[ExI] Is the wave function real?

[John Clark]

On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 7:49 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

​>> ​
> Why isn't the map
> ​ t
> he territory? Because the map usually lacks detail that the territory has.
> If my map is so good it has all the information that the territory has then
> the two would be indistinguishable.
>
>
> ​> ​
> Except they would still be two different things.
>

​How would you differentiate between them? You have 2 helium atoms Alice
and Bob, you can tell there are 2 because Alice is here and Bob is over
there. But now you cool them both down to almost absolute zero and they
become quantum entangled and form a Bose–Einstein Condensate. The 2 atoms
are now in the same quantum state, so there are no longer 2 things but only
one thing. Now warm things up and the entanglement is destroyed and there
are 2 things again, but there is now no way for you to tell, even in
theory, which atom is Alice and which atom is Bob. And it's not just you,
even Alice and Bob don't know which one they are.


> ​>​
>  Rearranging the map (and thus making it distinguishable) would not affect
> the territory.
>

​Well yes, change one thing and not the other and 2 identical things are no
longer identical. But it works both ways, rearranging the territory would
not affect the map. It seems to me that they both behave the same way to
perturbations, so what's the difference between them?

 John K Clark
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