tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27938567.post6711642281605727818..comments2023-05-25T11:05:10.365-02:00Comments on Political Scientist: Political Scientisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00763391741375972410noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27938567.post-49439687591780662952010-01-20T09:13:17.995-02:002010-01-20T09:13:17.995-02:00Comment above was spam, of a rather unattractive n...Comment above was spam, of a rather unattractive nature. It has been deleted accordingly. Comment moderation will be on for a while - apologies.Political Scientisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00763391741375972410noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27938567.post-4180468625563058492010-01-19T02:54:19.466-02:002010-01-19T02:54:19.466-02:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27938567.post-25887969071239685892010-01-18T08:53:47.587-02:002010-01-18T08:53:47.587-02:00Hello Andrew - thank you for writing it!I always e...Hello Andrew - thank you for writing it!I always enjoy SF criticism, and this was a particularly fine example. Good luck with the magazine!<br /><br />Re:many worlds; I must do a post at some point on interpretations of QM (and actually defend Bohmian mechanics and make some cheap cracks at the expense of John Gribben, who has been a really problematic influence of the field IMHO). However, as I am self contracted to produce a number of posts detailed in Irresolution, so I think the odds of it coming out this year are slight. <br />Worth remembering that a surprising number of physicists get there information about philosophy of QM from pop-sci books (it couldn't be otherwise, really, there's barely enough time to compress the necessary maths to do the QM and the QM itself into a 3/4 year syllabus, without adding a lot of what is, ultimately, philosophy taught by non-philosophers, some of whom will have hobby horses), so I wouldn't worry too much about that. Have you read Speakable and Unspeakable, the collection of Bell's papers? Should I ever write a post, I will be generously quoting from it, so better to hear from the horses mouth. He outlines the differences between Bohmian (we might well say Bell-Bohmian, tho' IIRC he didn't) and many worlds. <br /><br />The main (I have several) problem I have with MW is that it is very elegant - if you assume there are, in fact, many worlds. (In the same vein, if I assume I have eggs, I could have scrambled eggs). A lot of the trouble is that this is a philosophical matter, that is not ameanable to being resolved by experiment. Perhaps this is why people get so cross about it.Political Scientisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00763391741375972410noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27938567.post-25472340009605548132010-01-17T18:37:19.742-02:002010-01-17T18:37:19.742-02:00Glad people are still reading that stuff, and also...Glad people are still reading that stuff, and also glad that someone who properly understands the physics doesn't dismiss everything I wrote as utter gibberish. My knowledge of quantum mechanics comes from weird directions - rather than from physics courses, it comes from reading papers on quantum computing by Deutsch and people like that (my main interests right now being theoretical computer science and bioinformatics) and trying to figure the maths out by myself, and then adding in a big dollop of pop-science books.<br /><br />As far as my limited understanding goes, something like the many-worlds interpretation seems neater to me than anything else - I'd intuitively *like* some sort of hidden variable because it could mean a completely deterministic universe, which would fit my own prejudices, but many worlds seems to require the fewest additional assumptions...Andrew Hickeyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07412263807838661843noreply@blogger.com