Quantum theorem shakes foundations

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The universe hates to think of itself as finite, and yet physicists love to try to make it finite

Talk about 2 different interpretations of PBR theorem:

Leifer:


Oscar Dahlsten:

The Everett many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the only valid model.

The Universe is not sentient although there are sentient beings in it.

ruveyn

The universe is sentient.

Where is its center of intelligence. Where is the "brain". What are the "nerves" And what proof do you have?

ruveyn

Whether the universe is sentient or not, I do not know, but I’d say your take on universe, ruveyn, is a bit too human organ oriented. “Brains”…? “Center of intelligence”…?

Take plants for example. Research has shown that they have some cognition.

Indeed. Plants do have tropism. They just love to lean toward the light, for example. But plants are -living things-. The cosmos is mostly non-living. Aside from Dark Matter (whatever that is) what there is mostly is hydrogen and hydrogen is not alive.

ruveyn

Regarding the plants, I wasn’t talking about tropism… As an example a linked research paper on the matter: Green plants as intelligent organisms.

l:

Intelligent blooming idiots? I will believe angels emerge from my rectum when I fart, before I believe that.

ruveyn

The paper, thought by some to be one of the most important in quantum foundations in decades, was finally published last week in Nature Physics (M. F. Pusey, J. Barrett & T. Rudolph Nature Phys. http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v8/ ... s2309.html 2012), enabling the authors, who had been concerned about violating the journal’s embargo, to speak about it publicly for the first time. They say that the mathematics leaves no doubt that the wavefunction is not just a statistical tool, but rather, a real, objective state of a quantum system. “People have become emotionally attached to positions that they defend with vague arguments,” says Jonathan Barrett, one of the authors and a physicist at Royal Holloway, University of London. “It’s better to have a theorem.”...

Barrett and his colleagues are following the approach of physicist John Bell, who in 1964 proved that quantum mechanics has another counterintuitive implication: that measurements on one particle can influence the state of another, distant particle, faster than the speed of light should allow. Bell’s was a ‘no-go’ theorem: its strategy was to show that theories that do not allow faster-than-light influences cannot reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. Similarly, the theorem proposed by Barrett and his colleagues shows that theories that treat the wavefunction in terms of lack of knowledge of a system’s physical state will also fail to reproduce those predictions. Given how well-confirmed quantum mechanics is, the theorem suggests that such epistemic theories are wrong. “I hope this will take its place alongside Bell’s theorem,” says Barrett.

Because it is incompatible with quantum mechanics, the theorem also raises a deeper question: could quantum mechanics be wrong? Everyone assumes that it reigns supreme, but there is always a possibility that it could be overturned. So Barrett is now working with experimentalists to check predictions that differ between the theory and the epistemic accounts it conflicts with. “We don’t expect quantum mechanics would fail this test, but we should still do it,” he says.

Does that mean you do not accept the Everett interpretation?