Sunday, September 23, 2018

New comment by kgwgk in "The Mathematics of Quantum Mechanics [pdf]"

This reminds me of Peter Woit, a theoretical physicist who has written a book on "Quantum Theory, Groups and Representations", asking if QM is a probabilistic theory.

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10533

By the way, this example illustrates the point I made in another comment: you can have a long career in physics and even become professor of theoretical physics without ever caring about the interpretation of QM.

Edit: I can't resist copying the opening of a recent comment in that thread.

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John Baez says:

September 18, 2018 at 4:05 pm

Peter Woit wrote:

"The state of the world is described at a fixed time by a state vector, which evolves unitarily by the Schrodinger equation. No probability here."

And perhaps no physics here, either, unless we say how the state of the world is described by that vector: that is, how we can use the vector to make predictions of experimental results.

(A long and insightful comment by Baez follows)



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