2min chapter

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Sean Carroll: Quantum Mechanics and the Many-Worlds Interpretation

Lex Fridman Podcast

CHAPTER

Is the Wave Function Really Real?

Do you think of it as a wave function fundamentally sort of a probabilistic description of the world and is collapse reducing that part of the world into something deterministic? Well, there is a fourth category, is a fourth contender. There's a mere peat of quantum mechanical interpretations which are called epistemic interpretations. And what they say is all the wave function is way of making predictions for experimental outcomes. It's not mapping onto an element of reality in any real sense. Two different people might have two different wave functions for the same physical system because they know different things about it,. The wave function is really just a prediction mechanism.

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