A challenging book I started reading 20 years ago and still haven't finished or come to terms with. A lot of its philosophic vitriol felt personal as a somewhat anti-intellectual intellectual youth. And I came to sympathize significantly wi...
So what does decoherence mean? I latched onto the term several years ago when I was reading about quantum theory and started this blog.
Decoherence is akin to entropy, where physical disturbances sort of wash out in the overall scheme of things, an averaging of unique particle interactions in an inevitably cooling universe.
Metaphorically, creating an intellectual levee to halt that trend in our culture is one way to preserve what is special and unique amid the middling herd.
A more succinct, non-technical summary of the theory that I recently came across is by this Vancouver physics prof:
"Decoherence is the process by which quantum becomes classical; the process by which the determinism of the macroscopic world arises out of the superpositions and entanglements that describe the microscopic one."
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