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In Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (1990), 381 Key: citeulike:711521
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For some sixty years it has appeared to many physicists that probability plays a fundamentally different role in quantum theory than it does in statistical mechanics and analysis of measurement errors. It is a commonly heard statement that probabilities calculated within a pure state have a different character than the probabilities with which different pure states appear in a mixture, or density matrix. As Pauli put it, the former represents "Eine prinzipielle Unbestimmtheit, nicht nur Unbekanntheit". But this viewpoint leads to so many paradoxes and mysteries that we explore the consequences of the unified view, that all probability signifies only incomplete human information. We examine in detail only one of the issues this raises: the reality of zero-point energy.
Mind Projection Fallacy: supposing that creations of our own imagination are real properties of Nature, or that our own ignorance signi fies some indecision on the part of Nature.
we fi nd some otherwise rational physicists, on the basis of the Bell inequality experiments, asserting the objective reality of probabilities, while denying the objective reality of atoms!
Einstein's thinking is always on the ontological level traditional in physics; trying to describe the realities of Nature. Bohr's thinking is always on the epistemological level, describing not reality but only our information about reality.
("Einstein's view") The existence of a real world that was not created in our imagination, and which continues to go about its business according to its own laws, independently of what humans think or do, is the primary experimental fact of all, without which there would be no point to physics or any other science. The whole purpose of science is learn what that reality is and what its laws are.
("Bohr's view") Any theory about reality can have no consequences testable by us unless it can also describe what humans can see and know.
Our present QM formalism [..] is a peculiar mixture describing in part realities of Nature, in part incomplete human information about Nature.
We suggest that the proper tool for incorporating human information into science is simply probability theory. But is probability theory a "physical" theory of phenomena governed by "chance" or "randomness"; or is it an extension of logic, showing how to reason in situations of incomplete information?
Our probabilities (ie. as logic under uncertainty) and the entropies based on them are indeed "subjective" in the sense that they represent human information; if they did not, they could not serve their purpose. But they are completely "objective" in the sense that they are determined by the information speci fied, independently of anybody's personality, opinions, or hopes.
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