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by japanuspus
1567 days ago
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As a former quantum physicist who has just decided to go back into quantum computing, this was my take as well: Introductory quantum physics courses may still include wave-function collapse and all that nonsense, but I have not met many physicists who use this as a mental model. To be a bit more specific as to how _decoherence_ solves this, one way to see it is that classicality (i.e. observables having specific values) is an emergent property in the limit of near-infinite degrees of freedom in the same way that e.g. thermodynamic properties (temperature etc.) are emergent properties of classical systems in the limit of near-infinite degrees of freedom. Putting it on the edge, claiming that quantum theory is at a dead end is like claiming statistical physics is at a dead end. One of my personal favorites for how to formalize this is the work on "pointer states" by Wojciech H. Zurek. There is a freely available Physics Today articls [0], and you can find surveys of further work e.g. in the introduction of [1]. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0306072 Zurek, Decoherence and the transition from quantum to classical -- REVISITED
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.04101 Brasil, Understanding the Pointer States |
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But could we then please stop teaching the collapse nonsense to first year students?
The logical inconsistencies of the collapse interpretation are an insult to their intellect.