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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."."
the fact that observation changes a system doesn't require everyone sees massively different things, so an explanation of things being not massively different seems unnecessary.
if there is a box containing a red pen and a blue pen and I "observe" it (e.g. shake it about), it will have a different configuration but will still be a box containing a red pen and a blue pen.
It's time to Revisualize the universe.
Software Wars
Is that some quantum states are more stable and are more likely to occur at any given moment than others?
I didn't realize this was new. Maybe the news is that they have a "proof" of this now?
I'm not a physicist so you can shut me up at any time. But I thought the "observation changes the object" was only true because to observe you you have to toss energy at it and see what happens. Then the act of tossing the energy changed it. How does this mean that "looking at Buckinham Palace" would do anything ever? You just look at it. Being aware of an electron does not make it change. What you do to the electron to know it's there is what changes it. I suppose I don't really know, so I won't claim to.
Oh by the way if we all percieve that the reality of quantum physicists is to disappear, I think they would disappear... or at least make themselves disappear to prove their own points.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
*shrug* "Social Darwinism" is an unfortunate construct, especially since the people who advocate it have a high crossover with the people who fight against teaching actual evolutionary biology in public schools. But noting that the principles of evolution apply to non-living as well as living systems, and calling those things "___ Darwinism" in general, seems reasonable to me.
That being said, there's one thing I couldn't decipher from the article (yes, I did RTFA): are these preferred quantum states pre-existing, or do they change, sometimes coming into existence by random processes where they didn't exist before? IOW, is there any equivalent to mutation in this "evolutionary" system? If there is, then it's probably reasonable to consider it Darwinian; otherwise, it's not.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
by Stephen Hawking:He goes on to talk about how time curves back on itself as it approaches zero (stuff I'll never understand). So, basically the Catholic Church has conceded the time since the Big Bang to Science, excepting the occasional divine meddling. Of course, such meddling would imply the Great One couldn't design a universe that ran according to The Plan without intervention - such impudence.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This sort of thing has been a theory with me for years. All 'reality' is based on single and shared observation. Person A views everything a certain way, Person B views it another way. What we 'see' in our reality is the overlapping realms between persons A and B (for instance). In other words, the universe is touched and changed by observation. Humanity as a whole shares and expected result of reality which is the baseline norm.
Quantum physics is just the microcosm if the greater universe. Looking for a particle? Create it. Do the math, theories, etc... Then 'look' at it and there it is! The greater the number of believers that the particle exists, the greater chance the particle will be observed. The big question is "Did the particle exist before, or did it come into existance because shared reality expectations amoung observers cause it to come into existance?"
I know there will be those that totally don't understand, and those that will detract, but quantum physics is where science, philosophy, and religion tend to meet. There are few that feel comfortable with that thought.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
This is sounds like pseudoscience to me and someone feeling the need to invent some new crazy thing to get a PhD thesis going. This all stems from applying different intuitive "explanations" to the results of the quantum physics. The math works out alright but it seems that people have a need to understand and have an intuitive plan or schematics in their head. The computer scientist might imagine an array as a bucket or a counter with items on it. The electrical engineer might think of the current as water flowing through the wires etc. This seems to work up to a point. Quantum physics on the other hand doesn not seem to have any decent intuitive explanation that everyone's mom or uncle can read in a "how stuff works" book and have a clear grasp of what is going on. This hasn't stopped physicists from applying different interpretation to the quantum phenomena based on classical world. The authors from the article in Nature adopted what I believe is called Copenhagen Interpretation, where a state of the system is changed by measuring it. So there is a distinction between the macroworld where the measuring device is and the quantumwold where the system being measured is considered. The problem is that the measuring apparatus itself lives in a quantum world and everthing else is part of a larger quantum world. Check out wiki for Copenhagen interpetation, which the authers seem to adopt and the many-worlds interpretation which might not work out so well for these guys. (look around in here). So take these nice new ideas with a grain of salt. If you want to know that happens go through the math at least 3 times and then all you see is the math which everyone seems to agree on.
Yes, there are "facts": the Earth is round (more or less), and it orbits the Sun.
But "facts" are based on observations - and observations either support or - more importantly - do not support any particular theory.
Basically, all we have are a bunch of theories we use to describe the world around us. And those theories fit all our observed "facts" as well as we can force the fit.
In other words, all our scientific theories rest on negative evidence: they're "true" until they're disproved. Then we have to come up with something "better".
So theories are what we think the "rules of the universe" are. They describe how things act. They don't and can't touch the why - which is left to philsophy and religion.
http://qso.lanl.gov/qc/graphics/whz.GIF.
If a quantum state changes upon being observed, and it does, then it has a 'successor' state. The 'stable' states are actually the ones which have 'successor' states that are very similar to themselves, no matter what type of observation is made. This makes a state appear stable, as observation only changes it to another copy of itself. This basically allows for states to 'evolve' into stable states.
Think of Conway's Game of Life. You can start with a bunch of random cells, and eventually they'll "evolve," according to rules much simpler than those of quantum mechanics, to either stable structures or structures that move/change in stable ways.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
I suspect that somewhere it went wrong. Modern physicists are much like the ancient astronomers.
These astronomers, believing that planetary orbits were circular, developed much arcane math and explanation as to why they couldn't completely account for the observed data. They could not imagine such a thing as an elliptical orbit.
Modern physicists, believing that wavelets acted a particular way under certain observation arrangements, developed much arcane math and explanation as to why they couldn't completely account for the observed data. They could not imagine such a thing as a (insert reason here).
I believe that somewhere along the way, a key piece of information may have been missed that would make all of this very simple. Lord knows, I could be wrong...
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Its similar to natural selection.
The more stable the configuration, the more likely it is to form and stay for long periods of time.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
It would be nice if religious authorities could be as diligent. But that's too risky; might accidentally invalidate their biases, and then they would have to change the way they interpret the world around them. Heaven forbid.
include $sig;
1;
Darwinian history of boygroups
Well, don't boy bands work on similar principles to reproductive success? I'd suggest a large proportion of purchasers of boy band singles and albums wanted to reproduce with them. So past sales must measure percieved "fitness"
What of the strange costumes in the '80s? Well, Zahavi's handicap principle surely comes into play here. Throw in some songbird research and you're done.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
This sounds very interesting, but is it just simply a strange twist on words? Mathematics can work out to many wonderful things, but the challenge is how and why the mathematics is applied. Methinks (and remembers as a physics undergrad) that conceptual theories such as quantum and relativity are very different from everyday life because they are special cases. Whereas in biology we learned that Darwin's theory of evolution was a general case.
Let me explain: Quantum mechanics takes place in the realm of the extremely super small. Einstein's relativity takes place in the realm of extremely large values of velocity. There is a disconnect there in reconciling these two theories, thus the epic hunt for TOE, The Theory of Everything. The Holy Grail of physics is to find this super theory that unites relativity, quantum mechanics, electricity and magnetism, gravity, mechanics. Although relativity is used in quantum for calculations, there are some contradictions in reconciling the two theories, thus Einstein's famous quote (during his hunt to reconcile relativity with quantum), "God does not play dice with the universe!"
It is my understanding that Darwinism, whether social, economic or of natural selection, takes place in all biological situations. Look around, and everyone will see that quantum mechanics is not something that happens around us! Do you see quantum wells on your computer screen? As you observe the movement of the train, does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle come into play? No! This uncertainty principle does not conflict with everyday life chiefly because it only applies to the special case of extremely small and extremely fast particles.
So this comparison, extension and exercise of extending quantum mechanics to Darwinian proportions appears to me to be more than anything a philosophical exercise.
but she can cold roll them anytime.
... according to quantum mechanics we do all percieve things slightly differently. The effect is only 'noticable' on a quantum scale because Plancks constant is so 'small' as compared to say Avogadros number.
Seriously, IANAP but
>> "The environment is modified so that it contains an imprint of the pointer state," he says.
Which means that the photons (say) coming from one area and reaching another will statistically be similier at a level of accuracy attainable by the receptors(?)
Or are they implying that some 'resonance' (my word) is conserving information that should, according to Copenhagen, be lost. I'm trying to read the paper but I'm charitably near the bottom of the slashdot education graph so someone please explain. The phrase 'Environment monitors certain observables' sounds like a macroscopic pov in a microscopic (quantum) discussion.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
The article is muddy and confusing, and makes a number of problematic claims, the most important of which is the claim that measurement changes the system measured. Within the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of QM this is exactly the type of claim we want to avoid: prior to measurement, we can't say much about the system. We certainly can't say it "is" in any particular state or superposition--only that the outcomes of various possible experiments will follow the predicted probability distributions. To say the system "is" something prior to measurement is to load it with ontological baggage that just isn't justified.
The article also makes a hash of the relation between collapse and decoherence, which are quite different things. Decoherence theory doesn't explain collapse--it replaces it by making it unnecessary. I'm a bit out of date on this stuff, but as near as I can tell decoherence theory is treading down the path to many worlds, and it's still an open question as to whether it will be able to avoid the well-known problems that await its arrival.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Like any bible thumper, you are picking and choosing your arguments.
The age of the earth is not mentioned biblically. Indeed, but isn't the creation of everything mentioned? I seem to recall they say he created people just a few days after the earth. So, to be pragmatic, the earth is mans age (x) plus a few days (3 for example): x+3 days.
You're right, it isn't a coincidence -- we have the same designer! Good job, you pointed out this fact can be used in creationism as well as evolution.
shows EVERY KNOWN PHYLUM coming into existence fully formed
Yeah, welcome to science. 542mya multicellular organisms started showing up. This is quite a bit older than what the bible says. That it was an explosion is far from a fact, it's still being debated in the scientific community. There are many theories that can explain it, including your "god" one. Some of the more-fact based ones are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_glaciation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_warming
and
"The Cambrian Explosion has recently been a controversial topic regarding the history and evolution of life, with the idea posited that the Burgess Shale preserved such a wide variety of life and that the "Cambrian Explosion" was actually a slower radiation of animal forms than previously thought. The idea of an "explosion" of life in the Cambrian period is still being debated."
Taken from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
and if you call all disproved scientific ideas "religion" then you can say that all bad ideas are religious,
Sounds good to me, as religion relies heavily on faith, and faith is really just someone taking guesses.
Yes, Newtonian physics was ridiculously accurate, within the bounds of our ancestors' measurement precision. In fact, it was so accurate that we still use it today. When we looked closer, we found situations where it doesn't work so well, so we had to expand the theory to fit those situations. Specifically, we can't use Newtonian physics when there are extreme amounts of energy (relativity) or when the scale is extremely small (QM).
But that doesn't make Newtownian physics invalid; it's correct, as an approximation. The maths of relativity and QM do reduce to Newtownian math outside those extremeties.
To respond to your implication, no, this does not mean that QM is perfect. Just as we refined & expanded Newtownian physics, we may well have to refine & expand quantum mechanics. That's not a weakness, per se; QM still works almost everywhere we look. (The major exception is quantum gravity, the synthesis of relativity and QM; we don't have that figured out.) But QM still works astoundingly well. I can't imagine it will ever be shown wrong. Incomplete, sure, but not wrong.
There is [no] scientific way to prove that God Does or Does not Exist.
Actually, there is.
If the skies opened up, and a heavenly choir of angels descended, and a load booming voice shouted "I am the Lord your God, the God of Abraham and Moses!", and scientists ran out and checked for loud speakers and mass halucinations and a whole bunch of other alternate explanations, the existance of God could be proven to the same extent that evolution can be.
But without cooperation from the Big Guy and daily lightning strikes on the sinners, you're right. There is no scientific way of proving or disproving the existance of a God who doesn't do anything.
There are different ways to be wrong. A decent mathematician today could easily work out a perfectly accurate theory of planetary orbits in which the Earth is at the center of the solar system. The predictions about orbits would all be perfectly correct. Like the epicycle-dependent orbital theories developed by the old astronomers, the system would be ridiculously complicated, but it would appear to be a perfect fit with observation. Would such a theory be wrong or right?
In light of this, all we can say about QM is that QM is right in the sense that it's an accurate model of certain phenomena. It could still be entirely "wrong" in the sense that it might be misleading us about the phenomena which it models, analogous to the way in which a theory of epicyclic orbits would mislead us about the solar system's structure.
Note that I'm not drawing any conclusions about QM in this respect, I'm just saying that the idea that QM could turn out to be wrong in some important ways is quite feasible.
The point of that passage, from the Bible, isn't to say the world was created in six thousand years, as many people might argue. What it means is that God exists outside of time. I would go farther to say that God created time. Thus we cannot apply our notion of time to explain the behavior of God.
While many speculated about the presence of planets around other stars, scientists only managed to detect one in 1995. Since then, scientists have managed to discover many planets around many stars. And many of these systems are quite a bit different than our own, however at least one system similar in scale to our own has been found. This suggests that planets, including some like our own, are not rare throughout the universe. It would be foolish to assume otherwise.
The weak anthropic principle says that we see the universe as we do because if it were different, we would not be here to observe it. In other words, our existence implies that the surroundings we see are suitable for complex life such as our own.
Many other planets certainly exist with conditions similar to our own Earth. One argument against creation would be made if we were to discover other complex life that had developed independently of the Earth. It would suggest that complex life is reasonably likely to develop on its own. Furthermore, it's likely that at least some of these complex beings would have the same urges to explore and contact other beings. It is a reasonable assumption that other beings would have this desire to explore and seek out other life such as their own.
If this is the case, why then have we not been contacted? Why, when we listen to the cosmos, do we only hear the background hum of the universe and the noise from the stars and other celestial bodies emitting radiation? Why do we not hear the chatter of other complex beings?
If life is truly widespread in our universe, as one would expect to find if creationism were not the case, we ought to be finding other beings similar to us. One might argue that our civilization was one of the first to develop or that other civilizations are far enough away that radiation emitted would not have reached the Earth. The second argument, however, would suggest that life such as ours is not that likely and would favor creation. The first argument is unlikely as well. The sun is a second or third generation star in the middle of its life cycle. There have been many stars like it before and will be many stars like it in the future. It is foolish to believe that we, the race of humans, are the first complex life such as our own to exist in this universe.
If complex life such as our own is really this rare throughout the universe but planets such as Earth are not, and we can't fall back to the weak anthropic principle, it is truly a dilemma. Sure, it could be explained by saying we are the one in a very large number of planets like Earth that complex life happened to form on. But scientists would hate to fall back to that argument and accept that humans are a fluke. If this is the case, creation doesn't seem quite as unlikely.
I know I've made many assumptions in this argument, such that complex life would attempt to seek out other beings and that they would use methods detectable to us. But that being said, I still believe this is a reasonably sound argument that says creation isn't as unreasonable as it seems.
There is an excellent novel by Australian Science Fiction author Greg Egan called Quarantine (Wikipedia entry/Amazon) on this subject. I cannot claim to understand even half the theories in there, but it is a fascinating read and a mindbender similar to what Stephenson's "Snow Crash" had to offer twelve years ago.
Someone quoted from Hawkin's "A Brief History of Time" to ridicule the Pope. He could have quoted from the introduction, where Hawkins states that the Einstein Metric requires an "admixture" of philosophy, which he then goes on to describe. Basically, you have to accept some of the Metric's terms on Faith, because they can't be proven. Then there is Godell's Law.
Over the years I've observed some things:
1) Physicists at the top of the theoretical latter, like Hawkins, readily admit to the strenghts AND weakness of their models, but those at the bottom don't seem to understand the weakenss. They often speak in term os absolute knowledge, usually displaying lots of arrogance and insulting those who hold different views. No smear seems to be beneath them. The NTY science writer who ridiculed Goddard for believing man could fly to the Moon and said rockets couldn't fly in space because there was nothing to 'push against'. But, sometimes the 'expert' is not above arrogantly ridiculing the less trained. Prof. Langley denounced the Wright brothers efforts to build a flying machine as mis-guided, while crashing into the sea on both of his efforts.
2) Science seems like a spiny sea urchin, with the spines representing specific areas of 'advancement' in knowledge. Some of those spines have only a handful of scientists at the tip, some only one, speaking in mathematical terms few others, if any, can understand. Are they right, or are they merely building castles out of clouds? Who can say?
3) Biology has made advancements in direct proportion to its utilization of chemisty, then physics, then math. But even now, I have yet to read of any Evolutionist making a non-trivial prediction about some future event in the same way that Einstein precticed the bending of light grazing the eclipsed Sun and making a specific star appear to move a specific distance from its normal position relative to nearby stars. Claddists still hold to successive minute changes occuring over long stretches of time (gradualism) even though other Evolutionists don't believe the geologic record support gradualism, something Dawkin's called "Evolution's dirty little secret" in order to advance a theory he and Gould called "Puncuated Equilibrium". Punk Eek states that life forms are static for LONG periods of time then explode in a burst of new forms for a short (50K years) period of time because, they think, that is more in tune with what they think the geologic record is showing them. Both camps still argue about whose interpretation of the geologic record is right but always come together to fight those with divergent views. It seems that either view is preferable when compared to one which includes the actions of a Supreme Being, suggesting that the common element in both theories is that God is not.
History is littered with the carcases of "missing Links" which turned out to be distortions of fact, mis-identified or even faked. It seems to me that if supporters of Evolution are so sure of its being factual one of its members could devise a sophisticated hypothesis that would predict specific facts of a non-trivial future event, something on the order of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativeity prediction.
Well, I am going to suprise a few readers and state that such a prediction will soon be made (not by me!) and will prove overwhelmingly, by the best science we have today (DNA?), that Evolution is true and God is not. Those that witnessed for God will be destroyed, certainly in influence if not physically. Atheists and others who favored the demise of God will exchange gifts with one another in celebration of their achievement. These celebrations will go on for a few years. Very few people will continue to cling to Faith in God, and religious Faith might even cease to exist. Then the celebrations will cease. Then we shall know.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
to say there is no god (atheist), to say that I don't believe in a god until his existense is proved (agnostic)
That's not really what those terms mean. "Atheist" is a wide term that means "I don't believe there is a god" - this umbrella then also ends up including those who go one more step to saying "I believe there is no god." "I believe there is no god" is a statement that is true of only a subset of atheists, and it's not a very large subset, actually (in much the same way that fundamentalists are a subset of Christians, but not a very large subset). It's just as wrong to assume all atheists have a strong belief there is no god, as it would be to assume all Christians are fundamentalists.
"Agnostic" is about knowelge, not belief. There is some overlap between "agnostic" and "atheist". It is possible, for example, to say "I don't think it is possible to really know for sure if god exists or not. However, using Occams' Razor in this situation I think the burden of proof is entirely on the one who says god *does* exist, since they're the one introducing extra entities that don't simplify things any. Therefore if no knowlege is possible, I'm going to take the guess that god is probably nonexistant, and thus refrain from believing in him." Such a person is BOTH an atheist and an agnostic. It's what I am, and I'm not the first person I came across with that exact stance on the issue.
In theory, there could possibly be a god. However all the major religions are nothing more than random guesses as to what properties that god might have. As random guesses taken from a pool of infinite possibilities, the probability of any of them being even remotely close to correct is infinitessimally close to zero. At least that's the way I see it. If there is a god, then there is still a high chance that 100% of theists guessed wrong as to what it is like. In fact, I think that the chance of 100% of them being wrong is almost infinitely greater than the chance of even one individual among them being right.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Evolution doesn't suggest that every living thing shares an ancestor, not even necessarily when you limit it to the one planet we reside on (though the vast majority of life does share a common ancestor). Whatever mechanism allows for life to spontaneously develop likely was activated more than once. It's even possible (though not likely) that we'll discover some unicellular organism somewhere in an ocean vent that doesn't share an ancestor with us.
Science has always assumed that A) somewhere in the universe there is alien life B) that life arose in a process vaguely similar to however it arose on earth and C) that God has nothing to do with it. And before you go after me with a vengeance about what science does and doesn't assume, those assumptions are made just waiting to be disproven, should it ever be possible to do so.