Hi All,
Sorry, coming in late to this discussion, but I'm looking for a distraction from a rather boring task at work today
I just wanted to highlight a few points from the last few posts which may or may not help. The words "entanglement" and "uncollapsed waveform" were used and I think whese concepts are the key to understanding the "fundamental" difference between classical and quantum approaches to modelling "reality". I'm using lots of quotes here because I think different people interpret these words in different ways when talking about quantum stuff - for me the only way to reallly grok quantum physics is to do the maths (which I know is not practical for most people who have a real life to get on with
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/....milies/lol.gif) ; if you have to rely on words to explain quantum stuff it will be really hard to get a common or correct understanding of what's going on.
Bell's theorem show us that "classical" theories really
cannot explain how the world works at quantum scales, due to the uniquely quantum phenonenon of entanglement. It is only when you introduce an "observer" or "measurement" into the system, which causes entanglement to be lost (i.e, "collapses the wavefunctions") that the system will start to follow classical laws, i.e., it has lost the thing that made it quantum. (As an aside, this is the reason why quantum computers are so hard to construct - you need the entanglement between the "bits" to enable the magic quantum calculations to be done, but to build anything on a scale that has enoughs bits to do a useful calcualtions exposes you to the "measuring effect" of the enviroment.)
Now how you define an observer and measurement will open up another can of worms, and is sort of off topic. These articles will get you thinking though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure...ntum_mechanics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence
HTH.
John.
P.S. Before anyone complains, I know the experimental tests of Bell's theorem are not conclusive, and even if they were interpreting Bell's theorem is still a difficult thing to do for our classical brains using normal language.