Talk:Philosophical interpretation of classical physics

"But the airplane does not have a position until we have done our measuring work, and that is simply because we define position as the result of doing that work."
That is not exactly how I define position. The 747 has the potential to have its position measured. A tree makes a sound when it falls even if no-one is there to hear it.


 * You may be interested in the analysis of the implicit assumptions behind such assertions presented by the physicist Hans Reichenbach in his article, "The Principle of Anomaly in Quantum Mechanics," on p. 513 of Feigl and Brodbeck's Readings in the Philosophy of Science. P0M 03:49, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

>A tree makes a sound when it falls even if no-one is there to hear it.< Does it? Zen Buddhism and Quantum Physics aside, when a tree falls it creates vibrations which only become 'sounds' when they strike someone's ear and are conveyed to the brain and interpreted.

I know this has nothing to do with the point you were trying to make but thought I would light-heartedly take it up. LoL! :-) ThePeg (talk) 15:24, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Toward a quantum interpretation of Copenhagen
In doing an experiment, one naturally intends to obtain results that are as stable as possible. The fundamental advantage of digital data is that it is stable: on paper there is too much ink or graphite to wander away. Especially, in electronics, the feedback stabilizes the state of the memory. Signals are re-shaped to stay within reliable bounds by each stage of the circuitry. When doing an experiment the result might be a continuous variable in analog form, but it must be stored stably. The physical "collapse" that then must occur in an experiment consists of reaching a region of positive feedback and falling into a stable state of some sort. This is typically one or more bits in a computer, or more traditionally a number in a notebook. The requirement that the system be in the bottom of a well does not necessarily imply that which well is unique. In rare cases, the best description may be a linear combination of stable states. That is still a good experiment, as long as all of the components of the state vector that have non-vanishing amplitude are themselves stable.

The essence of the Copenhagen Interpretation is that this physical (describable in QM) collapse occurs at the same time that a classical approximation is used. Of course, without a quantum computer, the result must be expressed classically. When these two things can be described as happing at the same time, they are called "wave function collapse". What Einstein was attacking was QM with the Copenhagen Interpretation, as no other form was clear at that time. He appears to have won, in the sense that one cannot understand an EPR experiment in terms of Copenhagen without giving up things like locality.

A century later, we see that he should have attacked the over-simplified rules for doing experiments and not the mathematical theory. David R. Ingham 04:16, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

So where's the CLASSICAL physics?
Where's action at a distance? Point particles? The three body problem? 1Z 22:56, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Spoof article
This article is partly intended to be a spoof, kind of like Stanislaw Lem's robot tales or dozens of other amusing fictions where the world is "inverted", yet no-one notices because it's actually our familiar world that is viewed as strange. Classical physics is being treated as an antique oddity that the reader might not be familiar with ! Bravo.

129.132.210.184 (talk) 10:02, 21 April 2015 (UTC)