[ExI] Is the wave function real?

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Tue Dec 6 04:47:54 UTC 2016


On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 6:07 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Or even if they are still Alice and Bob, and have not morphed into
Claire and David.

>>  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?

Location, presumably, since 2 things can't occupy the same space at
the same time.  Until and unless you destroy the property of them
being independent things.




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