Pierz Newton-John
1 min readOct 13, 2024

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Thank you for this explanation. I get what you're saying. I struggle somewhat with the idea that "random" might be a concept that we can never really understand logically, but only have an "experimental model" for. We can understand randomness when we consider it to be a relationship between known and unknown aspects of a system, as in my weather example. Or in the case of a die, we know it has six faces, but not the multitude of physical factors that define how it will land. So it is strange to confront a situation that looks from the outside exactly like this, but which is in fact not like this, one in which the randomness is beyond definition but must simply be accepted as an empirical fact - kind of another "shut up and calculate" situation, which makes me unhappy. Is it not an unscientific position to call quantum randomness a brute fact that is beyond explanation or even logical formulation (if science is the business of understanding reality)? This is, in my mind, the one reason to prefer MWI over Rovelli's Relational QM, even though I would - emotionally if you like - prefer the latter. Those being the only interpretations which seem to me to resolve QM's paradoxes (sorry, great gramps!). Though I suspect you may be a Copenhagen/Born gal from the above?

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Pierz Newton-John
Pierz Newton-John

Written by Pierz Newton-John

Writer, coder, former psychotherapist, founding member of The School Of Life Melbourne. Essayist for Dumbo Feather magazine, author of Fault Lines (fiction).

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