I like Dmitry Blokhintsev’s idea that quantum mechanics just describes a statistical theory whereby the statistical dynamics depend upon the particle’s interconnections with everything else. For Blokhintsev, the particles really are just particles. That is their ontology. The waves are not ontological but are nomological, they describe the system’s statistical behavior in an ensemble of systems. If you have one particle, it will always be one particle, you will always find it in one place, it always takes one trajectory. But if you have a large number of particles (either many in one experiment, or one over many experiments), their statistical behavior in the aggregate will form wave-like patterns.
What is essential for making the idea work is that the statistical behavior of the particles really do depend upon their interconnections with everything else, so it is explicitly non-local, or as I like to refer to it, it is a “globally” stochastic theory, since the statistical behavior depends upon everything all at once. If you just try to track the individual behavior of the individual local particle and only condition on things it directly locally interacts with, then it is impossible to reproduce things like interference effects.
Indeed, this latter point is what convinced so many people that particles don’t exist. Consider in the double-slit experiment, you block one slit and capture the statistics of where the particles land on the screen given they make it through the top slit, we’ll call this P(x|top). Then, move the barrier to block the top slit and collect the statistics of where it lands on the screen given it goes through the bottom slit, we’ll call this P(x|bottom).
Physicists like Feynman and Deutsch argued that if you remove both barriers, then the statistics of where the photon shows up on the screen when unhindered, let’s call it P(x), should just be the sum of the previous two, such that P(x)=P(x|top)+P(x|bottom). We can call this the “additivity assumption.” We know in practice that P(x)≠P(x|top)+P(x|bottom), so Feynman and Deutsch argued you must believe particles don’t exist and are waves that “take all possible paths.”
But their assumption implicitly relies on a premise that Blokhintsev explicitly rejected and insisted we should drop from our thinking. If everything is interconnected, then the laws of physics do not necessarily need to admit themselves to statistical rules that only take into account what a particle directly locally interacts with. They can take into account the whole global experimental context. If we drop that assumption, then it becomes clear Feynman and Deutsch’s argument actually contain two implicit assumptions.
The additivity assumption really should be expanded out into this:
P(x|¬BB,¬BT)=P(x|top,BB)+P(x|bottom,BT)
Where BB = barrier on the bottom slit, and BT = barrier on the top slit. The statistics Feynman and Deutsch add together come from a case where there is always either a barrier on the bottom or top slit, and they expect them to add in the situation where there are no barriers at all. This only makes statistical sense if:
P(x|top,BB)=P(x|top,¬BB)
P(x|bottom,BT)=P(x|bottom,¬BT)
Meaning, the additivity assumption only logically and statistically holds if the barrier on the path a photon does not take cannot influence its behavior.
However, not only do we know it can influence its behavior, but you can even use this effect to measure the presence of something without interacting with it, because its mere presence alters the behavior of a particle that never interacts with it in a detectable way: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9305002
Indeed, this property is actually quantifiable, it is something known as quantum mutual information (the equation for QMI is similar but not the same as the equation for mutual information in classical statistics). If a particle moves through an environment, QMI can be used to quantify, based on the physical structure of the environment that the particle moves through, how much information on the particle is accessible to the environment.
You can just explain interference effects not by positing that the particle goes through both slits at once, but that its statistical behavior has dependence upon the presence or absence of QMI with the environment and thus its behavior has a global dependence upon the structure of the whole environment in relation to itself.
In the case of things like the double-slit experiment, placing a barrier on one of the two slits will cause a hypothetical particle that moves through the two slits to either collide with or not collide with the barrier, slightly altering the state of the barrier. The presence or absence of that slight alteration then can be used, in principle, to distinguish which slit the photon tried to go through, and thus the barrier possesses quantum mutual information on the particle.
This is a quantifiable property of the physical structure of the experiment prior to actually sending any particles through it. You can predict whether or not the particle’s marginal statistical behavior will exhibit interference effects or not without presupposing that the particle takes all possible paths like a wave, but by conditioning on QMI, which is ultimately a structural parameter in the global experimental context.
This is also why measuring a particle seems to cause interference effects to temporarily go away, not because looking at it collapses some wave back down into a particle, but because the presence of a measurement device establishes QMI between the environment (that being the measuring device) and the particle.
Indeed, you can fit any arbitrary quantum circuit to a Markov chain if you choose the Markov matrices based upon the entire experimental setup, and, in fact, quantum theory actually guarantees a single unique Markov matrix for each unitary operator given the experimental setup, and so any arbitrary quantum system can be reduced to a stochastic process.
Blokhintsev was rather critical of Einstein who believed that nature can be reduced to things which can be considered solely in compete isolation from everything else. He cautioned that we should instead be thinking of everything as interconnected and inseparable from everything else, and that locality can only be a useful approximation of reality. People who insist that everything should be explained in entirely local terms are forced to devolve into rather bizarre and incoherent metaphysics to actually make “sense” of quantum mechanics (I put it in quotation marks because rarely what they say even makes sense).
I like Dmitry Blokhintsev’s idea that quantum mechanics just describes a statistical theory whereby the statistical dynamics depend upon the particle’s interconnections with everything else. For Blokhintsev, the particles really are just particles. That is their ontology. The waves are not ontological but are nomological, they describe the system’s statistical behavior in an ensemble of systems. If you have one particle, it will always be one particle, you will always find it in one place, it always takes one trajectory. But if you have a large number of particles (either many in one experiment, or one over many experiments), their statistical behavior in the aggregate will form wave-like patterns.
What is essential for making the idea work is that the statistical behavior of the particles really do depend upon their interconnections with everything else, so it is explicitly non-local, or as I like to refer to it, it is a “globally” stochastic theory, since the statistical behavior depends upon everything all at once. If you just try to track the individual behavior of the individual local particle and only condition on things it directly locally interacts with, then it is impossible to reproduce things like interference effects.
Indeed, this latter point is what convinced so many people that particles don’t exist. Consider in the double-slit experiment, you block one slit and capture the statistics of where the particles land on the screen given they make it through the top slit, we’ll call this P(x|top). Then, move the barrier to block the top slit and collect the statistics of where it lands on the screen given it goes through the bottom slit, we’ll call this P(x|bottom).
Physicists like Feynman and Deutsch argued that if you remove both barriers, then the statistics of where the photon shows up on the screen when unhindered, let’s call it P(x), should just be the sum of the previous two, such that P(x)=P(x|top)+P(x|bottom). We can call this the “additivity assumption.” We know in practice that P(x)≠P(x|top)+P(x|bottom), so Feynman and Deutsch argued you must believe particles don’t exist and are waves that “take all possible paths.”
But their assumption implicitly relies on a premise that Blokhintsev explicitly rejected and insisted we should drop from our thinking. If everything is interconnected, then the laws of physics do not necessarily need to admit themselves to statistical rules that only take into account what a particle directly locally interacts with. They can take into account the whole global experimental context. If we drop that assumption, then it becomes clear Feynman and Deutsch’s argument actually contain two implicit assumptions.
The additivity assumption really should be expanded out into this:
P(x|¬BB,¬BT)=P(x|top,BB)+P(x|bottom,BT)
Where BB = barrier on the bottom slit, and BT = barrier on the top slit. The statistics Feynman and Deutsch add together come from a case where there is always either a barrier on the bottom or top slit, and they expect them to add in the situation where there are no barriers at all. This only makes statistical sense if:
P(x|top,BB)=P(x|top,¬BB)
P(x|bottom,BT)=P(x|bottom,¬BT)
Meaning, the additivity assumption only logically and statistically holds if the barrier on the path a photon does not take cannot influence its behavior.
However, not only do we know it can influence its behavior, but you can even use this effect to measure the presence of something without interacting with it, because its mere presence alters the behavior of a particle that never interacts with it in a detectable way: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9305002
Indeed, this property is actually quantifiable, it is something known as quantum mutual information (the equation for QMI is similar but not the same as the equation for mutual information in classical statistics). If a particle moves through an environment, QMI can be used to quantify, based on the physical structure of the environment that the particle moves through, how much information on the particle is accessible to the environment.
You can just explain interference effects not by positing that the particle goes through both slits at once, but that its statistical behavior has dependence upon the presence or absence of QMI with the environment and thus its behavior has a global dependence upon the structure of the whole environment in relation to itself.
In the case of things like the double-slit experiment, placing a barrier on one of the two slits will cause a hypothetical particle that moves through the two slits to either collide with or not collide with the barrier, slightly altering the state of the barrier. The presence or absence of that slight alteration then can be used, in principle, to distinguish which slit the photon tried to go through, and thus the barrier possesses quantum mutual information on the particle.
This is a quantifiable property of the physical structure of the experiment prior to actually sending any particles through it. You can predict whether or not the particle’s marginal statistical behavior will exhibit interference effects or not without presupposing that the particle takes all possible paths like a wave, but by conditioning on QMI, which is ultimately a structural parameter in the global experimental context.
This is also why measuring a particle seems to cause interference effects to temporarily go away, not because looking at it collapses some wave back down into a particle, but because the presence of a measurement device establishes QMI between the environment (that being the measuring device) and the particle.
Indeed, you can fit any arbitrary quantum circuit to a Markov chain if you choose the Markov matrices based upon the entire experimental setup, and, in fact, quantum theory actually guarantees a single unique Markov matrix for each unitary operator given the experimental setup, and so any arbitrary quantum system can be reduced to a stochastic process.
Blokhintsev was rather critical of Einstein who believed that nature can be reduced to things which can be considered solely in compete isolation from everything else. He cautioned that we should instead be thinking of everything as interconnected and inseparable from everything else, and that locality can only be a useful approximation of reality. People who insist that everything should be explained in entirely local terms are forced to devolve into rather bizarre and incoherent metaphysics to actually make “sense” of quantum mechanics (I put it in quotation marks because rarely what they say even makes sense).
This is so interesting thanks for adding it
whole nature connected take a look
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: