Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests

Are the actual papers available online? On arxiv.org?

It is indeed a stretch, but it's just supposed to be an evocative name not a perfect analogy. In particular, quantum Darwinism has a notion of fittest types of information, and this information is replicated, but it crucially does not feature a notion of mutation, so in particular it cannot result in increasing complexity/sophistication over time as produced by biological Darwinism.

I also view the apearance of classical physics as you say, but I am not sure if that rules out this concept in the article. I admittedly don't really understand what the article is saying. (It takes me alot of work to understand these things.) The author does admit that this is just an implementation of the basic laws of quantum maechanics. I suppose why this is interesting is just that in large systems the aggregate behavior does not always follow obviously from the basic rules.

I would like to write down what I considered to be the standard motivation for why the classical solution arises, which is in other words why it is more probable, as you point out.

In the Feynman path integral formalism, any paths in the system is possible, with an amplitude proprotional to the exponential of the action. (Action as in a Lagrangian). For paths that are an extremum of the action, there is the least destructive interference between neighboring paths, since there is the smallest phase change between these neighboring paths. Of course this extremum of the action is, not coincidentally, the classical solution, which is the result from the lagrangian formulation of classical machanics.

There is a limit to the precision of a position measurement of any particle, and atoms are made of many particles. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that the uncertainty of the position and momentum of a particle are related. In particular, the product of the errors has a constant lower bound. Visually, if you think of (1d) position and (1d) momentum plotted on a 2d graph, then Heisenberg's principle means that particles are not points, but rectangles with a minimum area.

I know it’s just an off the cuff example, but that one seems easy to argue against -- in the double slit experiment, the particle is perceived to go through both slits, not through the middle.

I know this is a joke, but QD specifically excludes the requirement of a living observer.

The rebuttal takes a view which is close to my heart—but [Motl] puts it so viciously, dismisses without genuine inquiry or curiosity the intriguing claims of the article, and plays so much faster and looser with his ideas than the author he critiques—you can taste his contrition. Ball and [Motl] are probably both mistaken about what QD actually explains.

Edit: fixed names

Motl is often too agressive and not fair to the target of his critiques, but when it's about quantamagazine vs. Motl he's the safe bet. (I've not read neither in this case, though.)

This rebuttal is very weak. It’s attacking straw men, not really addressing the original article at all.

For example, Motl objects to Ball’s The world we’re living in sure doesn’t feel quantum mechanical by quoting himself(!): some people keep on saying that it "looks like" there must be a classical mechanism beneath the quantum phenomena.

That’s a ludicrous misreading of the article. Ball isn’t claiming that nature is somehow secretly classical, he’s saying it is quantum but looks classical in everyday life. Ball is in fact making the same claim as Motl himself, if only Motl could see it.

Or for another example, Motl objects to Ball’s How do quantum probabilities coalesce into the sharp focus of the classical world? and insists that they do not in fact coalesce: Statements about big objects' properties may "look" certain because quantum mechanics may predict probabilities to be 99.9999% or higher [...] But quantum mechanics never allows the certainty to go to 100%

Again, Motl is in violent agreement with Ball! The whole thrust of the article is that wave function collapse is not a special process outside of known quantum mechanics, doesn’t depend on consciousness, and doesn’t require an observer. It’s a statistical process where the probability of seeing a singular, classical-like state will tend towards 1 as a system interacts with its environment and decoheres.

And there are plenty more such examples. It seems like Motl in fact agrees with the article, but objects to... the tone for some reason?

Or maybe he just thinks it’s trivial? If so, I don’t think that’s fair at all, as wave function collapse really is widely depicted as highly mysterious, in pop science circles at least.

It depends on point of view.

Would the Universe exist if there were no conscious beings to observe it?

Don't. I just got my PhD (working on quantum computing at a good school) and I do not really get the point they are making. It is interesting, but esoteric even for people working in related fields.

However, it is a great opportunity to start learning more about it!

It can be made to work in at least some cases -- for example, QED is a theory about how individual photons and electrons behave that’s in truly fantastic agreement with experimental results.

There’s a deep philosophical question about whether we can every truly learn the real fundamental laws of nature, sure; but it certainly looks like we can get very very close, perhaps arbitrarily close.