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Originally Posted by
mal4mac
So to an "outsider", and even with a physics degree I count myself as an outsider, it can only look like you are tub thumping for your favourite interpretation. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't see you having any success in persuading anyone in this thread that MW is *the* true description of reality. Even if you did, it's the wrong tack! You need to do what Eddington did with GR, he moved heaven & earth to perform the eclipse experiment that persuaded (just about) all physicists that GR was correct, and the public (me, YesNo, et. al.) then followed along in admiring GR as a great theory. So why not devote all the energy you put into these threads into devising an experiment that shows MW to be the one true theory? Or if you think the evidence is already there, why not devote your time to convincing the doubting physicists, those are the ones who will raise you to special status if you succeed! Not me and YesNo.
Perhaps I'm "tubthumping" to an extent, but you won't find anything I've claimed to be untrue. Plus, go back to less than a year ago and you'll find that I was very much on the fence on this issue. It took me reading a lot into it to realize that it was the best interpretation by, like, a whole lot. Even now, though, I'm not insisting that MW HAS to be true, what I'm saying is that, thus far, all the evidence is in favor of MW and it is by far the most
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Time and again, we’ve managed to show that larger and larger objects can be in multiple states, using the double slit experiment or variations of it. At last check, the double slit experiment was successfully preformed on C60F48, which has fully 108 atoms, or 2,424 protons, neutrons, and electrons. The entire molecule (actually, thousands of them) actually interfered with itself, demonstrating the ability to be in multiple states.
Which raises the question: what’s the damn problem? Everything that can be tested has demonstrated quantum superposition, so why not just extend that to “everything obeys the same quantum mechanical laws, including superposition.”? Why not indeed?
One may be tempted to say “the physics at small scales is just different!”. Fair enough. However, there are no physical laws that work differently on different scales. For example, at very small scales water acts like honey, and to swim you need to use things like flagella. At the other end of the scale (our scale) water behaves… like water, and things like fins and flippers suddenly work really well, but flagella don’t. However, the same physical laws (specifically, the Navier-Stokes equation) govern everything.
More generally, all laws apply at all scales, it’s just a question of degree. Relativity works at all velocities, but you don’t notice the weird effects until you’re moving really fast. What we call “Newton’s laws” are just an approximation that work at low speeds.
If the Copenhagen “size argument” (that larger objects somehow have different laws) holds up, it’ll be the first of its kind.
You may also be interested in reading this:
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When we turn our attention to macroscopic phenomena, our sight is obscured. We cannot experiment on the wavefunction of a human in the way that we can experiment on the wavefunction of a hydrogen atom. In no case can you actually read off the wavefunction with a little quantum scanner. But in the case of, say, a human, the size of the entire organism defeats our ability to perform precise calculations or precise experiments—we cannot confirm that the quantum equations are being obeyed in precise detail.
We know that phenomena commonly thought of as "quantum" do not just disappear when many microscopic objects are aggregated. Lasers put out a flood of coherent photons, rather than, say, doing something completely different. Atoms have the chemical characteristics that quantum theory says they should, enabling them to aggregate into the stable molecules making up a human.
So in one sense, we have a great deal of evidence that quantum laws are aggregating to the macroscopic level without too much difference. Bulk chemistry still works.
But we cannot directly verify that the particles making up a human, have an aggregate wavefunction that behaves exactly the way the simplest quantum laws say. Oh, we know that molecules and atoms don't disintegrate, we know that macroscopic mirrors still reflect from the middle. We can get many high-level predictions from the assumption that the microscopic and the macroscopic are governed by the same laws, and every prediction tested has come true.
But if someone were to claim that the macroscopic quantum picture, differs from the microscopic one, in some as-yet-untestable detail—something that only shows up at the unmeasurable 20th decimal place of microscopic interactions, but aggregates into something bigger for macroscopic interactions—well, we can't prove they're wrong. It is Occam's Razor that says, "There are zillions of new fundamental laws you could postulate in the 20th decimal place; why are you even thinking about this one?"
FWIW, I'm not a physicist myself, so I have no hope of convincing any scientist of authority that MW is the best interp. In fact, I haven't formally studied science since high school. I'm just an interested amateur. I look to those much smarter than myself to tell me how reality works, and I try my hardest to cross-check what they say against what other smart people say that disagree. MW is one of those cases where I eventually realized there were no good arguments against what it's fundamentally claiming. Those that do argue against it seem to be arguing wholly against what it implies, not what against it claims. EG, you can read over 