How determined are you?

Ok, I think I'm beginning to understand what you're saying.The wave function is deterministic, and it is the "realest" of descriptions of the sub-atomic world, and it's only when we try to collapse it to classical properties of the world that we get a probabilistic world and those classical properties don't have any fundemental existence at the sub-atomic level?Is that close?

Couldn't put it better myself

Greetings my trogloditic smart friend.
Two little questions .
Is the wavefunction "fully" deterministic? Is Scrodinger's formula
100 percent accurate or 99.99 to the trillionth decimal place?

Well, "evolution" of the wavefunction is purely deterministic. At least theory says it is, and evidence backs it up to a very deep level of accuracy.Hawking was hoping that non-unitary evolution would show up at some scale not yet reached as evidence of the purely thermal emmision of black holes. The idea was that planck scale virtual black hole pairs would create observable non-unitary scattering. No one believes this now. Schrodinger is only the non-relativistic approximation, so no, it is not accurate. As soon as you try to make it accurate (relativistic), you are pretty much forced to leave QM behind and embrace QFT (quantum field theory). QM still has the concept of a single entity (single electron, single photon), and this is not a consistent picture of the real world. You cannot have single electrons and you cannot have a useful theory of just photons.This message has been edited by cavediver, 11-05-2005 01:12 PM