This appears to be an impressive series of articles. Kudos on writing it.
The impression that I get is that the measurement problem is still common to all QM interpretations. Not so much when ‘exactly’ does decoherence occur, but when, approximately, does decoherence occur. It occurs whenever there is a measurement, and possibly (rarely) at other times, although there is no experimental evidence for the latter.
Your impression is mistaken when it comes to Many Worlds; decoherence is a continuously occurring process which has nothing to do with any ‘observers’, but only with the way probability mass stretches itself out into different regions of configuration space according to the Schrödinger equation. It’ll make more sense once you’ve read some of these posts, I promise.
(comment edited):
Consider an experiment performed which illustrates the watchdog effect. A radioactive molecule has a half-life of an hour. The molecule is repeatedly measured every second, with a resulting delay in the decay of the molecule, consistent with the hypothesis that the half-life is reset upon each measurement.
This experiment seems to show that upon measurement, something happens, whether it be called collapse of the wave function or XYZ. And, if there is no measurement, that ‘something’ does not happen.
If you think that all worlds are just as real as our world, then under the MWI interpretation you can say that the multiverse is intact. However, the series of measurements has nudged our world to a part of the multiverse where the molecule decays later than it (probably) would have.
This appears to be an impressive series of articles. Kudos on writing it.
The impression that I get is that the measurement problem is still common to all QM interpretations. Not so much when ‘exactly’ does decoherence occur, but when, approximately, does decoherence occur. It occurs whenever there is a measurement, and possibly (rarely) at other times, although there is no experimental evidence for the latter.
Your impression is mistaken when it comes to Many Worlds; decoherence is a continuously occurring process which has nothing to do with any ‘observers’, but only with the way probability mass stretches itself out into different regions of configuration space according to the Schrödinger equation. It’ll make more sense once you’ve read some of these posts, I promise.
(comment edited): Consider an experiment performed which illustrates the watchdog effect. A radioactive molecule has a half-life of an hour. The molecule is repeatedly measured every second, with a resulting delay in the decay of the molecule, consistent with the hypothesis that the half-life is reset upon each measurement.
This experiment seems to show that upon measurement, something happens, whether it be called collapse of the wave function or XYZ. And, if there is no measurement, that ‘something’ does not happen.
If you think that all worlds are just as real as our world, then under the MWI interpretation you can say that the multiverse is intact. However, the series of measurements has nudged our world to a part of the multiverse where the molecule decays later than it (probably) would have.