A powerpoint reviewing these ideas is at John Cramer's website:
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/PowerPoint/43
I suspect that advocates of the Copenhagen and MW Interpretations will
give different applications of their interpretations to the Afshar
experiment than Cramer does. His applications of these rival
interpretations to the experiment have a "straw man" flavor to them.
-- Ben
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Bone [mailto:jbone.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 2:27 PM
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Cc: Fabric-of-Reality.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: Many Worlds invalidated?
>
>
>
> Hot off the press, via Boingsters:
>
> http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/26/many_worlds_theory_i.html
>
> Many Worlds theory invalidated
>
> Kathryn Cramer breaks the story on a to-be-presented Harvard
> talk on an
> experiment that appears to invalidate both the "Many Worlds" and
> "Copenhagen" theories of quantum mechanics. Kathryn is the
> daughter of
> John Cramer, a physicist whose "Transactional Interpretetation"
> hypothesis is the only one left intact by the experiment's findings.
>
> It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum
> mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds
> Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional
> Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment,
> because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all
> such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment
> demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in
> this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism,
> then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment
> falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the
> absence of
> interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the
> Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference
> between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that
> correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole or the other.
> Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)
>
http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000530.html
Received on Mon Apr 26 2004 - 16:08:09 PDT