Friday 27 November 2015

Roger Penrose: Quantum Mechanics is internally inconsistent




Yet there remains a profound conundrum in the contradiction between the continuous deterministic U-evolution and the discontinuous probabilistic R-evolution, as we shall be seeing in §6. In any case, a probabilistic and discontinuous outcome (R) certainly could not be the result of a continuous deterministic process (U), unless some approximation procedure is involved. Most physicists appear to take refuge in the puzzling issues involved in finding the right ‘physical interpretation’ of the quantum state and its modes of evolution. For my own part, I would regard it as likely that the linear quantum mechanics that we now use is merely an approximation to some more refined nonlinear evolution that we shall someday discover, and according to which both the U- and R-evolutions would arise as excellent approximations in their respective contexts. If this proves to be the case, then the present-day inconsistency between the U and R procedures could be removed.


This is a banging paper by Sir Roger Penrose which clearly outlines his take on Quantum Mechanics.

My take on this is along with the arguments of John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner that a non-physical mind collapses the wave function since it doesn't obey the Schrödinger's equation and influences matter to behave differently when it encounters itself with the former.

Winger's friend paradox by Eugene P Wigner 

"Consciousness causes collapse"

In his 1932 book The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann argued that the mathematics of quantum mechanics allows for the collapse of the wave function to be placed at any position in the causal chain from the measurement device to the "subjective perception" of the human observer – the notion of such a chain, more specifically a chain of interacting systems in which the values of one system is correlated with that of the immediately following system, has since become known as the von Neumann chain. In 1939, F. London and E. Bauer argued for the latter boundary (consciousness). In the 1960s, Eugene Wigner reformulated the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment as "Wigner's friend" and proposed that the consciousness of an observer is the demarcation line which precipitates collapse of the wave function, independent of any realist interpretation. See Consciousness and measurement. Very technically, Wigner identified the non-linear probabilistic projection transformation which occurs during measurement with the selection of a definite state by a mind from the different possibilities which it could have in a quantum mechanical superposition. Thus, the non-physical mind is postulated to be the only true measurement apparatus. This interpretation has been summarized thus:
The rules of quantum mechanics are correct but there is only one system which may be treated with quantum mechanics, namely the entire material world. There exist external observers which cannot be treated within quantum mechanics, namely human (and perhaps animal) minds, which perform measurements on the brain causing wave function collapse.

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