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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pearl Diver
« on: July 09, 2011, 03:19:15 pm »One thing from I've learned playing Magic is that people don't really understand that the contents of their deck might be physically fixed after they shuffle, but they are logically a probability distribution until observed.
In the interest of ensuring that people don't get an incorrect idea of what quantum mechanics is, I would like to jump in here and make sure that it is understood that every major interpretation of quantum physics does not say anything like this. To the contrary, unobserved phenomena remain solely a probability distribution until observed, and there is no such thing as facts being physically fixed yet hidden in advance.
I am not saying that anyone has made that mistake here (the above quote does not say directly that the situation is like quantum dynamics, but it is implied), but since Razzishi is comparing quantum effects with hidden deck orders, I just wanted to make sure that idle readers didn't think that hidden information is like an uncollapsed wavefunction. If hidden information were equivalent to an uncollapsed wavefunction, then quantum physics would be unverifiable. Yet quantum physics is most certainly verifiable, and so uncollapsed wavefunctions are most certainly unlike mere hidden information.
(I apologize for going offtopic, but too often do I see incorrect ideas on physics posited on webforums, and I just wanted to clear up a possible misunderstanding before any more false memes get started on the internet.)