When you observe any system, according to Maccone, you enter into a "quantum entanglement" with it.
That's a nice theoretical claim, but in practice it is just plain false. Two macroscopic objects, like a human and a cup of coffee, at room temperature, entangled? Give me a break. We have to go trough a hell of a lot of trouble to create entangled pairs of photons to do experiments with. Interactions with the environment break the entanglement, which is exactly what we are doing all the time.
Maccone's solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time
Of course they do. The point is those fluctuation in the 'wrong' direction last an extremely short period of time. We have no trouble observing temporary decreases in entropy: the 2nd law of thermodynamics holds over macroscopic periods of time and that has been verified experimentally. Laplace's daemon doesn't exist, but he can deceive you for a nanosecond.
The problem with these damned brilliant mathematician-physicists is that they really loose touch with the boundary conditions imposed by physical reality.
That's a nice theoretical claim, but in practice it is just plain false. Two macroscopic objects, like a human and a cup of coffee, at room temperature, entangled? Give me a break.
That idea is pretty common in (so-called) many-worlds interpretations. In such interpretations, the wavefunction never collapses: the "collapse" of the wavefunction is just the observer becoming entangled with the system. This, of course, has all sorts of disturbing implications, but arguably still makes a lot more sense than any other interpretation.
That's a nice theoretical claim, but in practice it is just plain false. Two macroscopic objects, like a human and a cup of coffee, at room temperature, entangled? Give me a break. We have to go trough a hell of a lot of trouble to create entangled pairs of photons to do experiments with. Interactions with the environment break the entanglement, which is exactly what we are doing all the time.
Maccone's solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time
Of course they do. The point is those fluctuation in the 'wrong' direction last an extremely short period of time. We have no trouble observing temporary decreases in entropy: the 2nd law of thermodynamics holds over macroscopic periods of time and that has been verified experimentally. Laplace's daemon doesn't exist, but he can deceive you for a nanosecond.
The problem with these damned brilliant mathematician-physicists is that they really loose touch with the boundary conditions imposed by physical reality.