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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.
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)
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!"
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.
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 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.
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.