Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by newpavlov 656 days ago
It's not a some sort of particle conspiracy. The idea is not so different from the Laplace's demon. We have an initial state of the Universe at the moment of Big Bang (a PRNG seed, if you will) and a set of differential equations (QM is not different in this regard). Theoretically, it allows the demon to predict everything in the Universe. The wave nature of QM equations introduces a certain quirk to it, but, effectively, with your example the breakfast was already "preordained" at the moment of the Universe creation.

Surprisingly, this idea makes many physicists very umcomfortable and they start to object to SD using philosophical arguments about "free will".

1 comments

It should make anyone uncomfortable (a trait it shares with all other known interpretations of QM). It implies a degree of correlelation across many different levels of abstraction which basically nothing else in physics does. As the name implies it's not just an abstract sense of determinism but one which tips the scales of everything at every level towards a specific outcome.
>one which tips the scales of everything at every level towards a specific outcome

According to the SD, this is nothing more than an artifact of splitting an entagled system into an "observer" and an "observed" parts. The linked video covers this part relatively well, the "randomness" of quantum measurment is nothing more than an artifact of artificial split of the Universe done by humans.