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

Quantum what?

[JossiRossi]

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.

Stephen Hawking

[bill_mcgonigle]

Reminds me of this passage from A Brief History of Time
by Stephen Hawking:

"He [the pope] told us that it was all right to study the evolution
of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire
into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation
and therefore the work of God. I was glad then
that he did not know the subject of the talk
I had just given at the conference - the possibility
that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it
had no beginning, no moment of Creation.

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.

Re:Abuse of the term "Darwinism"

[Stile 65]

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.

Quantum Physics is Like 15th Century Astronomy

[human bean]

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...

Here is the Problem

[freepath]

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.

Re:Define ridiculous accuracy

[JeanPaulBob]

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.