Ask Lemmy

A lot of people who present quantum mechanics to a laymen audience seem to intentionally present it to be as confusing as possible because they like the "mystery" behind it. Yet, it is also easy to present it in a trivially simple and boring way that is easy to understand.

Here, I will tell you a simple framework that is just 3 rules and if you keep them in mind then literally everything in quantum mechanics makes sense and follows quite simply.

1. Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory where, unlike classical probability theory, the probabilities of events can be complex-valued. For example, it is meaningful in quantum mechanics for an event to have something like a -70.7i% chance of occurring.
2. The physical interpretation of complex-valued probabilities is that the further the probability is from zero, the more likely it is. For example, an event with a -70.7i% probability of occurring is more likely than one with a 50% probability of occurring because it is further from zero. (You can convert quantum probabilities to classical just by computing their square magnitudes, which is known as the Born rule.)
3. If two events or more become statistically correlated with one another (this is known as "entanglement") the rules of quantum mechanics disallows you from assigning quantum probabilities to the individual systems taken separately. You can only assign the quantum probabilities to the two events or more taken together. (The only way to recover the individual probabilities is to do something called a partial trace to compute the reduced density matrix.)

If you keep those three principles in mind, then everything in quantum mechanics follows directly, every "paradox" is resolved, there is no confusion about anything.

For example, why is it that people say quantum mechanics is fundamentally random? Well, because if the universe is deterministic, then all outcomes have either a 0% or 100% probability, and all other probabilities are simply due to ignorance (what is called "epistemic"). Notice how 0% and 100% have no negative or imaginary terms. They thus could not give rise to quantum effects.

These quantum effects are interference effects. You see, if probabilities are only between 0% and 100% then they can only be cumulative. However, if they can be negative, then the probabilities of events can cancel each other out and you get no outcome at all. This is called destructive interference and is unique to quantum mechanics. Interference effects like this could not be observed in a deterministic universe because, in reality, no event could have a negative chance of occurring (because, again, in a deterministic universe, the only possible probabilities are 0% or 100%).

If we look at the double-slit experiment, people then ask why does the interference pattern seem to go away when you measure which path the photon took. Well, if you keep this in mind, it's simple. There's two reasons actually and it depends upon perspective.

If you are the person conducting the experiment, when you measure the photon, it's impossible to measure half a photon. It's either there or it's not, so 0% or 100%. You thus force it into a definite state, which again, these are deterministic probabilities (no negative or imaginary terms), and thus it loses its ability to interfere with itself.

Now, let's say you have an outside observer who doesn't see your measurement results. For him, it's still probabilistic since he has no idea which path it took. Yet, the whole point of a measuring device is to become statistically correlated with what you are measuring. So if we go to rule #3, the measuring device should be entangled with the particle, and so we cannot apply the quantum probabilities to the particle itself, but only to both the particle and measuring device taken together.

Hence, for the outside observer's perspective, only the particle and measuring device collectively could exhibit quantum interference. Yet, only the particle passes through the two slits on its own, without the measuring device. Thus, they too would predict it would not interfere with itself.

Just keep these three rules in mind and you basically "get" quantum mechanics. All the other fluff you hear is people attempting to make it sound more mystical than it actually is, such as by interpreting the probability distribution as a literal physical entity, or even going more bonkers and calling it a grand multiverse, and then debating over the nature of this entity they entirely made up.

It's literally just statistics with some slightly different rules.

Right, I was expecting the earlier one to be a work of fiction