[NihilumExNil]

That does very much sound like magic. The wave function is in principle just describing the probability of measuring a value, if I recall correctly. What you make of it is but an attractive theory to interpret that wavefunction after the fact. And it's not particularly satisfying. It's completely meaningless that it would have been in all places at once, if in fact, when you look, it's only ever in one place.

[GW150914]

“When you look” is the key phrase there. When you measure you’ve perturbed the system and a superposition of probabilities collapses to a single possibility. You can try to ignore the problem, but it keeps cropping up. Take for example the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e4af/e51dd7946512eb14674035...

[NihilumExNil]

I am not going to even click that. "superposition of probabilities" is not a real thing, merely a mathematical tool. The definition of probability still involves something that is going to happen. Hey that's amazing, it's the probe-ability.

edit: It's very hard for people to admit we really don't know, is what I am trying to say. I mean that's the real definition of chance, we don't know for certain. Whereas, if there is more to the field theories, more than ether, I'd really like to know, but I'm not holding my breath. Between measurement uncertainty and observer uncertainty, the models will remain just that.

[GW150914]

Well you’re allowed to believe whatever you want of course, however divorced from observation, experiment and theory it happens to be. I would just caution you against drawing such strong conclusions about a field you seem to know very little about based on what you think should be, or your intuition.

[posterboy]

Well, now I read the paper and, while I do find it interesting but don't follow the formulas, I wonder what you are trying to show me.

Removing the Beamsplitter (BSA) would only remove the ability to correlate the measurements, so how do you know that there are actually no instances of Gaussian distribution happening already at the origin, which would cause the fork at the splitter (instead of information traveling back in time, for example)?

> observation, experiment and theory

we agree on the observation and theory parts. The predictive power of the theory for experiments is duly noted, but here the object under scrutiny is way bigger than a single atom. Whereas the science around the materials used, crystallography to begin with, is way above my grade.

The language in the paper caused me a bit of trouble: "It is easy to see ...", "at the same time", "a quantum".