If you’re not, what kind of “knowledge” are you referring to? How does a field with only a few components code for the knowledge of everything?

The way I see it, it goes the opposite way. The macro system “discovers” that it’s linked to the observed quantum when the quantum forces it to separate into distinct possibilities, and the macro “chooses” which to become.

(I’m not referring to a consciousness or “cat” argument. I’m referring to “dumb luck”. That is, Markov Processes or Martingales or whatever.)

The decision propagates from the macro to the quantum, starting with how much blurriness the macro can tolerate and “deducing” that of smaller and smaller portions.

If that doesn’t make sense, what am I missing?

A “quantum” of anything will always, repeat ALWAYS!, know where you are/exist, long before you can locate a quantum? by default of scale, a quantum has always measured “you” prior to your ability to locate a “quantum”. Think about a quantum needle that exists in a macro haystack, the needle will detect you macro movement, whilst you will not “register” the needle anywhere!

By default, the evolution of any observation is stacked one-way, from the quantum outwards, in gravitational terms it’s like walking on the surface of the Earth, I am the “quantum” and I know with certainty that the macro Earth is below, but WRT all else that is going on upon the Earth’s surface, does it know with certainty where I am shuffling my feet ?

Basically, decoherence is what happens when a system in a superposition interacts with some other system. (It could be any two systems, not necessarily an atom and an observer like in my above example.) You get a situation like I described above where you can’t “factor out” the original system, so the only way to see the superposition is to perform measurements over the composite system. If we’re talking about an atom interacting with a macroscopic system (such as the surrounding environment), then we can’t possibly measure the quantum state of the combined system, and the superposition is effectively lost.

Decoherence is an observable effect, and it happens regardless of our interpretation of quantum mechanics. Someone trying to build a quantum computer, for instance, has to worry about decoherence effects. (Quantum computers take advantage of the fact that the bits can be in superpositions of 0 and 1, so destroying these superpositions is a problem for them).

As for the measurement problem, as I said above it can be stated as:
“The evolution of the wavefunction is always unitary — except when someone makes a measurement, in which case it’s non-unitary. What makes measurement different than everything else?”

But really, the evolution is only unitary for closed systems. That is, we expect the quantum state of a system that isn’t interacting with anything else to evolve unitarily. But when we have a situation like above, where the system we’re studying is really a subsystem within some larger closed system, then the evolution of the subsystem need not be unitary.

Like I said, I don’t think this really resolves the measurement problem, since even though for all practical purposes the superposition is destroyed, at least in principle it still exists within the state of the full system (i.e., the system being studied plus the macroscopic environment it’s entangled with). One way around this is to note that the observer himself inevitably becomes intangled in the wave function, leading to a sort of “many worlds” picture like I discussed above.

An alternative is to deny the reality of the wave function — to say that it is merely a mathematical device for predicting the results of experiments. If you initially have a quantum system in a coherent superposition of state A or B, then after decoherence if you look at the state of the system alone (ignoring the quantum state of its environment, which is presumably unmeasurable) you can find a certain probability of A and a certain probability of B, but not the superposition. As far as I can see this doesn’t really explain why the system persists in state A after you’ve measured it once — but with this mindset we essentially say “Quantum mechanics allows us to calculate probabilities of different measurement outcomes based on our current knowledge of the system. Once we know the result of the measurement, we no longer need quantum mechanics to know what we’d measure.” (Well, until some time passes, at any rate.)

I should reiterate that I’m sort of playing devil’s advocate here — I don’t personally find either of these explanations particularly satisfying. If wave functions don’t exist, then the question of what actually exists that explains the predictions of quantum mechanics reamins open. I can’t stomach the extreme positivism in saying “The goal of science is just to predict measurement outcomes.” Someone once made the point that if we discovered a magic oracle that could correctly predict the result of any experiment, no one would consider that the end of science. We’d want to know how the oracle worked, and the reasons why those answers were the right ones. In my opinion the goal of science is to create a conceptual framework that accurately describes the real world and is predictive.

As I’ve said, I also don’ t care for the sort of “many worlds” interpretation you get from assuming that the wave function has real existence and never collapses. Postulating an infinite number of alternate versions of ourselves which are unobservable even in principle seems to badly violate Occam’s razor, and is in my opinion too high a price to pay to resolve the measurement problem.

Personally, I don’t think a satisfactory resolution of the measurement problem yet exists — unless it turns out that some as-yet undiscovered physics beyond quantum mechanics actually causes wave function collapse. There are some theories to that effect, but so far none has been successfully tested (although one can always hope).

The idea of C2 doesn’t seem to make much sense as compounding the speed of light, so is it a function of volume, that amount of energy expressed within the x times the y coordinates is squeezed into the volume of the mass? When energy is released, it is as a wave in all directions.

H|psi> = 0

If you consider the entire mulitiverse, then time evolution become trivial. In the MWI, it is more natural to consider the multiverse static. The wavefunction then satisfies the equation:

H|psi&gt = 0

So, the time evolution that we experience is simply an illusion. The multiverse doesn’t change at all. All that happens is that in the same multiverse that I exist in, my “time evolved copies” also exist. All the possible states that I can possible be in exist and they each contain some subjective notion of time and personal history.