Epistemology of Wave Function Collapse in Quantum Physics [pdf]

arxiv.org

24 points·user_235711··7 comments

A note: This is not about standard quantum theory, but about GRW theories.

Basically it's an ad-hoc modification of quantum theory, in which you postulate that the wave function collapses at random with some probability.

As long as you say the probability is low enough, the theory is not really experimentally verifiable. (Currently there is no experimental evidence for GRW type theories.)

There is no experimental evidence that the collapse is caused by magical consciousness, either, but that doesn't stop people from perpetually claiming exactly that.

Very true, there is a lot of nonsense going on in the fundamentals of quantum theory.

But I find that GRW (or Bohmian mechanics if you're into that) doesn't add much of interest to the debate either.

There are hypotheses that say that the collapse of a quantum wave is involved in producing some sort of intelligence and in some cases consciousness. But I'm not aware of any that say that intelligence is involved in producing or guiding the collapse. See Orch-OR theory by Penrose and Hameroff.

There are also much more sane theories that involve no collapse at all (many-worlds).

For arXiv.org links, please link to the abstract page rather than directly to the PDF: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0827

Also, it's often good practice not to link to a specific version (the "v1" in the original link here), since papers are often updated with corrections or additional references. (That's sometimes desired, of course, but it's not the usual case.)

Thanks for the tips. I will definitely use them next time I post an arXiv link.

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