Atla wrote: ↑February 4th, 2020, 5:19 pm
Terrapin Station wrote: ↑February 4th, 2020, 4:48 pm
I'd ask you to quote what part of the Wikipedia article you believe answers the question I'm asking, but I won't bother, because there's no way you'd follow through.
So your position boils down to: even though these machines were designed to emit single photons, and according to all the known physics they do, and according to the experimental results they do, and according to techniques like the SPECT scan, all this is working as intended, that still has nothing to do with the question of whether single photons can be emitted?
My question boils down to: what is the epistemic justification, a la "the well-known physics," for the apparatuses in question emitting just one photon. It can't be a complete mystery to everyone, can it? So let's find someone, or a source, to whom it's not a mystery, and let's examine the arguments for how we know that we're emitting just one photon.
You're not claiming that we've experimentally observed superpositions prior to measurement, are you?
Can't make heads or tails of this question.
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The "measurement problem" is "the problem of how (or whether) wave function collapse occurs. The inability to observe such a collapse directly has given rise to different interpretations of quantum mechanics and poses a key set of questions that each interpretation must answer. The wave function in quantum mechanics evolves deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation as a linear superposition of different states. However, actual measurements always find the physical system in a definite state. Any future evolution of the wave function is based on the state the system was discovered to be in when the measurement was made, meaning that the measurement 'did something' to the system that is not obviously a consequence of Schrödinger evolution.
The measurement problem is describing what that 'something' is, how a superposition of many possible values becomes a single measured value."
I commented that the whole "problem" arises because of the mathematical way that we talk about wave function collapse, namely so that there's a "superposition" prior to measurement. You countered that it's not simply a mathematical issue, but something we've observed. So I asked you if we've observed superpositions (so that we have an issue of how superpositions collapse into a single measured value where this isn't simply an artifact of reifying mathematics).