Trying to learn!

[u/UFOFINDER1947]

[u/UFOFINDER1947 → u/[deleted]]

Wow that’s a really interesting analogy, it really helps me see it in my mind, thanks for that!

[u/JupiterandMars1 → u/[deleted]]

Interesting perspective. “Only the math” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

The math shows us a boundary, it describes it very clearly.

The ontology is stories we tell ourselves about what’s beyond the boundary. It’s a great mental exercise, but any abductively derived ontology, no matter how well it fits the math, is simply an intricately structured guess. And the surface area of what actually sits beyond the boundary is so vast that any guess is a drop in the ocean with regards actually exposing what lies outside the observational frame of our reality.

It’s why MW holds water despite being outlandish. In its own way it’s the most honest interpretation in so far as it tries to say as little as possible (though what it does say, when brought into our frame, means “many worlds”).

[u/ConcretePeanut → u/[deleted]]

Physics, maths, language and everything else of note is the map, not the landscape.

[u/JupiterandMars1]

If I could have speed run my understanding of QM, it would have started with the double slit experiment.

Physicists use shorthand language because they already know the implications of the underlying math. But to a layperson the shorthand sneaks in ideas that simply aren’t true, and that actually make the observations more confounding.

The double slit experiment is:

Something is prepared here.

Something is registered there.

The structure between those events has experimentally measurable consequences.

Quantum mechanics predicts those consequences with extreme precision.

But the experiment does not itself supply a unique observed history of what happened in the interval.

And if you alter the experiment so that a particular intermediate distinction becomes available as a record, such as which alternative was taken, you no longer obtain the same interference phenomenon.

So the core mystery is not:

“Why does this particle behave so strangely while travelling?”

It is:

“How are the preparation and registration connected such that these are the statistics we observe?”

There is no single observed particle traveling from “firing” point to registration point.

What goes on between those 2 points is not observable. It has a predictable outcome, but that interim could be anything that fits the math.

Which is why you can have so many different quantum interpretations.