Nothing collapses. A not-so-nice thing about this interpretation is that it’s incompatible with our experience unless we say that the universe itself is branching into an outcome for every observation. We don’t ever see superposition, so it must be that each branch of the universe gets its own “outcome” of the observation. This conclusion seems very strange to many people. As it happens, this interpretation also makes probability very mysterious. 14 C. Boom The third interpretation to consider is the most “classical” of the lot.
According to David Boom and his followers, the coin was definitely ‘Heads’ or definitely ‘Tails’ before you measured it. The reason is that in addition to the coin, there was also another thing: a sort of guiding probability-wave that caused the coin to land on ‘Heads’ or ‘Tails. ‘ The world evolves deterministically, and superposition, in a sense, aren’t real. 1 5 Particles Just seem to behave in a “superposition” way because we don’t have a way of monitoring everything about them. A nice thing about this interpretation is, as mentioned, that it’s very classical. Most of the mystery in quantum mechanics evaporates.
There’s nothing special about observation. The Scar¶dingier equation merely tells us how to predict how deterministic systems evolve. A not-so-nice thing about this interpretation is that in the details, it turns out to need implication. 16 Basically, that means that things can affect each other at faster than ten speed AT align, even IT tenure nowhere near can toner. I crossover ‘Heads’ on a coin here, and instantly, somehow, a coin ten light years away “becomes” ‘Tails. ‘ And there’s no obvious particle or mechanism to convey that causal signal, if it is a causal signal.
Another thing some people don’t like about this interpretation is that it seems to require the existence of an object we have no way of empirically detecting: the “pilot eave” that guides the particles to do what they do. 17 IV. Next Steps We don’t have any empirical tests that can easily decide between these and other interpretations. We might never. 18 So again, the choice between interpretations is at least partly a philosophical choice. It turns out that the choice between interpretations also has many other implications for traditional philosophical questions.
The last article in this series will take a look at some of those questions. Notes 1 Usually photons and electrons, and most commonly, spin-properties; CB. Albert 1992: an the “party’ metaphor, this is like watching a guest arrive (at TTL) through the front door before you’ve seen which item they brought, and then looking (at to) at which item they brought. Coins in the real world don’t actually end up in superposition. The reason is something called ‘despondence’: big objects such as coins interact with their environments in lots of ways, constantly, enough to push them out of superposition.
On this, see Polyhedron 2002: 43-44 and Grained 2014: S 5. However, our best physics says that in principle, a coin could be placed in a superposition of ‘Heads’ and ‘Tails. See, e. G. , O’Connell et al. 2010. That would it look like, to the observer? I have no idea. If the coin is an American quarter, would you be seeing 50% of George Washington’s face and 50% of an eagle? Would it look like a double-exposed photograph? CB. Albert 1992: 112 if. And Greene 201 1 : 207-08. There are different ways of dividing things up, but this sort of division is one of the most common in introductory-level works.
