[SEQ RERUN] Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable

MinibearRex

Today's post, Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable was originally published on 07 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

(Note: Designed to be standalone readable.) An epistle to the physicists. To probability theorists, words like "simple", "falsifiable", and "testable" have exact mathematical meanings, which are there for very strong reasons. The (minority?) faction of physicists who say that many-worlds is "not falsifiable" or that it "violates Occam's Razor" or that it is "untestable", are committing the same kind of mathematical crime as non-physicists who invent their own theories of gravity that go as inverse-cube. This is one of the reasons why I, a non-physicist, dared to talk about physics - because I saw (some!) physicists using probability theory in a way that was simply wrong. Not just criticizable, but outright mathematically wrong: 2 + 2 = 3.

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Today's post, Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable was originally published on 07 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

(Note: Designed to be standalone readable.) An epistle to the physicists. To probability theorists, words like "simple", "falsifiable", and "testable" have exact mathematical meanings, which are there for very strong reasons. The (minority?) faction of physicists who say that many-worlds is "not falsifiable" or that it "violates Occam's Razor" or that it is "untestable", are committing the same kind of mathematical crime as non-physicists who invent their own theories of gravity that go as inverse-cube. This is one of the reasons why I, a non-physicist, dared to talk about physics - because I saw (some!) physicists using probability theory in a way that was simply wrong. Not just criticizable, but outright mathematically wrong: 2 + 2 = 3.

Like which? Copenhagen breaks every physical symmetry we have if you ever let it kick in, and is identical to MWI if you don't. Some others, like the Bohm guide-wave include MWI but refuse to recognize that they did so (anything real enough to have a causal influence on reality is itself real. The guide-wave is thus real, and the One True Worldline superfluous). The bidirectional time interpretation is blatantly erroneous (measurement is not a time-symmetric process)...

I don't know much about the transactional interpretation. Maybe that stands, but I suspect it leaves open the question of just what the transactions are between (if it doesn't, then it's making testable predictions at variance with QM as it stands, like Copenhagen)

Any others?

Can you unpack your argument against Bohm? Why does a real guide-wave require multiple worlds?

1Shmi14y

It doesn't, except in the minds of confused people assigning ontological significance to a calculational prescription. No interpretation out there has more predictive power than "1. Do unitary evolution, 2. Apply Born rule".

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