Subatomic Darwinism

blamanj writes "In the beginning was Darwinism, then there arose Social Darwinism, now physicists are proposing Quantum Darwinism. According to the Nature article: "If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find? Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states."."

Comments

don't forget about darwinist programming

[Knights who say 'INT]

i.e. genetic algorithms.

GA's are used to maximize arbitrary functions by a mixture of random mutation and crossover between the solution candidates with better aptitude.

It's hot stuff, and it comes up with good solutions for analytically untractable problems.

Re:Quantum what?

[doug_wyatt]

There are really two kinds of "measuring affects things" at play. The first is more understandable by the lay person - when you look at buckingham palace, you're not changing it, but you're changing the photons that had reflected off it. Had you not looked, your eyes would not have been in the way and absorbed them, so they'd have continued on. In a more general sense, to detect anything, be it the velocity of a particle, the location of a particle, the energy level of a particle, etc., you need to do something to it that affects something about the particle.

The other kind "measuring affects things" is a little harder to grasp, and is exemplified by the schroedinger's cat example. There are situations where a particle/system/etc. can probabalistically be in one of several states. But until someone or something measures it to determine which state it is in, "the universe hasn't decided yet". So it's kind of like telling someone "I'm thinking of either a car or a dog" and not really deciding which one you're thinking of until someone asks you to tell them which it is. It's not the case that someone really has to look at it for it to "determine" itself - something about the universe could depend on the state, which is as good as an observer looking at it.