{"id":421,"date":"2012-05-08T14:00:38","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T19:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/?p=421"},"modified":"2012-05-08T14:00:38","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T19:00:38","slug":"we-still-dont-know-if-the-wavefunction-is-physically-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2012\/05\/08\/we-still-dont-know-if-the-wavefunction-is-physically-real\/","title":{"rendered":"We still don&#8217;t know if the wavefunction is physically real"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Nature<\/em>\u00a0has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/a-boost-for-quantum-reality-1.10602\">piece<\/a>\u00a0claiming that a newly-published paper shows that the quantum mechanical wavefunction is physically real, as opposed to merely encoding information about our knowledge of the state of a system. As <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2011\/11\/18\/is-the-wavefunction-physically-real\/\">I mentioned <\/a>back in the fall, I can&#8217;t see how the published result shows anything like this.<\/p>\n<p>The paper shows that a certain class of hidden-variable theories would lead to predictions that differ from standard quantum mechanics, and hence that experiments can in principle tell the difference between these theories and quantum mechanics.\u00a0But that doesn&#8217;t show that the wavefunction is real, unless you believe that this particular class of hidden-variable theories is the only thing that the wavefunction-isn&#8217;t-real camp could possibly believe. There&#8217;s certainly no evidence that this is the case.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I&#8217;m not sure the question of whether the wavefunction is &#8220;physically real&#8221; is meaningful. I am pretty sure that, even if it is, this paper doesn&#8217;t resolve it.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nature\u00a0has a piece\u00a0claiming that a newly-published paper shows that the quantum mechanical wavefunction is physically real, as opposed to merely encoding information about our knowledge of the state of a system. As I mentioned back in the fall, I can&#8217;t see how the published result shows anything like this. The paper shows that a certain &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2012\/05\/08\/we-still-dont-know-if-the-wavefunction-is-physically-real\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">We still don&#8217;t know if the wavefunction is physically real<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}