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Are GRW Tails as Bad as They Say?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Alberto Cordero
Alberto Cordero*
Affiliation:
City University of New York
*
†Department of Philosophy, Queens College, and The Graduate Center, CUNY, Flushing, NY 11367.
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Abstract

GRW models of the physical world are criticized in the literature for involving wave function “tails” that allegedly create fatal interpretive problems and even compromise standard arithmetic. I find such objections both unfair and misguided. But not all is well with the GRW approach. One complaint I articulate in this paper does not have to do with tails as such but with the specific way in which past physical structures linger forever in the total GRW wave function. By pushing the total proposal towards either the “Many Worlds” approach or the Bohmian approach, this feature diminishes extant GRW claims to preferability. I suggest, however, that the problem here is just an artifact of the particular and ultimately optional genre of collapse mechanism chosen by GRW.

Type
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 66 , Issue S3: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers Sep., 1999 , 1999 , pp. S59 - S71
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Research for this work was made possible in part by the National Science Foundation (Grant 9109998).

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