[extropy-chat] Popper and QT

[scerir]

From: "gts" 

> What a shame Popper died in 1994, before these experiments! 
> I wonder how Popper himself would have interpreted the results.

Oh, this is simple. The debate, about Popper's gedanken
experiment, its meaning, and the real experimental results, 
is going on since 1995, as you can see.
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0507121
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0507040
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0507011
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0505158
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0405057
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9910078
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0005063
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9905039
There are people who think that Popper was 
right (because, otherwise, a FTL machine would
be possible: note that there are theorems,
in QM, forbidding such a machine, but these
theorems use the QM formalism, i.e. the tensor
product, so there are _remote_ chances that
these theorems may be 'circular').
There is a famous physicist (Shih) whose 
experiments gave opposite results (or it seems
so).
There are people who say that HUP does not
apply to entangled particles (due to the
so called 'conditional' measurement, or due
to the so called 'non-separability'). There
are people who say the opposite.
In these cases it is better to read that what
the very best wrote. In this specific case:
Asher Peres. 

> In particular I am interested in his philosophy of "objective  
> propensities," and whether it applies not only to QT but to the  
> interesting subject of probability in general.

It seems that Popper's 'propensity' is something 'contextual'.
In this sense the concept has been rediscovered by modern
QM (contextual hidden variables, etc.).
 
> I'd be interested to know your opinion as to whether these experiments  
> corroborate or falsify or say anything conclusive about Popper's  
> philosophy of probability.

I do not remember what Popper wrote about probability.
But the question is always the same, this one. 
'The question of whether the waves are something "real" 
or a function to describe and predict phenomena in 
a convenient way is a matter of taste. I personally like 
to regard a probability wave, even in 3N-dimensional space, 
as a real thing, certainly as more than a tool for 
mathematical calculations ... Quite generally, how could 
we rely on probability predictions if by this notion we 
do not refer to something real and objective?' 
[Max Born, Dover publ., 1964, "Natural Philosophy of Cause 
and Chance", p. 107].