Hacker News Reader

This is disappointing.

The title prompted a science (or, maybe, philosophy of science) question, but the article give only applications.

Maths don't have to be real to be useful.

The mundane answer to the philosophical question is that the frequency domain is not any less or more "real" than the time domain; they're different mathematical abstractions of change. Just like base-10 numbers are not any more or less "real" than base-2 or base-8. Carthesian coordinate locations are not any more or less "real" than polar coordinate locations. Some representations are just more convenient for specific calculations than others (mostly by simplifying specific calculations).

Yeah, I was hoping for something more along the lines of "are wave functions real".

To answer your question they aren’t

How do you know? PBR theorem justifies the idea that the wavefunction is ontological rather than epistemological

Reply on news.ycombinator.com