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by age_bronze 2508 days ago
The equations of quantum mechanics aren't random, only its interpretation, in the form of born's law.

Unitary evolution means there's neither information loss nor gain, and if there was anything random you would at the very least expect to see information gain (as new bits of information are created from the "random" result of an observation).

Randomness in quantum mechanics isn't even a hypothesis, it's an interpretation.

1 comments

Important nitpick: the equations that govern dynamics in quantum mechanics aren't random, and evolution is unitary. However, the process of "measurement" is described by a (obviously non-unitary) projection operator onto one state; the so called "collapse". If you, for example, attempt to answer the very real physical question "given two particles in with some total joined state Psi, one is measured and found to be in state Phi, what state is the other particle in?", you would have to use such an operator. There isn't anything interpretive about this, as such experiments have been done again and again. It's a standard part of the mathematical framework.

Now, whether the underlying physics is truly random, or whether it's deterministic and the projection only represents a sort of Bayesian update of prior information (a la MWI), that is indeed a matter of interpretation. And completely unfalsifiable by definition, and therefore not even really a question for physicists. It's philosophy at best.

Cosmology was once considered philosophy and totally untestable. Just saying...