Talk:Quantum Darwinism

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This article was nominated for deletion on 1/2/2006. The result of the discussion was keep.

did he say you could apply this to anything? What about a history model? Jared Diamond makes an attempt at it in Guns, Germs and Steel.

[edit] Merge

I`ve never heard of that. It certainly isn`t original research, but i know this mostly as quantum evolution. Besides the term "Darwinism" itself is rather used in political contexts, other than that one usually speaks merely of evolution. 193.170.48.34 20:30, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] OR tag removed

as it was clearly not appropriate. Archelon 21:10, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] explaining

"Quantum Darwinism is a theory explaining the emergence of the classical world from the quantum world as due to a process of Darwinian selection." <-- I do not understand what the theory is "explaining". What predictions are made by the theory; does it in any way tell us something about the physical world that we do not otherwise know? There should be a non-circular definition of "pointer states" right at the start. --JWSchmidt (talk) 03:58, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree. This sounds very circular and doesn't include any attempt to present a means to test the validity of this theory (or perhaps hypothesis?). Statements like "a preferred basis into which a quantum system will decohere is the pointer basis underlying predictable classical states" and "successive interactions between pointer states and their environment reveal them to evolve" don't provide any kind of specificity to distinguish them from pseudoscientific hand-waving. (I'm not saying it is pseudoscience, but one avoids that label by laying out specific, testable situations and then demonstrating the results, even if only theoretical for now.)

Can we get some concrete examples (in something approaching layman's terms) of what is being suggested here? (I'm particularly skeptical of the selection mechanism, which appears to be more like the anthropic principle — it is what it is because that's what we observe in the macro world — than any clear Darwinian environmental process.) Specific citations of what "Zurek and his collaborators have shown" would seem to be required. Even if testability is a challenge within the observable universe, a more comprehensive (and comprehensible) description is essential. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:02, 17 December 2007 (UTC)