Quantum Mechanics, Sklansky and God

[David Steele]

Every couple of months, David Sklansky mentions
something cryptic about QM in a thread about religion.

What I would like to see is a discussion of just how weird things are in QM now with the latest theoretical progress. It would also be nice to hear what David is so concerned about too.

Here is my take:

According to Gell-Mann and others, the so called "quantum weirdness" has been overblown in the popular literature. ( see his book, The Quark and the Jaguar ),
however even his account is a little hard to follow. It goes something like this:

Decoherence gets rid of all the Shrodinger cat problems and other measurement issues. The small stuff is weird but, when small stuff interacts with large stuff, decoherence makes things nearly classical, and no special status to the observer. The brain doesn't collapse the wave function ( there is no collapse ). Also no special human role in this that could some how be connected to religion or free will ( if you think you need randomness for free will, then QM is a source, not sure myself how that helps, I think determinism is also fine for free will, see Elbow Room by Dennett) .

The other plank of his explanation, is that a many worlds theory or reallyConsistent_histories theory is a reasonbable interpretation. This stuff is hard to follow but somehow we dont actually trade a gazillion universes for a working theory, or do we? I can see how the many-worlds idea elliminates all the weirdness in things ( like the slit experiments, Aspect etc ), if all we have to accept is a mathmatical construction and not actual splitting then it seems quite good? Is it something like using imaginary numbers to solve problems that ultimately have real number solutions?

Can those that really understands this physics elaborate?
- and of course the rest of us, feel free to speculate!

Dave