It may be inadequate, but the consequences of quantum theory still apply without having to add new postulates. Among those consequences is many worlds.
Guess that's what happens when you shut down safe, cheap, emissions-free sources of electricity for nonsense ideological reasons (nuclear power plants).
> There is an additional postulate, namely that the state vector is the real world we inhabit.
Well, yes, it's a model for the physical world. Refusing to accept that the state vector is the real world we inhabit is tantamount to rejecting the existence of an objective universe, in which case any discussion is moot, or to the outright rejection of quantum theory, which seems irrational. (i.e. "I don't believe the state vector represents our world, despite it being the best physical model of our time")
In QM, evolution is unitary. The Born Rule is an empirical observation that is adequately explained by the decoherence of a quantum system into entangled states of observer, environment, measurement apparatus and the system being measured.
E.g. the master equation for a quantum density matrix governs its evolution when the environmental conditions are not completely known or modelled. Classical ensembles or 'decohered' states occur as a consequence.
QM is formulated as a deterministic theory. When you try to model an open, interacting system without tracking its environment, you have to sacrifice determinism in that model, because you are failing to track all the information in the system. You settle for probabilistic quantities. Nothing quantum about it either-- same thing happens in classical mechanics. They call this "classical thermodynamics".
Of course. I assume that in those papers, she demonstrates a similar lack of understanding of the details. Or that she doesn't research on quite the same things she talks about in her public-facing content.
Someday I'll get around to reading some of them, and I'll find whether that assumption is wrong.
I didn't commit an ad hominem fallacy. I did not say that her blog is invalid because of her character. I was just commenting on her character (actually more so on her work tbh).
i.e. an insult is not an ad hominem.
This is an ad hominem: "Your argument is wrong because <insult to character>."
This is not an ad hominem: "<insult to character. Particularly an insult that they often wrong>"
Nobody does that. We follow the math and the experimental results. There is friction against accepting what the results tell us, which is the odd thing.
Why is GR required? Already in standard QFT (Minkowski metric; flat spacetime; special relativity) the propagator 'violates causality'. Although that phrasing is misleading; it doesn't mean there's any logical inconsistency.
'The future affects the past' you might say. Yes, well, all information about the future is derivable from information about the present. So actually those 'future influences' are determined by the present. In the same way, 'locality' is almost a moot concept, because the analyticity of fields implies that the value of fields at remote locations is determined entirely by the field locally.
Well if they insist on expressing the dynamics of the universe as the minimisation of a global (or local) action functional, then they are already throwing in the towel because that implies a wavefunction of the universe.
I'm suspicious that these fringe quantum-physics-deniers just don't understand the mathematics. They want to be relevant but they don't want to learn, so they post wordy, fluffy blog posts targeted at non-professionals. Like Sabine.
Last I checked, many-worlds is a consequence of current quantum theory, not a postulate or additional axiom. Yet people treat it like such. Probably because it's 'spooky'. Then indeed it's ironic that they search for alternative explanations which try to say the same thing as many worlds but without saying 'many worlds'.
Well if you're doing fermionic thermal field theory sure (where the `integral' on Grassmann numbers is just some linear operation which satisfies certain properties). But apart from that I thought all the thermodynamic quantities were defined in terms of the partition function, which is a perfectly well-defined (Riemann) integral...
Whatever benefit you perceive in gaming the current inflation rate is most likely cancelled by the massively inflated house prices from everyone else having the same idea. Market is efficient, remember?
So you sold the bank a bond with an inflated par value, figuring interest rates will rise soon (lowering the bond value) and snatched a good deal. Except the banks are almost certainly better at predicting the future interest rates, and they demand a coupon rate significantly higher than the risk-free rate to compensate.
The short of it is that the banks aren't stupid; the potential for a future interest rate hike is priced in.
The exception is if the banks are selling on their mortgage bonds to someone else-- then they don't care if they're paying too much for them, and they'd be happy with the additional demand.
Isn't that how the 2008 Global Financial Crisis happened...?