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Searching for Dieter Zeh

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From Quantum to Classical

Part of the book series: Fundamental Theories of Physics ((FTPH,volume 204))

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Abstract

I never met Dieter Zeh in the flesh, nor did I ever talk to him by phone, Skype, or Zoom. Ours was exclusively an email relationship for more than a decade, and it worked.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Zeh to Byrne, April 5, 2008.

  2. 2.

    The short list includes Everett’s relative states theory, hidden variables theories, such as Bohmian mechanics, and several collapsing wave function theories. Everett’s universal wave function is a key component of the Landscape model in string theory, according to Leonard Susskind and other physicist-cosmologists.

  3. 3.

    Byrne [1], Osnaghi et al. [2].

  4. 4.

    Wave function collapse was postulated as a physical action by John Von Neumann in 1932. Bohr was not a fan of the collapse postulate, and the philosophical stance of the Copenhagen Interpretation with which Bohr is associated is often misunderstood as “anti-realist”. See Barad [3] for an erudite and convincing defense of Bohr’s philosophical stance from the point of view of what Barad terms “agential realism”.

  5. 5.

    Is there a probability of branches without probability? Maybe, but the point is that as far as the universal wave function and its unsquared amplitudes is concerned, probability is latent or emergent. Maybe branches with no observers or “maverick” branches have no probability laws. But then they might not qualify as branches. As Everett remarked, language is ever a problem in quantum mechanics.

  6. 6.

    Discussing the language used in this section with me, Jeffrey A. Barrett comments, “For Everett, one gets the appearance of probabilistic events from the statistical distribution of results in a typical branch (in his special norm-squared coefficient sense of typical)”.

  7. 7.

    Ney and Albert [4].

  8. 8.

    Halpern [5].

  9. 9.

    Gell-Mann [6].

  10. 10.

    Barrett [7].

  11. 11.

    Jammer [8].

  12. 12.

    Translation: “Wow, how cool is that!”.

  13. 13.

    Barrow et al. [9].

  14. 14.

    Zeh [10].

  15. 15.

    Ibid, p. 119.

  16. 16.

    Byrne [11].

  17. 17.

    Barrett and Byrne [12].

  18. 18.

    Becker [13].

  19. 19.

    Ibid, p. 209.

  20. 20.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.2904.pdf, p. 7.

  21. 21.

    Zeh to Byrne, June 16, 2006.

  22. 22.

    Zeh to Byrne, September 19, 2007.

  23. 23.

    Zeh to Byrne, May 9, 2009.

  24. 24.

    Barrett and Byrne [14].

  25. 25.

    Zeh to Byrne, May 9, 2008. Emphasis added.

  26. 26.

    Barrett and Byrne [15].

  27. 27.

    On June 11, 1957 Everett wrote an eloquent letter to the distinguished physicist, E. T. Jaynes, presenting his use of the Lebesque measure in light of Jayne’s work. Barrett and Byrne [16].

  28. 28.

    Zeh to Byrne, June 10, 2008. Emphasis added.

  29. 29.

    Zeh to Byrne, October 4, 2008.

  30. 30.

    Barrett and Byrne [17].

  31. 31.

    Zeh to Byrne, June 10, 2008.

  32. 32.

    Zeh to Byrne, June 11, 2008.

  33. 33.

    Maybe there could be such a measure, in theory, because not everything is possible? But there is no way to measure the possible against the impossible … the road to madness wends through quantum mechanics …

  34. 34.

    Zeh to Byrne, June 11, 2008. Emphasis added.

  35. 35.

    Zeh seems to be missing that Everett’s conceptualization of correlation was essentially what we now call entanglements between the microscopic systems composing macroscopic objects. Everett did, however, have an information theoretic approach to modeling correlation/entanglement. That differs from Zeh’s approach to modeling, which is more grounded in nuclear physics. The meaning of correlation between quantum systems is discussed at length in Everett’s drafts, “Quantitative Measure of Correlation,” and “Probability in Wave Mechanics, and the long thesis, “Theory of the Universal Wave function. See Barrett and Byrne [18].

  36. 36.

    Zeh to Byrne, July 17, 2008.

  37. 37.

    Zeh to Byrne, August 19, 2008. Zeh was opposed to the proposals of David Wallace, Simon Saunders, and David Deutsch that the Born rule can be justified in Everettian quantum mechanics because a “rational agent” would make bets as if the probabilities calculated by the rule were true. In our correspondence, Zeh several times denigrated that notion as psychology, not physics.

  38. 38.

    I.e. a branch where the usual physical laws do not apply.

  39. 39.

    Zeh to Byrne, August 19, 2008.

  40. 40.

    Emphasis added. Is Zeh echoing the Oxford Everettian’s assumption that using the Born rule is a rational choice? Sadly, I never thought to ask him.

  41. 41.

    Zeh to Byrne, September 18, 2008. “RMP” refers to the Review of Modern Physics which published Everett’s severely edited thesis in 1957.

  42. 42.

    Zeh completely discounted DeWitt’s and Neil Graham’s version of a probability measure on the Everett branches because it relied on counting separate worlds and was, in his view, a circular argument. See Barrett and Byrne [8] for discussions of this issue, as well as Barrett [19].

  43. 43.

    Zeh to Byrne, October 10, 2008.

  44. 44.

    Barrett [20].

  45. 45.

    Zeh to Byrne, May 23, 2009.

  46. 46.

    Zeh to Byrne, August 18, 2009.

  47. 47.

    In a nutshell: the problem of how the ever-splitting worlds maintain consistent histories and physical laws.

  48. 48.

    Zeh to Byrne, August 18, 2009.

  49. 49.

    Ibid.

  50. 50.

    Zeh emailed the editor’s note and the referee reports to me on May 21, 2009.

  51. 51.

    Zeh to Byrne, May 21, 2009.

  52. 52.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1003.

  53. 53.

    Zeh to Byrne, August 23, 2017. Zeh was posting on a physics blog Not Even Wrong in March 2018, not long before he passed. His parting shot: “In my opinion there are no arguments but only emotions against Everett! So please take some time to study my website!”.

References

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  4. A. Ney, D. Albert, The Wave Function—Essays on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 209

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  1. Peter Byrne Ink, 101 H Street, STE O, Petaluma, CA, 94952, USA

    Peter Byrne

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  1. Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, Köln, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Claus Kiefer

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Byrne, P. (2022). Searching for Dieter Zeh. In: Kiefer, C. (eds) From Quantum to Classical. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol 204. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88781-0_13

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