just wanted to ask in respect of "no one has ever pointed out any actual mistakes" - have you seen the stackexchange discussion at http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/208609/does-the-f... , and do you have any comment on the assertion there that your statement of EPRG misses the point that "even if Alice does let her system produce interference, the other system will not produce interference either"?
The thing that people who critique my work generally miss is that it is not about physics, it's about pedagogy. It's about how the physics is explained. Everyone agrees on the physics. It's the explanation that is at issue. The whole first half of the talk is the problem statement.
(God damn this is annoying: "I'm afraid I won't have time to critique whatever it is he says in the second half of the video." Well, the second half is where I explain why the EPRG paradox doesn't actually work. By the time I gave that talk I already knew that people got this wrong, so I went to great lengths to highlight the fact that EPRG was a straw man. And then people jump into the middle of the video, see the story out of context, and say "This is wrong." Well, duh, of course it's wrong. That's the whole fucking point!)
I did suspect that "Garret then claims that this can be used for superluminal communication" missed that you were using this as a kind of reductio, but I then took it to mean that your reductio was not working how you expected it to. Probably I should re-watch the video - it's been a couple of years.
> your reductio was not working how you expected it to
Actually, it pretty much works exactly how I expected, and has for 25 years (I started down this road in 1990 when the EPRG paradox first occurred to me. It took me ten years to find someone who knew the answer.)
The problem is when people look at EPRG out of context and think that my thesis is that I've invented FTL and therefore I am the World's Greatest Physicist. (And now some moron is probably going to cite this very comment and say that I've claimed to be the Worlds Greatest Physicist because they saw that I wrote "... I am the World's Greatest Physicist" and they don't have time to read the part that they elided.)
Edit: downvote me all you like, but at least be accurate. I'm referring to the title of the tech talk video linked several times in this thread: "The Quantum Conspiracy: What Popularizers of QM Don't Want You to Know"
But I think you give too short a shrift to Many-Worlds because it's not intuitive to you. Plenty of things about QM are not intuitive; I don't think that's sufficient reason to reject it.
[UPDATE] Yes, my recollection is correct. Go watch it again starting at the 58 minute mark or a little earlier.
just to confirm my interpretation, its saying that:
- fundamentally the universe is governed by quantum mechanics
- classical physics doesn't truly exist
- the classical physics we see and intuit can be explained by entropy (information theory) of the quantum state
- measurement and entanglement are the same in the sense that both imparts "information" into the system. this in effect acts as a "filter", an example of which is the double-slit experiment where the waves are "filtered" to particles when being measured
- our conscious mind is a classical construct so its naturally difficult to intuit quantum laws
is that mostly correct? also, how popular is this theory in the physics community?
Mostly.
> also, how popular is this theory in the physics community?
Not very. The fashionable way to think about this stuff is something called "decoherence" which really amounts to the same thing but phrased in different terms.
so if i were to do further research into this, I would use the keyword "decoherence"?
also not being a physicist, could I naively think this would be a good candidate for the "theory of everything"?
Decoherence, relational quantum mechanics, quantum information theory, the Von Neuman measurement model -- all of these turn out to be the same thing.
> also not being a physicist, could I naively think this would be a good candidate for the "theory of everything"?
No, the "theory of everything" refers to the unification of quantum mechanics and relativity. Completely different topic.