“There’s more than just two schools of thought on what wave functions mean.”

To pick a nit, which you do often, There really isn’t any disagreement as to what the wavefunctions are: they are a probability distribution for a system that comes from solving the Schrodinger equation. The real question is what is a measurement? Mathematically it’s simple: operate on the wavefunction with the appropriate operator and get a number. Classic eigenfunction/eigenvalue case. The conundrum is when someone does something like [operator]*wavefunction = value*waverfunction” what is being described mathematically is a measurement. Defining what constitutes that measurement is where we go off into Copehagen, many worlds, etc.

After “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy” Douglas Adams went on to write “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.” Gently solves crimes based on the interconnectedness of all things.
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We solve the whole crime. We find the whole person. Please leave a message after the pretentious whale song.

–Dirk Gently’s Detective Agency’s answering machine
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Perhaps not surprisingly, Dirk Gently got his start as a detective by solving “The Mystery of Schrödinger’s Cat.”

–“Dirk Gently – Schrödinger’s Cat”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKG_Q8GnIlo

Gently claimed that after the researchers opened the box, the cat was neither alive nor dead, but missing. He deduced she had simply grown bored of being locked in a box with poisonous gas and escaped through the window.

In this morning’s newspaper, Thomas Friedman has spoken, to the effect that the only question will be how big a plate of crow Trump has to eat in order to escape from Iran, and will he lie and claim it’s actually lobster, or it’s steak?

— Ray van Dune

When looking at the ‘news’ coverage, there’s a useful and relevant example from a few years ago that gives perspective. Remember when de Santis was tangling with the Disney Corp. over the Reedy Creek Improvement Zone (i.e. Disney’s corporate fief in Florida)?

It went on month after month, and most of the news coverage was (naturally) hostile to de Santis. Every time Disney made a legal move, the coverage would gloatingly explain how the Disney execs were making fools of de Santis, outsmarting him on every side, and how Disney was so beloved that he had lost before he started.

In actual fact, de Santis had the upper hand on Disney Corp. from start to finish. Florida State law was on his side. Disney tried to sue him in Federal Court on free speech grounds, but doing so automatically undercut their legal arguments in State Court.

(The basis of their legal case in Florida State Court was that Reedy Creek Improvement District was not Walt Disney Corporation. But de Santis, legally, was moving against Reedy Creek. So, a Federal claim that de Santis was retaliating against Disney by trying to dissolve Reedy Creek would only hold water if Disney=Reedy Creek Improvement District.)

But you wouldn’t have known that from watching the day-to-day coverage, which maintained constantly that de Santis was trapped, defeated, overmatched, the only question was his exit strategy. Then, suddenly, it was over and de Santis had won.

Of course he was always going to win, like I said, he was holding most of the cards from day one. It was just that the press was reporting the opposite. Probably out of both knowing deception and genuine ignorance.

What the lefty press was doing then with de Santis, and is doing now with Trump, is not reporting at all. They’re cheerleading. Rallying the Democratic faithful and urging the Dem players to fighter harder. Always remember that when evaluating their ‘coverage’.

The collapse of the wavefunction is an ongoing problem. One group including Bohr, Wheeler, et al say consciousness is needed to break the Von Neumann chain of wavefunction collapse.

— physicsguy

Which also begs the question of what constitutes an ‘observer’ and ‘consciousness’.

For ex, can the Schrodinger’s Cat itself be an Observer?

Plus, the relationship between observation and time. Presumably there was a time before there was consciousness, but the universe operated on some level then. Of course, the nature of time is mysterious, too.

You could imagine, 500 years ago, people having similar arguments about if epicycles and deferents are really crystal rods and spheres or what are they. Their math worked in that they knew where the planets were going to be in advance. Other math also worked, math that didn’t agree with crystal spheres and whatnot, the math we used to launch the Voyage probes.

So many-worlds and wave function collapse and pilot waves and what have you, they are interesting to talk about between bong rips, but unless they make a physical prediction and they’re all different and testable you can’t conclude that any of them is how the universe “really” works. They’re all giving the same math, making the same predictions.

The Voyager probes didn’t hit any of the crystal spheres on the way out, so we can close the file on that one at least.

All the different interpretations must converge with the observed results, so in the end they make little difference. But why things work that way is a mystery. “Hypotheses non fingo”.

Are there problems with QM? Absolutely, for instance, that the ground state energy of the various fields seems to have little gravitational effect. Theories such as string theory may get around the renormalization problem, but they don’t solve the ground state energy problem.

I’m not a theorist, and my experimental work was at a very much larger scale, atoms/molecules. As I understand, the Planck length is just derived by combining h, c, and G so the units come out in meters. I’m not sure of the significance especially without a real combination of QM and GR.

The collapse of the wavefunction is an ongoing problem. One group including Bohr, Wheeler, et al say consciousness is needed to break the Von Neumann chain of wavefunction collapse. The other group, being very uncomfortable bringing in such get around the issue saying there’s no terminal collapse, as the universe is continually splitting…..hence many worlds/ multiverse solution. Your choice. I prefer the role of consciousness from my own philosophical viewpoint. Many worlds seems to overcomplicate the system. No experimental evidence for either that i know of.

While gone I read (reread actually) Spencer Klaven’s book Light of the Mind, Light of the World. From a classics major, he provides an amazing discussion of the history of science and of QM. His assertions about the necessity of a “mind” as an observer was not fully persuasive to me, but presumably no one is yet able to support rejecting that concept either. Apparently not even Stephen Hawkins?!

Klaven’s mention of the Plank distance (1.6×10^-35 meters) led me to wonder/ realize that as the idea of an “atom” or sub-atomic particle was explored/ discovered, you finally “had to” reach a point of describing the boundary between “something” and “nothing”. And then the idea of a “fuzzy” probabilistic description for that boundary makes some real sense – “it’s there but it isn’t – or not quite??”.

I am sure several folks here more qualified than I about QM may amplify or clarify this idea.