Website of Prof. H. Dieter Zeh (1932-2018)
"Man can retire, but man can never stop thinking …" (Ben Liang Li)
A Frog's Bird's View
This website offers a list of selected publications,
most of them with links to electronic versions, and some unpublished "web essays" for download.
Just click your topic on the sidebar
!
Note that some old papers on this website may be draft versions or preprints.
More recent ones are mostly revised versions of their printed originals (compare their dates or see for version number).
Quote from page 24 of
my “Strange (hi)story of particles and waves“ (see Quantum Theory):
If the global quantum state does indeed always obey unitary dynamics, the observed quantum
indeterminism can clearly not
represent any objective dynamical law.
In the Everett interpretation it is in principle a “subjective” phenomenon
that instead reflects the (then unavoidable) branching histories of all conceivable
observers into many different successors (with their “many minds”).
This may explain
Heisenberg’s interpretation of quantum
measurements as requiring “human” observers. … All measurement
outcomes are thereby objectivized by the correlation between those versions of
different
observers (including Wigner’s friend or Schrödinger’s cat) who exist
in the same Everett branch, and thus can communicate. For all practical purposes,
their entanglement with the apparatus after reading it, and with the environment,
also justifies Bohr’s interpretation of measurements (unlike Heisenberg’s)
in terms of classical outcomes that would be irreversibly and objectively created
(in apparent events) by the macroscopic apparatus. This macroscopic entanglement
(in addition to decoherence) explains the traditional concept of a “classical
reality”: only a documented phenomenon is a phenomenon.