Posted on 05/17/2016 11:13:33 AM PDT by Reeses
Surreal... such a sexist term...
Surrealistic Pillow. Great Jefferson Airplane album.
I have the JA albums and Gracie on two Great Society albums.
For some reason I see this as the good old Christian debate of predestination vs free will. And I come to your answer: all we see is emergent behavior and can’t see what is behind the curtain or, as you say, in the layer below what we know.
Until there is some breakthrough in our interpretation of dimensions beyond four, we will only be able to describe, but not “explain.”
The main appeal of Bohmian mechanics is it offers a viable deterministic explanation of what's going on. Many people cannot accept the magical idea of particles moving about randomly without cause, or the even more magical idea of many worlds. Many times in the history of science some effect was declared to be totally random, then someone else came along and figured out how it really works. If randomness is not just a lack of knowledge but an actual property of the universe then that's the end of the line. Nothing further could ever be discovered.
That is not correct, we use probability distributions in many cases for explanations, such as in statistical physics.
If you have time to argue about Bohmian mechanics I suggest you make a comment here: http://motls.blogspot.se/2016/04/bohmian-mechanics-is-incompatible-with.html
Before Einstein's theory of Brownian motion, particles suspended in a liquid were thought to move randomly. Using statistical physics Einstein was the first person to determine the size and existence of atoms. The particles are not really moving randomly at all but are being bounced around by tiny billiard balls. Similarly the random behavior of subatomic particles may also not really be random, although we have no way yet to see what is going on and can only guess. Einstein did not believe randomness was an actual property of the universe, it only reflected our lack of knowledge.
Flame wars about quantum interpretations are a waste of time because everyone is guessing and no one really knows. The overconfidence some people have about their favorite interpretation amounts to religious faith and is not science. It's certain the pilot wave interpretation is wrong but its great contribution is that a deterministic explanation that fits experimental results is possible.
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