this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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It’s a reasonable thing to think from the way it was described in my physics class, at least. I fault people a lot less for misunderstanding something that even scientists in the field don’t really understand than for something like thinking the earth is flat.
They don't even explain it in physics class. That is kind of the schtick of the Copenhagen interpretation. You just assume as a postulate that systems are in classical states when you look at them and in quantum states when you do not, and from those two assumptions you can prove using Gleason's theorem that the only possible way the former can map onto the latter is through the Born rule. But there is no explanation given at all as to how or when or by what mechanism this transition actually takes place.
Many Worlds isn't much better because they posit that the classical world does not even exist, yet that clearly contradicts with what we directly observe in experiments, so if that is true it necessarily means that the classical world is an illusion, and so then you still have to explain how the illusion comes about, which they do not. Dropping the postulate that there is indeed a classical world also disallows you from deriving the Born rule through Gleason's theorem, and so it then becomes unclear how to do it at all without some arbitrary additional postulate, and the arbitrary nature of it means there are dozens of proposals of different postulates and no way to decide between them.
Modern physics is of the form (1) there is a quantum state, (2) you look at it, (3) a miracle happens, (4) you perceive a classical state, and then you are repeatedly gaslit into believing quantum mechanics is a complete theory of nature and it's impossible for there to ever be anything more fundamental than it and any physicist who thinks there might be, even if they are literally Albert Einstein, is a crank crackpot. They then take on the same playbook as the Christians where when you point out their explanation seems to be logically incoherent, they say, "God has no obligation to make sense to you" as an excuse to be incoherent and making no sense, but just replace "God" with "nature" and the same argument is repeated verbatim.
Its like punching a hole in folded paper to explain a wormhole. Hollywood science movies have a lot to answer for.
i fault them for doubling and tripling down when corrected, with sources, because they'd rather keep believing a fantastic lie.
In fairness, there was a whole Journey song about it
I think I've meet too many charlatans to be that forgiving about it