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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KonKilo who wrote (84855)	9/16/2008 1:15:57 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541164

I used "expectation" both times in the sense that the observer believes he will see a certain outcome. The problem with framing things that way is this: In QM (or science in general) the observer is an instrument (it has to quantum mechanically interact somehow) which has no belief whatsoever about the measurement it makes. The fact that there is usually some human brain somewhere in the background who is interested in the measurement result, and perhaps even might, due to its training and acquired knowledge, have belief, hope, happiness, or any other emotion in the result is irrelevant. This is what is wrong with many of the repeated versions of Schroedinger's Cat, since they are framed as though a QM event (beta decay triggering some poison release mechanism) results in a combined wave equation for the cat, which is not resolved until a human lifts the lid and looks at the cat to see if it is alive or dead. This is all wrong for a number of reasons, but the fundamental one is that the QM measurement which collapses the wave equation is the beta detector, which happens before the poison is released (indeed, it is what released or does not release the poison). QM paradoxes are seen only at the very small scale (particle scale) accept for a number of specially ordered systems,which have demonstrated QM behavior for macroscopic systems, but these are not something you are likely to bump into in real life. In real life, macroscopic systems don't exhibit QM behavior because the statistics blur it out. Hence we use different laws and equations at different scales. Writing the wave equation for a mechanical truss is not going to work for example, as a means of analysing it.