What collapsed the first wave function?

[Mumfuzz]

What collapsed the first wave function?

[Severian]

You did. Or at least, you can only be certain that wavefunction collapse happens for your own measurements (since the scientists who made the measurements might be in a superposition of states until you review them yourself).

[Mumfuzz]

This is a chicken and egg question.

 

Why do we have to keep to observer out of quantum physics?

 

Do you think the scientists are in superposition or just their consciousness?

 

Just a bricklayer trying to understand this weird thing, any reply would be appreciated.

[juanrga]

Why do we have to keep to observer out of quantum physics?

 

We do not do that. The Bohr/Heisenberg old formulation of quantum mechanics left out the observer and have been criticized precisely by that! For instance Steven Weinberg writes in Physics Today, November 2005, page 31:

 

All this familiar story is true, but it leaves out an irony. Bohr's version of quantum mechanics was deeply flawed, but not for the reason Einstein thought. The Copenhagen interpretation describes what happens when an observer makes a measurement, but the observer and the act of measurement are themselves treated classically. This is surely wrong: Physicists and their apparatus must be governed by the same quantum mechanical rules that govern everything else in the universe. But these rules are expressed in terms of a wave function (or, more precisely, a state vector) that evolves in a perfectly deterministic way. So where do the probabilistic rules of the Copenhagen interpretation come from? Considerable progress has been made in recent years toward the resolution of the problem, which I cannot go into here. It is enough to say that neither Bohr nor Einstein had focused on the real problem with quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen rules clearly work, so they have to be accepted. But this leaves the task of explaining them by applying the deterministic equation for the evolution of the wave function, the Schrödinger equation, to observers and their apparatus.

Edited July 11, 2012 by juanrga