There's no need for Wave Function collapse or Measurement in Quantum Mechanics

The system changes over time following probabilistic rules.
If you flip a coin once there i a 50% chance of it being heads or tails.
If you flip a coin a trillion times it will come up heads 28 times in a row at some point.

a reply to: Arbitrageur


A simple sine wave has 50% of its waveform as positive amplitude and 50% negative amplitude and this would come into play with wave constructive and destructive interference patterns that follow a probability function.

For a trillion coin flips you would expect the longest run of all heads or all tails to be about 38 or 39 and in the quantum world there may be processes that are governed by run probability.

There are less than 1000 runs of 28 in a sample size of a trillion, would you get the same number of runs of 20 after flipping a billion times as you do with runs of 28 after flipping a trillion times?

Quantum coin flipping analogues might return exact values with very little randomness.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

You quoted Dyson as saying:

Unfortunately, people writing about quantum mechanics often use the phrase "collapse of the wave-function" to describe what happens when an object is observed. This phrase gives a misleading idea that the wave-function itself is a physical object. A physical object can collapse when it bumps into an obstacle. But a wave-function cannot be a physical object. A wave-function is a description of a probability, and a probability is a statement of ignorance. Ignorance is not a physical object, and neither is a wave-function. When new knowledge displaces ignorance, the wave-function does not collapse; it merely becomes irrelevant.

I have to disagree with this.

There's evidence that shows the wave function is real yet non physical and some people say that it's physical.

The wave-function is real but nonphysical: A view from counterfactual quantum cryptography

Counterfactual quantum cryptography (CQC) is used here as a tool to assess the status of the quantum state: Is it real/ontic (an objective state of Nature) or epistemic (a state of the observer's knowledge)? In contrast to recent approaches to wave function ontology, that are based on realist models of quantum theory, here we recast the question as a problem of communication between a sender (Bob), who uses interaction-free measurements, and a receiver (Alice), who observes an interference pattern in a Mach-Zehnder set-up. An advantage of our approach is that it allows us to define the concept of "physical", apart from "real". In instances of counterfactual quantum communication, reality is ascribed to the interaction-freely measured wave function (ψ) because Alice deterministically infers Bob's measurement. On the other hand, ψ does not correspond to the physical transmission of a particle because it produced no detection on Bob's apparatus. We therefore conclude that the wave function in this case (and by extension, generally) is real, but not physical. Characteristically for classical phenomena, the reality and physicality of objects are equivalent, whereas for quantum phenomena, the former is strictly weaker. As a concrete application of this idea, the nonphysical reality of the wavefunction is shown to be the basic nonclassical phenomenon that underlies the security of CQC.

arxiv.org...

A test later confirmed this and transferred information between points A and points B without a physical particle. An interesting question to answer next is can this transmission of information on the phase part of the wave function occur faster than light.

Direct counterfactual communication via quantum Zeno effect

Significance

Recent theoretical studies have shown that quantum mechanics allows counterfactual communication, even without actual transmission of physical particles, which raised a heated debate on its interpretation. Although several papers have been published on the theoretical aspects of the subject, a faithful experimental demonstration is missing. Here, by using the quantum Zeno effect and a single-photon source, direct communication without carrier particle transmission is implemented successfully. We experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of direct counterfactual communication with the current technique. The results of our work can help deepen the understanding of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, our experimental scheme is applicable to other quantum technologies, such as imaging and state preparation.

Abstract

Intuition from our everyday lives gives rise to the belief that information exchanged between remote parties is carried by physical particles. Surprisingly, in a recent theoretical study [Salih H, Li ZH, Al-Amri M, Zubairy MS (2013) Phys Rev Lett 110:170502], quantum mechanics was found to allow for communication, even without the actual transmission of physical particles. From the viewpoint of communication, this mystery stems from a (nonintuitive) fundamental concept in quantum mechanics—wave-particle duality. All particles can be described fully by wave functions. To determine whether light appears in a channel, one refers to the amplitude of its wave function. However, in counterfactual communication, information is carried by the phase part of the wave function. Using a single-photon source, we experimentally demonstrate the counterfactual communication and successfully transfer a monochrome bitmap from one location to another by using a nested version of the quantum Zeno effect.

www.pnas.org...

So, in the case of Wigner's Friend, in the lab, he can collapse his wave function so to speak when he carries out a measurement. Wigner outside of the lab can look at the same particle and get an interference pattern and come to the conclusion that his friend hasn't carried out a measurement.

If the wave function is just a mathematical tool, why doesn't Wigner and his friend get the same outcome? Again, information went from point A to point B on the phase part of the wave function which is supposed to be non physical.

Here's more:

Quantum Theory's 'Wavefunction' Found to Be Real Physical Entity

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on November 14 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents--with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.

"I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper," says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina.

www.scientificamerican.com...

One more:

Wave function gets real in quantum experiment

Now, Eric Cavalcanti at the University of Sydney and Alessandro Fedrizzi at the University of Queensland, both in Australia, and their colleagues have made a measurement of the reality of the quantum wave function. Their results rule out a large class of interpretations of quantum mechanics and suggest that if there is any objective description of the world, the famous wave function is part of it: Schrödinger’s cat actually is both dead and alive.

“In my opinion, this is the first experiment to place significant bounds on the viability of an epistemic interpretation of the quantum state,” says Matthew Leifer at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada.

The experiment relies on the quantum properties of something that could be in one of two states, as long as the states are not complete opposites of each other: like a photon that is polarised vertically or on a diagonal, but not horizontally. If the wave function is real, then a single experiment should not be able to determine its polarisation – it can have both until you take more measurements.

CONT'D

Alternatively, if the wave function is not real, then there is no fuzziness and the photon is in a single polarisation state all along. The researchers published a mathematical proof last year showing that, in this case, each measurement you make reveals some information about the polarisation.

In a complicated setup that involved pairs of photons and hundreds of very accurate measurements, the team showed that the wave function must be real: not enough information could be gained about the polarisation of the photons to imply they were in particular states before measurement.

www.newscientist.com...

This is something we have known for awhile but people just don't want to accept it. The quantum system is in superposition prior to observation. It's not in one state and we're just ignorant as to what state it's in.

The probabilities exist even after decoherence. They don't go away. The math says this and we have built technologies based on a quantum system being in two different states at the same time, not one state and we're just ignorant about it.

I will give you an example:

Ignorance is having a deck of cards and you're ignorant as to the first card in the deck you will turn over. You turn over the first card and observe an Ace of Diamonds. You have observed one state of the deck of cards but the rest of the deck of cards still exist!

If I roll a 7 on a pair of dice, the other numbers on the dice still exist after the roll. Before the roll, I was ignorant about what number the dice would land on, after the roll I'm certain it's a 7. That's only true for that moment. The next roll could be different. Again, even though I roll a 7, all of the numbers on the dice still exist.

Now let's say you have a hypothetical quantum deck of cards.

Before you turn over the first card, all probable states or cards exist. When you turn over the first card, you observe an Ace of Diamonds just like before but with the quantum deck of cards, the other cards just vanish. You only have the one card in your hand. Where did the other probabilities go?

It's like if I flip a coin and get heads. I'm just observing heads at that moment. At 1:42 P.M. the coin landed on heads. This doesn't mean tails doesn't exist because I observe heads at that moment.

Wave function collapse is a postulate of QM because people can't accept what it says.

It tells us that the probable states of the wave function exist even after a measurement. Many people have just said this can't be true because we can't see these other probable states after we observe the state the system is in.

So either there's some objective collapse cause by quantum gravity as Penrose supports. This is getting harder to accept as bigger objects are put into Schrodinger Cat states. You then say consciousness or something else cause collapse but again, there's no evidence of any collapse of these probabilities. They don't go anywhere.

This is why a Relational interpretation is the best one so far. It's the only interpretation with observed evidence to support it with the recent Wigner's friend experiment.

Relational interpretation is essentially the many worlds interpretation but it's observer dependent. Everett added a universal wave function in an ad hoc way to make his theory observer independent. There's no evidence of a universal wave function and there can't be so it's not science. You would need a superobserver outside of the universe, that could never interact with the multiverse but can do an interference measurement to show many universes in superposition.

Observer dependent means we're the superobservers interacting with these universes.

a reply to: neoholographic

David Deutsch goes as far as saying the many worlds phenomena can be manipulated retro-causal.

'State an explanation [publicly, so that it can be dated and verified by others later] that remains invariant [in the face of apparent change, new information, or unexpected conditions]'

Similar stuff I've read from Jack Sarfatti, which leads me to believe there is a subjective aspect to the phenomena that makes it not universally experienced.

The confusion comes as the MW theory is more often a Jungian knapsack problem rather than an objective quantum state in physical superposition.

a reply to: neoholographic

First of all: in QM a nanosecond is a very long time. These tiny suckers are fast and constantly changing.
Second: what we call "particle" is basically the most "dense", or "energetic" crest of the wave. (the true nature of my metaphorical "dense and energetic" is so far undefined)
3rd + 4th: Pauli exclusion principle and Laplace's demon in an extrapolated version tell us that in a snapshot of time approaching zero, you could tell the state of all wave-particles in any system up to the universe because

harmony.

We just can't because we lack the technology for both detection and calculations.


I mean mathmatically speaking, the sum of all probabilities in stochastics is always 1.
If you get infinity you #ed up big time.
That's both philosophically true and literally also.

To think the universe, or a wave-particle gives a damn about an observer or superobserver is just beyond silly.
That's telling about the religious indoctrination of those who think it and maybe has psychological value but in physics that's just absurd.
The decisive factor is simply time.

And again: stop confusing the mathmatical model with the object it describes.
To give you an example 2+2= 4, always, but if you got apples all with slightly different mass, that 4 can be 560 g one time and 723 g another time and 684 g and...
Or in this case, the lack of precision leads to the uncertainty of propbability. In my example you get a possibility interval of g, in QM you get a propbability wave because it's an interval of t.


And just for fun, I would like to add that Schrödinger's cat being both alive and dead at the same time is also only possible if you don't know exactly the half-life period (Oh look an interval of t again) and about what point in time you're talking about.
Superposition= lazy and ignorant

a reply to: Peeple

Superposition= lazy and ignorant

Suppose we represent letters with numbers, you could code JOHN as 10 15 8 14 If we subtract the 8 from the 14 we have JOF because we are ignorant about the H which deconstructs with the N when viewed as F.

There is no time at all used in this superposition example.

Zero point energy analysis could not be done ahead of Castle Bravo according to the history books because of superposition taking less time than imaginable.

A Photon represented in 2d as -Y Gluon +Y is also a propagating wave.

The Gluon is an entanglement of a particle. And holds the information as to what particle it represents. Y Photon in this case.

Upon detection, observation, annihilation of a wave. The Gluon provides the information.

If correct. The Gluon would be an integral piece of particles.

The 2d representation could be simplified to - Y +. Where, upon collapse of a wave. The Gluon (Y) provides info. While the - and + carry on independently of each other. The - and +. (I have been calling charges). Can entangle again with each other. Or, where many - and +'s occur. They could entangle/partner up with another - or +. When entangled/partnered. The partnership is represented by a Gluon.

The - and +'s are Neutrino's. They travel at up to c. Can be independent of each other. Or entangled/partnered up. And are integral to all particles. Pro or anti.

They create a wave as they travel. Which leaves a disturbance in the fabric of space. When the disturbances cross. An entanglement can occur. But seems a fairly rare event at larger scale. More common at smaller scale.

So. The representation/info of the particle being carried by the Gluon in a wave function driven by entangled Neutrino's is my thought.

a reply to: neoholographic

I was counting cards at the Casino and noticed that card had already been played by Goethe (H or .se) so of course I knew the German woman with the chicken was going to be played. I'm not pissed about the decision.