Title: Is Quantum Uncertainty All in the Mind? - SAND
Headings: Is Quantum Uncertainty All in the Mind?
Is Quantum Uncertainty All in the Mind?
“A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.”
Frequently wrong
End of observers

Content: Spooky action at a distance is an illusion too. The appearance of a spontaneous change is just the result of two parties independently performing measurements that update their state of knowledge. As for that shifty split, the “classical” world is where acts of measurements are continuous, because we see things with our own eyes. The microscopic “quantum” world, meanwhile, is where we need an explicit act of measurement with an appropriate piece of equipment to gain information. To predict outcomes in this instance, we require a theory that can take account of all the things that might be going on when we are not looking. For a QBist, the quantum-classical boundary is the split between what is going on in the real world and your subjective experience of it. End of observers
Quantum theorist William Wootters of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, thinks this is the most exciting interpretation of quantum theory to have emerged in years, and points to historical precedents. “ It addresses Schrödinger’s concern that our own subjective experience has been explicitly excluded from physical science, and both requires and provides a place for the experiencing subject,” he says. Others are less keen. Carlo Rovelli of Aix-Marseille University in France proposed a similar, less extreme, observer-dependent idea called relational quantum mechanics in 1996.