Does QM disprove realism and materialism?

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

Yes, it's an interesting model - it also rather reminded me of the classical description of the propagation of electromagnetic waves with their mutually supportive orthogonal fields...

Copenhagen interpretations seem to be losing popularity because of the ad-hoc nature of wavefunction collapse which has no formal justification, and the measurement problem. It's becoming increasingly accepted that a measurement or observation is just a particular case of quantum systems interacting.

If one drops the collapse of the wavefunction and simply accepts its unitary evolution according to the Schrödinger equation (and that observers are quantum systems too), the apparent randomness goes away and the universe has a fully deterministic description. One can even derive the Born rule that describes the probability of a particular observational outcome.

Click to expand...

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

Yes, it's an interesting model - it also rather reminded me of the classical description of the propagation of electromagnetic waves with their mutually supportive orthogonal fields...

Copenhagen interpretations seem to be losing popularity because of the ad-hoc nature of wavefunction collapse which has no formal justification, and the measurement problem. It's becoming increasingly accepted that a measurement or observation is just a particular case of quantum systems interacting.

If one drops the collapse of the wavefunction and simply accepts its unitary evolution according to the Schrödinger equation (and that observers are quantum systems too), the apparent randomness goes away and the universe has a fully deterministic description. One can even derive the Born rule that describes the probability of a particular observational outcome.

Click to expand...

Halbhh said:

The evolution of the wave equation is deterministic, but it only describes a probability of course, and that's where the interesting question about whether there are hidden local variables comes in, ala ERP, still that very same question, and the Bell Test experiments are about this, and they have been making that derterministic view of hiden local variables, aka determinism, less and less likely.

Click to expand...

Halbhh said:

Here, this background article could help also, and it has plenty of embedded links to follow up on various aspects:
Bell test experiments - Wikipedia

Click to expand...

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

You can have hidden variables if you drop locality, e.g. Bohmian pilot wave theory. But you don't need them if you allow that, rather than the superposition collapsing on interaction, the interacting system and, by decoherence, the environment, join the superposition, e.g. as in Everettian QM (although I suppose you could say the superposition itself is the hidden variables).

Click to expand...

Chriliman said:

Click to expand...

Halbhh said:

See posts #22 and #32 re Bohmian. Is there even another possible way to test Bohmian mechanics except for such a fortuitous analog (i.e., after all, doesn't Bohmian simply give identical predictions to Copenhagen)?

Click to expand...

As I wrote in #32, Bohmian seems very much still possible. The previous results (the first link in post #22) were so suggestive. But....jury's definitely out, and in QM sometimes those juries don't come in. If they could replicate a double slit result though, that would be an encouraging result for the Bohmian idea, which let's face it would be exciting to imagine as real, cause just like Einstein we all feel better to think "God doesn't play dice".

Click to expand...