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Quantum Trickery - Einstein's Strangest Theory
breckinshire writes "The New York Times is running an interesting story on Einstein's strangest theory. The theory was brought to light this past fall when 'scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state." [...] These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time.' It is an interesting writeup for even the uninitiated and also concentrates on Einsteins role as a 'founder and critic of quantum theory.'"
I suppose that is why Planck's Constant is named after him.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
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"To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive."
Actually, this term was coined by Nikola Tesla and refered to his observations of the violent sub-molecular reaction created when a cat with a cheese pizza tied to its back is dropped onto expensive carpeting. What, you didn't think that his silly "death ray" is what caused the Tunguska event, did you?
They had something to do with it.
Einstein said there would be days like this.
This fall scientists announced that they had put a half-dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."
No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being in two diametrically opposed conditions at once, such as black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.
These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes, they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.
The idea that measuring the properties of one particle could instantaneously change the properties of another one (or a whole bunch) far away is strange to say the least -- almost as strange as the notion of particles spinning in two directions at once. The team that pulled off the beryllium feat, led by Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colo., hailed it as another step toward computers that would use quan- tum magic to perform calculations.
But it also served as another demonstration of how weird the world really is according to the rules known as quantum mechanics.
The joke is on Albert Einstein, who, back in 1935, dreamed up this trick of synchronized atoms -- "spooky action at a distance," as he called it -- as an example of the absurdity of quantum mechanics.
"No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this," he, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen wrote in a paper in 1935.
Today, that paper, written when Einstein was a relatively ancient 56 years old, is the most cited of Einstein's papers. But far from demolishing quantum theory, that paper wound up as the cornerstone for the new field of quantum information.
Nary a week goes by that does not bring news of another feat of quantum trickery once only dreamed of in thought experiments: particles (or at least all their properties) being teleported across the room in a microscopic version of "Star Trek" beaming; electrical "cat" currents that circle a loop in opposite directions at the same time; more and more particles farther and farther apart bound together in Einstein's spooky embrace now known as "entanglement." At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers are planning an experiment in which a small mirror will be in two places at once.
Niels Bohr, the Danish philosopher king of quantum theory, dismissed any attempts to lift the quantum veil as meaningless, saying that science is about the results of experiments, not ultimate reality.
But now that quantum weirdness is not confined to thought experiments, physicists have begun arguing again about what this weirdness means, whether the theory needs changing, and whether in fact there is any problem.
This fall, two Nobel laureates, Anthony Leggett of the University of Illinois and Norman Ramsay of Harvard University, argued in front of several hundred scientists at a conference in Berkeley about whether, in effect, physicists are justified trying to change quantum theory, the most successful theory in the history of science. Leggett said yes; Ramsay said no.
It has been, as Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted, "a 75-year war." It is typical in reporting on this subject to bounce from one expert to another, each one shaking his or her head about how the other one just doesn't get it.
"It's a kind of funny situation," N. David Mermin of Cornell University, who has called Einstein's spooky action "the closest thing we have to magic," said, referring to the recent results. "These are extremely difficult experiments that
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This is just further proof that we are living in the Matrix. With each and every absurd observation, man is getting closer to the truth that we are the cat in the box.
Burn Hollywood Burn
"The New York Times is running an interesting story on Einstein's strangest theory. The theory was brought to light this past fall when 'scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."
Wouldn't that be Schroedinger's strangest theory?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive."
Or something happy to have its tummy rubbed only to bite you seconds later.
its a bit shit expecting to give your firstborn away just to read an article.
I found an alternative link.
I'm still not convinced by all this quantum connectivity business, but then again you look at a wall of clocks with their pendulums all in sync (because of vibrations in the wall) and you think hmmmm maybe its possible.
liqbase
but even I am confused by this. Clockwise and counterclockwise - YIKES ;)
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Don't expect to understand. We evolved to run around on a plain and throw spears at antelopes, so we shouldn't be suprised when we don't understand complex things.
Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.
Do I read that right and they created entangled atoms, giving us possible faster than light communications? Or is this just the usual journalists misreporting of scientific facts?
I believe the existance of a working quantum theory means that the universe can be considered as a simulation insofar as there might exist a universe without quantum physics and just particle physics.
Now assume someone with insufficient knowledge about such a universe who tries to model a simulation to get predictions, much like having for of war in a strategy game - when a unit disappears into fog of war (since x turns ago), it would be essentially in all places that in could reach in x turns at once.
An interesting question then might be, is then human knowledge and usage of quantum theory a desired property of the simulation, or an artifact that invalidates the simulation results?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
One thing I got from the article is that physicists don't really care that the Quantum mechanics doesn't make sense at the macro level, nor that there isn't a clear boundary between big systems and quantum systems.
That's the whole point of the cat-in-a-box: if an electron can be superposed, why not a whole cat? And what does that say about reality, if the quantum theory makes no sense? E.g. our sense of reality says the cat is either alive or dead, not both. Hence, shouldn't an electron be one or the other? Q.T. says no.
That "why" issue is the sort of thing that troubled a philosopher-type like Einstiein --- someone who wonders "why?" compulsively is likely to keep on digging. The physicists seem happy to crunch the numbers, do an experiment and see if it agrees with the numbers.
Which is in keeping with my observations of physicists: they are essentially applied mathematicians. Mathematicians (like Einstein) are a different sort.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
If you were to look at a clock backwards, the hands would be moving counter-clockwise from your perspective. It's all relative. So in theory, both could be happenning at the same time.
Strange that you bring up that entangled atoms allow faster than light communication.
The known problem with this is that no information actually is transferred as far as we know; it is is only acquired at both ends at the same time (that is, you can't decide what you read).
Entangled atoms allow safe FTL cryptography though, because uncovering and reading the state of the atom creates a bit of a key that is shared at both ends.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Isn't it possible that they just observed individual electrons within the cloud giving the illusion of spinning in opposite directions? It would mean that they were able to "focus" the elctrons so to speak instead of having them fly around haphazardly, still a big break, but that sounds extremely...well. I don't know what it sounds like. It sounds confusing.
As in: The granularity (bits) of the computer would be the Planck scale, and the top speed of the computer's operations would be the speed of light.
it's in my head
Nevertheless, he would be pleased.
http://www.phobe.com/s_cat/s_cat.html
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spin a top on a glass coffee table. It will be spinning clockwise and anti-clockwise at the same time, depending on the position of the observer (below or above). WOW!
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If you have the opportunity, go to Bali, Indonesia and get one of the locals to find you a bag of liquified mushrooms. Go to your hotel room and drink it. I kid you not, this is the red pill. You will not be dissapointed.
Yes, you are living in something very similar to the Matrix and there are signposts and clever little games designed in that will allow you to take a breather from the simulation and poke your head through to the other side. The primary rule of thumb is that the closer you get to the truth, the more confusing the alternate explanations start becoming. You do not have to be a zombie here, there are ways of finding the truth...
Think I'm kidding?
As in: The granularity (bits) of the computer would be the Planck scale, and the top speed of the computer's operations would be the speed of light.
Well yes and no. That is a completely different angle. The "real" universe I was talking about might have quantums and planck squales as well.But I can add something to your point of view:
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Support them... by slashdotting their site! Awesome :-p
All of reality consists of just 1 partical.
This partical takes all of its possible positions at once thought out all of time.
This can be called the supersuper position.
The reason we experience time and all the superpostions of the one particle can be analog to some form of measurement.
If the one particle and all its positions define space and time these attributes can also exist in one point. So they do. This means that observing any state of the particle at any time or position can change the superposition or the supersuperposition directly at any other point/time.
Therefor nothing is predetermined and faster then light travel is slow by any standard.
There, the known multiverse explained by an Anonymous coward.
Say it with me : We are all the same particle, all the time.
(I'm so good at this BS ! )
Retep Vosnul
I was under the impression that you could either only know the location of a particle, or its direction of motion, for to watch one was capable of having an effect on the other. SO if this is true, how could they know the location of these particles, and their states at the same time?
OMG, what a dumbass! Dumb old Einstein.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
my gawd i needed that laugh... had me howling at the chuck norris facts website... thx
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Bohr and Heisenberg made a popular interpretation of the duality paradox called The Copenhagen Interpretation. Needless to say, Einstein disagreed with this interpretation.
So if you put a cat in a box that you can't see in, take a gun, and shoot the box, is the cat dead? What proof can you provide me the cat might still actually be alive? (you know the saying "there's more than one way to skin a cat..." ask this physics question to the judge trying you with animal cruelty, and you're sure to get off the hook - it can't be proven right or wrong...)
"Most physicists agreed with Bohr, and they went off to use quantum mechanics to build atomic bombs and reinvent the world."
Why do they always have to use the atomic bomb as an example of the applications of quantum mechanics? It really gives it a bad name.
It's like saying, something happens in reality only the very moment you know it. Turn on CNN, and all what they are reporting on, just happened at that very moment you learnt of it, and if you did not hear it or know it, then it did not happen! Crack!
An electron has a specific velocity, whether any person knows it or not. The probability distribution of the electron's velocity (wavefunction) is not a property of nature as Heisenberg states, but a property of our minds (lack of complete information). When that value is finally measured, we have a single value rather than a wavefunction (complete information). It is our minds that have changed, not reality. Therefore it is crack to say the electron has many velocities (wavefunction) before measurement but as soon as it is measured, it collapses (wavefunction collapse) into a single value.
The strangest part of this is that this blatant confusion has not totally incapacitated the usefulness of quantum mechanics. Imagine what will happen if more physicists could get their ducks in line and properly understand why Quantum mechanics works. Einstein was on track. Others have followed him and been able to do great things, although clearly disagreeing with the "spooky action at a distance" "copenhagen" interpretation. Such as Schrödinger, Edward Thomson Jaynes, the father of "maximum entropy".
ET Jaynes wrote about the possibility of doing a thesis under Oppenheimer:
http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/etj.html
Oppy is Oppenheimer.
Quantum mechanics works, there is no question about it. The question is why does it work. IMHO, the majority of physicists today are backing up the wrong tree -- the copenhagen interpretation. Further progress is, thus being hindered.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
and the top speed of the computer's operations would be the speed of light. But it still wouldn't be able run Duke Nukem Forever...
I mean just look the real world. Two opposite things are all same time true.
Bush: combat is over, but there is still some resistance
Bush: There is no WMD's but I was right anyway
Salesman: even higher quality with even lower prices than before
Politician: lower taxes and higher spending
Employer: lower wages, shorter hours and more motivated employees who do more & better.
Why, just look, obviously quantum mechanics are already at work every day!
Einstein was right, but why do we need the cat to prove it? Who let the cat in?
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows has the trouble seen me, even I sometimes wonder why I write these line
I'm afraid you have misunderstood the EPR paradox.
look up Bell's inequality. You will see that *no amount* of extra information 'hidden' from us but carried by the particles can explain the observed phenomena of both EPR entangled particles and the distribution of states observed at one end.
QM in that sense is not shown to be incomplete by EPR. it is truly non-local. Or there are many universes. It is not at all the case that an electron 'has a velocity' and we don't know it. It really does only have a velocity when we know it. This *is* very difficult to accept, and is why people dream up things like many universes to get round it, but they just shift the apparent absurdity elsewhere. Or they just grumble that they can't accept it and it must be wrong, like Einstein did.
left spin=0
right spin=1
spin both ways=Microsoft windows is showing a blue screen?
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
QM works, as you say. but that's all there is. QM was created as one turn in the centuries-long game of building a mathematical model, comparing it to reality and then tweaking it or creating a whole new model whenever the two differ.
now you're changing the game. you're introducing a new rule, that the mathematics must be comprehensible, must be philosophically appealing. it's not surprising that eventually a theory crops up that doesn't meet these requirements since the blueprint for creating the theory didn't have them - they weren't part of the original spec, if you like.
So the Question is in fact a meta Question - does your question matter? does it matter which interpretation you choose - after all they are only alternative interpretations not theories - i.e we can never objectively decide between them.
Anytime quantum mechanics is brought up among a non-science crowd (sorry, desipte the geekyness of slashdot, the moderation and general comments I see indicate it's a non-science crowd) you wind up getting half-truth mystical garbage like this and this. The more hard to understand it is, the more people will come up with their own, wrong interpretations.
AccountKiller
Electrons don't carry information. Information is a property of the mind not reality. And that's the part you don't get.
I just dropped a coin on my floor. Tell me what I got, Heads or Tails. Or tell me that I got 50% heads and 50% tails, and the moment I finally tell you the TRUE results, what I got automatically changes.
You see, there is a difference between TRUTH and KNOWLEDGE(information). What you know about my coin is just that, information, not reality.
BTW my post was not about the EPR paradox. But you see the EPR paradox used as a validation of the "copenhagen interpretation" simply gives you the presuppositions you put into it, which is no validation.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
In Science, we are trying to understand reality. Classical mechanics worked but it was not accurate. Without questioning the present theories, there'll be no progress.
The rules have never changed. A theory is a theory. It only becomes a problem when some think their theory IS reality.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
Not quite. That would be what's called a hidden variables system: the unit still does have a real location, which is tracked by the program, even if it's inaccessible to an observer within the system. However, that doesn't appear to be the way our universe works; the Bell inequalities show that hidden variables are incompatible with locality.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I believe the existance of a working quantum theory means that the universe can be considered as a simulation insofar as there might exist a universe without quantum physics and just particle physics.
This is extremely doubtful, as it is hard to see how there could even be particles without quantum physics. What would these particles be? Infinitesimal points? If so, how could they react?
And if an electron does not have a velocity before measurement, then what are you trying to measure?
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
The real kicker is that evolutionary theory makes sense on an intuitive level. Random variation + natural selection = genetic change. Genetic change + time = a lot of change. Divergent change = speciation. I'm no scientist--I'm not even that bright. But the ideas are simple and elegant if you make even a token effort to understand. Not so with quantum mechanics. It means what again? If any thse creationists or ID advocates were actually moved by their supposed skepticism about methodologial naturalism, they would be up in arms about quantum mechanics. Instead you hear what from them? Silence. The only branch of science that their profound, deeply conscientious, implacable intellectual integrity can concern itself with is the only one that has implications for a simplistic reading of Genesis. Every time I read "I'm no creationist, but I can't stand by when our children are sold half-baked theories as fact!" I want to crack up laughing. Quantum mechanics is such an easier target because maybe 50 people worldwide really understand it (okay, I'm exaggerating, but by how much?) and high school teachers probably don't make a large percentage. If the issue were just the nature of methodological naturalism, or the limits of human knowledge, or the nature of science, then evolution would never be the easiest target. But as it is, it's the only target.
Perhaps I'm coming late to this realization. Despite my noted cynicism, the very act of debate requires a little respect for the opposing view. But if the opposition is just flat-out lying, not only about their facts, but about their very motivating premises, then what is there to talk about? I guess it had to come to this eventually--if the other side really thinks you are working for the devil, you can't help but call them kooks sooner or later. What else is there?
No, this post o' mine didn't address quantum mechanics. It's just that the sheer inscrutability of the subject (to me) got me to wondering--where are all the gadflies who normally come out of the woodwork with dire warnings about passing off rank theory as fact? Where are the lessons in the scientific theory, the exhortations to "prove" it before we poison the minds of the next generation?
over the seemingly more 'classical':
Why shouldn't they have definite but not simultaneously measurable properties with a clumsy photon? Why can't they just have some chaotic function altering it from one state to the next that we don't know how to predict?
Alternately, if schroedinger's cat is in an alive/dead superposition in the box, then if the cat experiences a sane and straightforward set of experiences yet the outside-of-box observer claims it to be in an alive/dead combo state, then outside the box observer and inside the box observer's consciousness lines must potentially deviate. If the cat experiences no trouble at all, but the observer measures it to be dead then they're already in different 'universes' from one another.
So my last questions: is everybody else around here soulless zombies due to the great improbability that I'd be traveling along the same path as the 'conscious' ones? If not, why the heck are all you people following my conscious line for (or me yours)? That is, if multiple consciousness can occur at the split points, yet any one consciousness experiences a fluid and non-confusing pathway then how do the others experience anything.
Where do they come from, who/what experiences it? Maybe we're all really the same person separated by whatever localized state our matter based brains are configured for, then given all possibilities we experience all of them, one after another after another. brrrrrrrr.. spooky!
Firstly, just because they say something on CNN doesn't mean it actually happened. But that's got nothing to do with this discussion.
Secondly, you're inferring too far. You can't discount perspective from measurement, perspective being a point in space and time (space-time). If you do, then you might as well go flip burgers, because everything has happened already from the null point of view, the universe should eventually collapse back into a single point at which point all these laws will be defunct and all time will be irrelevant, so what's the point of observation anyway? The argument is not that something didn't exist because it's not observed, it's that it isn't relevant because it wasn't observed.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound? The correct answer is: Who gives a shit?
However, at present there are no "clean" experiments unambiguously verifying the inequalities.
In addition to that, I am not stating that the program does have hidden variables, but that the program uses quantum logic to treat unknown states. Of course these would collapse somewhere, but not necessarily at the time of the measurement from our human POV; That is, if it is not necessary for a measurement to know a hidden variable it will not be determined.This matches in some respect the strong anthroposophic principle, or would be called lazy evaluation in a programming language.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
a quantum 'measurement' is not like an ordinary measurement. a better term to use is observation. one observable is momentum, but observables are all linked together by uncertainty principles.
the state of an electron before an observation of its momentum is one in which it doesn't have a distinct momentum. no known theory which tries to give it one (a 'hidden variable' theory) matches the results from experiment - except the many-worlds interpretation, which is probably the 2nd most popular interpretation for essentially that reason. but that's a bit inefficient, we've now got not just a hidden variable but a vast number of hidden universes. but it does work and rescues determinism and locality albeit at some cost.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound? The correct answer is: Who gives a shit?
The tree does, as far as there are people trying to say the tree is 50% standing, and 50% fallen. Just like the cat being 50% alive and 50% dead.
Now the more reason why you should "give a shit" also is because, your ability to reason correctly depends on how you answer the question.
Do you also believe that an electron does not have a velocity until it is measured? Then don't even bother watching CNN until all those electrons in your TV get measured.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
Maybe there is a whole different world at the sub-photon level that we do not know about. This unseen yet world contains variables that introduce a random element in our quantum experiments. Since we can only hypothesise and can not observe this world (since our best tool is the photon particle), it would take a very brilliant mind to make the correct hypothesis and test it in a lab.
That if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it
it makes no sound?
Particles without quantum physics would basically react like billard, basically relying on the pauli principle and exchange of values that maintain the sums. I can see what your reply will be: That billard physics has been disproved in favor of quantum physics.
I am not disputing that, I am stating that there might exist a point of view outside our universe from which our universe can be considered a simulation. This is more of a thought experiment in respect to physics inside our universe than actual physics (although it might shed some light on which models for our physics are "neat").
How would infinitesimal points react(in the POV from that hypothetical meta-"real" universe)? Well, it would look much like a fractal state engine(like these flowers), similar to how you would store the interactions of particles in a collider.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Isn't it possible that the reason we find this so difficult to grasp is because of our perception of reality? We perceive these particles purely in four dimensions but if it was the case that there was only a single particle moving in a dimension that intersected with the four we are capable of perceiving we would see much the same effect. Any action on one "particle" would affect all the others, because they are actually the same particle. Similarly, one particle could exist in two mutually exclusive states (clockwise and anticlockwise) at what appears to us to be the same point in time and space but is in fact two separate points along the higher dimension in which the particle exists.
...because said observer can only have one position (below or above) at any given point in time.
... the strangest theory was spooky action at a distance.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
hahah google you got slashdotted
:P
Such an influence, or disturbance, would have to travel faster than the speed of light. "My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion," Einstein later wrote.
Bohr responded with a six-page essay in Physical Review that contained but one simple equation, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation. In essence, he said, it all depends on what you mean by "reality."
This reminds me of the quote by the great Neil Peart "the more we think we know about, the greater the unknown."
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Haven't any of you played Half-Life? If we proceed any further in QT research, we will be so mystified by our new interconnected world that all of our best laboratories will fill with crates and become jumping puzzles -- and the only way to stop it will be to kill a gigantic baby in outer space.
Please, for the love of God, stop the madness!
it's bloody obvious that nothing can spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously.
this is an experiment in heisenbergs closed box, it's not factual, it's not real world, it's a thought experiment in the realms where we have a whole bunch of other thought experiments that attempt to explain the real world.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Particles without quantum physics would basically react like billard, basically relying on the pauli principle and exchange of values that maintain the sums. I can see what your reply will be: That billard physics has been disproved in favor of quantum physics.
Actually no - I would say that the 'billiard' model sounds no more or less like a simulation than the quantum model.
I am not disputing that, I am stating that there might exist a point of view outside our universe from which our universe can be considered a simulation.
I don't see that - as it is hard enough to define a point of view within the universe, let another without - I'm not even the idea of a 'point of view' is sensible for this.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
This fall, two Nobel laureates, Anthony Leggett ... and Norman Ramsay ..., argued in front of several hundred scientists about whether physicists are justified trying to change quantum theory. Leggett said yes; Ramsay said no.
And then, the two scientists began spinning clockwise and counterwise at the same time....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
The known problem with this is that no information actually is transferred as far as we know; it is is only acquired at both ends at the same time (that is, you can't decide what you read).
Entangled atoms allow safe FTL cryptography though, because uncovering and reading the state of the atom creates a bit of a key that is shared at both ends.
Not really FTL, it's more like a read-once OTP. You entangle two atoms, which is like creating two identical OTPs (even though you do not know the values). You then split the atoms (OTPs) at sub-light speed. You can then read out the same OTP at both ends. You still need to encrypt/send at sub-light speed/decrypt. The big point is that the OTP is verifiably *one time*, it can not be read twice. I suppose you can call it "security by quantum obscurity", since the entire point is that the key is kept behind a veil of quantum mechanics.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't know enough/anything about quantum mechanics to agree or disagree, but I don't really like your distinction between our minds and reality/nature. Our minds are a part of nature, and all the knowledge contained in them is a part of nature. Anything we observe is through interaction with other parts of nature. Perhaps you can rephrase your arguments to take that into account?
this cat I hope!
"If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door." - Paul Beatty
Well, there can be different points of view, can't they?
I am basically arguing that "fog of war" equals "quantum physics" in some respect; you sure will agree that an observer of a strategy game who is not impaired by "fog of war" will build a different model of the game as a player who is inside the game and as such has to make guesses as to the location of enemy units.
You are right that the Bell equations seem to contradict me; but Wolfram states they are unconfirmed, and I don't quite see why if a quantum state represents an overlay of several states it cannot even represent an exact single state when requested to do so.
Unfortunately, I don't know Bells assumptions(of locality) by heart; but if this "spooky action at a distance" is true, then assumptions of locality can easily be wrong.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
The New York Times... there is no better fish wrap.
The Admin and the Engineer
Quantum spin is not the same as with a top (or whatever). It's an analog of spin (and can, for example, be 1/2): Quantum Spin
Sorry man, but you're just wrong. If this was actually just an incompleteness of information, then the classic double slit experiment wouldn't work. When the experiment is done emitting just one photon at a time, if the particle always has a specific location and speed in time then the experiment would break and you wouldn't get the interference pattern, you'd just get two bands of light on the target. However, since the position of the photon actually is indeterminist until measurement, it interferes with itself, thus creating the interference pattern, even though only one photon at a time is being emitted.
It has withstood rigorous experimentation. Just because you do not understand Quantum Mechanics (very few people, if that, would claim to understand Quantum Mechanics) doesn't make it false.
A hammer and 20 minutes later it'll be fixed.
"On the Brain of a Scientist: Albert Einstein": These scientists counted the number of neurons (nerve cells) and glial cells in four areas of Einstein's brain: area 9 of the cerebral cortex on the right and left hemisphere and area 39 of the cerebral cortex on the right and left hemisphere. Area 9 is located in the frontal lobe (prefrontal cortex) and is thought to be important for planning behavior, attention and memory. Area 39 is located in the parietal lobe and is part of the "association cortex." Area 39 is thought to be involved with language and several other complex functions. The ratios of neurons to glial cells in Einstein's brain were compared to those from the brains of 11 men who died at the average age of 64. ...there were more glial cells for every neuron in Einstein's brain.
Interesting book, might pick it up.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
Macro evolution has yet to be tested experimentally, and, I'd argue, is incapable of being proven experimentally. Quantum Mechanics, on the other had, has been experimentally proven time and again.
A hammer and 20 minutes later it'll be fixed.
The first link from that Google News page leads straight back to this Slashdot article.
Or is it a dupe? o_O
Whether you open the door to look at the cat or not, the trigger mechanism has already measured the particle, and acted according to that measurement. So we don't know if the cat is dead or not, but this doesn't mean that it's both alive and dead. It just means we don't know. So what the hey is this experiment supposed to be saying that you couldn't see by flipping a coin under a bit of furniture?
The problem with Matrix type ideas is that they suffer from the same recursive problems as the omni-potent creator. Somewhere in the various levels you need to say something "just is", (eg: The Christian God proclaimed "I am"). I like the Matrix type ideas and they make great sci-fi but isn't it more elegant to cut out all the middlemen and conclude that this Universe "just is".
Distancing the philosophical question of "why" by adding undetectable layers of reality may bring comfort to billions but it really only complicates the question.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This article, in it's attempt to maximize the "weirdness factor", ignored what I find to be the most palatable explanation of quantum uncertainty. That is that the universe is five-dimensional. What makes everything seem so wierd is that we are not neutral observers. Our conciousness is created by phenomena that only exist when confined to a three-dimensional snapshot of that universe. We percieve the fourth dimension as time, because it allows our three dimensional snapshot to change as we move in the fourth dimension. We perceive the fifth dimension as probability because it allows multiple possible paths into the future. When an experiment, like determining the spin of one electron out of a pair of emitted electrons shows a particular outcome, the spin of the other particle is not magically changed. Instead we are simply determining which of two possible paths into the future our three-dimensional snapshot of reality happens to have taken. When we compare our results to a distant test of the spin of the other electron, we are not experiencing super-luminal communications, we are simply limited from seeing any other spin for that electron because of our limited three-dimensional conciousmess which can encompass only one state for that particle, which has to be compatible with the state discovered for its fellow electron.
The real surprise here is how very limited our intelligence is, and how little of the true universe we are able to percieve. It is a terrible conceit to believe that we are a neutral observer capable of impartially observering the universe. We literally create our reality by observering it because our reality is a tiny three-dimensional slice of all possible realities. The universe isn't weird, we are just hopelessly myopic.
This interpretation has the benefit of proving Einstein right. God does not play dice with the universe. Since it is commonly accepted that God would transcend the Universe, his conciousness would be at least five-dimensional. He would be simoultaneously aware of all possible paths into the future. When we pick one, we experience a true free-will choice, but the transcendent observer knows which path we will pick - without affeting the nature of the choice iteself. As a side benefit, free will and omniscience are reconciled, and one of the major arguments against the existence of God crumbles into dust.
We aren't programs in the Matrix, we are ants in an ant farm - trapped in a tiny little slice of reality.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Sure, but why should I bother discussing with someone who brings an argument out of his textbooks that is not actually related to the discussion(maybe YOU would attempt to follow it too?), merely because I used a trigger word "state"? (dog)
It all comes down to whether you believe to some extent in hidden variables. Hidden variables are very neat, and I got my own argument to authorithy available, that is, Wolframs stating the issue is unresolved - which I find is quite legit to bring into the discussion since I was referred to Wolfram myself in a reply.
Now, for a factual argument, Bells equations rely on axioms on what people believe are sensible assumptions of locality. Why these assumptions should not be flawed or varying under some circumstances is up to discussion, isn't it?
I can only find the army of downvoters amusing that seems to be chasing my parent post.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Read this article and then go play sudoku in your paper (don't know what it is? do a search, and you will learn). I think my head my just explode in a moment. I keep seeing entanglements and cat states. this box is both a "9" and "8" until i pick one. But the box all the way over there that's an "8" means that this can't be, but that it might be a "6" instead. So if this is "6" than i know that is "8" and therefore that one is "9". Dang Einstein ruining a good game even after he's dead.
Jester
Warning: This sig may be legally binding in England.
Maybe so. Not that I know how that one works any better than quantum mechanics. ;)
Well, I am aware that speculating about something not in the universe is pointless to an extent, but if the matrix type ideas give a neat and working model of the universe, why not have them?
I am stating that having a working quantum theory with hidden variables would result in a neat philosophical idea, the analogy to "fog of war", which is a concept more easily(and correctly) understood by the populace. Neat ideas often work, much like placing the sun in the center of the solar system got rid of extra corrections for "backwards" movement of the planets.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Well, it is not very helpful to have a discussion with someone who is insisting nothing can be ever measured. I do not feel it was an argument in reply to my arguments.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
"I could do a thesis with Oppy only if it was his thesis, not mine."This is very common in Academia, especially the experimental sciences, in fact, if you want to do a thesis with someone famous and reputable, as I had the experience with a world authority on a topic, you better be humble enough to bin your ideas for a good while and do his, however hard you try to be assertive and however nice he may try to be. It just won't work out otherwise. If this is not the case, you're not working with someone important enough, you're not working with someone who has more important work than he can fit into a lifetime. Do your own stuff when you get a tenure and even more so when you become a professor, but till then, just be a humble servant who knows the sceitnific method from A to Z and who'd antitipate what his master's next order is and politely suggests it. The better you get at anticipating what his next order is and suggesting it to him the faster you'll shoot up the ranks. All the rest about originally and et cetera is a facade. Trust me, a facade. That's how you make it in Academia, that's what you should spend your nights thinking about, not brainstorming your own ideas. Your own ideas, however brilliant, will be shot down, unless you're willing to relocate halfway around the world to where there is an interested authority for your idea of the month, and you shouldn't, because until your ideas are tested and replicated, they're not worth betting anything on. Modern Academia is a place filled with pride and politics, they'll bark at the wrong tree as long as they please and when they tire they'll bark at another tree without regard to who might've barked at it before. No one cares where the ideas came from, untested ideas are fantasies, the person who's got the job to enable him to secure the funding, men and equipment required to test them is whom they'll thank. If you have other plans just get out of Academia, and remember that Einstein wasn't a junior Academic when he had the freedom to work on his own stuff, and that they took their time to accept his, and that without his luck, yes, luck no doubt however brilliant, his ideas could've been disproved by experiment, and that for every recognised Einstein there must be countless unrecognised ones.
Well, it is not very helpful to have a discussion with someone who is insisting nothing can be ever measured. I do not feel it was an argument in reply to my arguments.
Helpful or not, it is almost certainly the truth - it is not me who is insisting this, it is virtually all of modern physics. There may be a few who disagree (Wolfram, for example), but almost no-one takes this seriously.
My point in reply to your argument what that a point of view 'outside of the universe' would not make sense (in my opinion), as there would be neither time nor space in which to have the point of view....
(Score: 5, Misinformation)
Here's a thought experiment.
Divde a second into 256 equal parts. Detangle an atom in the first 256th part, and there's your null character. Detangle in the 78th and there's your M. Continue once a second with a bathtub full of tangled particles.
After a few minutes, you've got an entire message sent FTL.
I have to disagree with this because you are referring to a hidden state like it was the value of a single variable.
I believe this has been proven wrong, at least under the common models of what is a particle and when its a wave.
I believe you are right in the basics of what you saying, but that the hidden state of two variables is not just the cross-product, but includes all interactions between these variables, so that the hidden state is a wave distribution. When the "wave collapses", the actual hidden values are resolved such as if they had always been assigned.
One might think the above paragraph is bullshit, but I believe that is not my fault, but is due to the fact that physics is taking shortcuts because it can never work with the hidden variables anyway:
This is often the point were Heisenberg is cited in the discussion. However, Heisenberg just means that there are always hidden variables, and that is the beauty of it.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Yes, I'm the AC that posted that comment, and I assure you that it was sarcasm, and honestly, I'm a little surprised that it wasn't modded down as flamebait or offtopic. It's intended as a reference to ID advocates who take the position that G— er, an "Intelligent Designer"—must be responsible for creation since the world is so complex and we haven't managed to explain it all to a scientific certainty yet, and that every once in a while, scientists argue among competing theories to try to get to the truth.
Funny, you don't see similar protests and rallying against teaching of physics and its theories because stuff like quantum mechanics isn't fully understood. No school board has been trying to put stickers in physics books saying, "This textbook contains material on quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a theory, not a fact, regarding the existence of matter and energy. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."
EPR does suggest (and this has been proven in tests) that states measured at one side of the entangled matter are exactly opposite of those on the other side thus enabling a method of distribution of random sets without comprimise (as measuring in transit violates the sets).
So, if you want to call it teleportation, go ahead, just understand that you are just "teleporting" randomness.
Actually this is proof that the article is in a quantum state. It is a dupe while at the same time it is not a dupe.
Physics: The stuff that dreams are made of.
Quantum Physics:The dreams that stuff is made of.
Dreams: That humans are the center of all things.
Just a personal PoV.
I'm a physician and I have never heard the word 'cat'. Quantum entanglement is not very complicated. In fact, it is pretty easy to explain if one takes two facts as granted:
1.) Nature realizes all possibilities which we cannot exclude.
2.) There are conservation laws.
Now take two photons from which you know that they have been produced in a decay of a spinless particle. Their spins must add up to one. So measuring one photon's spin immediately allows to determine the other one's spin just by looking at the angular conservation law.
I personally think that the basic problem of this all is due to the mixture of dynamical evolution and discrete restrictions not being part of the evolution. The evolution itself respects conservation laws as can be seen from Noether symmetries in the Lagrangian, but symmetrization (the knowability problem) must be introduced separately by a symmetrization procedure. Example: when can you separate two identical particles and when not? If you know their initial states, you can determine their identities by looking at their positions: assuming some momentum distribution it is up to some point in time very well possible to identify a particle with an initial state particle... IMHO this illustrates the basic problem of enforcing a symmatrization procedure which is not part of the evolution....
Now, I am not a physicist and I know nothing about anything, but reading the article made me think of a database. Assume for a moment that what we call an "electron" is actually a row in a table, with its various characteristics modeled by the fields. Although the electron seems to occupy something we call "space" with multiple dimensions, it can in fact be represented by a one-dimensional string of ones and zeroes.
Pursuing this dubious analogy further, we could suggest that our "electron" has several different positions:
- The "position" corresponding to the different values of its dimensional fields
- The position corresponding to its entry in the table
- The position corresponding to its actual position in storage
Positing a 2-dimensional storage for a moment, we can see that "electrons" with very different spatial field values might actually be on adjacent rows of the table or might lie next to one another as actual binary strings on the storage medium. Contrariwise "electrons" with very similar spatial field values might actually be very distant in terms of rows or media.Thus the concept of physically remote but related electrons could be explained by a variety of means (row adjacency, media adjacency).
Conclusion: The entire universe is actually a database residing on a really big server farm somewhere, and all these strange quantum effects are a natural consequence of interaction between records due to the limitations of the physical media. As to what the server farm is made of or where it resides...that's left as an exercise to the ID proponents. As to what database it is, since it has been in use for at least 15 billion years without a reboot, it's got to be DB2 or Oracle.
Pining for the fjords
At the other end you can't detect "when" the atom gets untangled. You can only "measure" it. If you happen to measure it before the first end did it, the roles are reversed and you triggered the detanglement instead of the first end.
When an evolutionist looks at various rings on a fruit fly, they make a leap and say, see that proves their is no God. Christians say, that proves nothing of the sort, you made an interpretation leap that is illogical.
Thusly, when a quantum mechanic says that's an electron doing something weird, Christians say, "yep, that's weird." Now at the point when a quantum mechanic makes the leap to say, "ok see that proves there is no God," thats when the Christians will say your interpretation is illogical.
It's the same reason Christians don't get all huffy about airplanes. Christians say, "Yep, that's an airplane." But if you were to say, "See that proves there is no God." That's when Christians would say your leap of interpretation is illogical.
If science were to just present what they know about evolution rather than making illogical leaps, then Christians wouldn't care. So, if you make the statement that it's evolution that you observe various fruit fly rings and you say that proves evolution, then why can't you really prove evolution by turning a fruit fly into a dog?" Sure evolutionists can show genetic variance such as hair color, but chromosomal variance such as species jumps, they can't. (micro vs macro) Geneticists can get into a cell and force mutation but then it's not evolution anymore, it's Intelligent Design. So really, you haven't proven your thinking, just your wishful thinking. But, proud scientists instead of admiting they don't know something to christians, they'd rather make leaps in logic. Really, isn't that what science is really all about, trying to upset Christians for no good reason? You basically believe what you want to believe but the burden of proof is still on the Scientists, that's why they're so up in arms when Christians won't fall in line to their leaps of reasoning.
So to answer your question, basically quantum mechanics don't make crazy leaps in faith where evolutists do.
I'm no physics expert, but from popularly distributed "knowledge" I assume two things *could* be true: 1) The matter of which I'm made was created billions of years ago when very dense, heavy atoms degraded into many more, much less dense atoms as stars colided and glaxies formed, etc. 2) Particles split off from a common source are "entangled", at least some of the time, resulting in the sort of quantum mechanics confusion that measuring the state of one particle changes the state of another, possibly beyond the speed of light, possibly instantly, no matter the distance between the two particles. Assuming these two things, is it then, possible, that every movement I make, or, indeed, even thoughts I have (as they cause neurochemical activity) causes an instantaneous, correlated change in a group of particles somewhere in the universe which originated from the same heavy atoms my less dense ones broke free of? If that is the case, what is the probability that those "entangled" particles are in similar configuration to the configuration my particular collection is in.. in other words, am I being mirrored somewhere? Quantum Mechanics seems to be a pandoras box of thought exercises.. Personally, I am of the opinion that there will eventually be a much simpler theory put forth that explains all of these phenomena, however, we will have to wait for the next great mind to conceive it. QM is just too messy for me to accept. I find the issues with Locality especially troubling, and generally think that if Einstein couldn't think around it, then there is probably something wrong with it, given his history of thinking in new and different ways. Anyways, geeks of slashdot, where does my above "mirror me" scenario break down? To me, I must have something wrong.
An interesting question then might be, is then human knowledge and usage of quantum theory a desired property of the simulation, or an artifact that invalidates the simulation results?
It is the purpose of the *simulation* as you call it. Because quantum physics guarantee that you cannot accurately simulate, or predict, how a quantum universe will go, the only way to see what will happen is to actually *run* the universe to get the results.
Personally I think the evolution of self-aware intelligence is the reason the universe is being *run*, the big bang + evolution = godseed. Eventually an intelligence that doesn't kill itself out will evolve. Eventually one of these will evolve to the next order of complexity and create a self-aware universe = a god.
Mathematics and logic are universal - I can still have views about a Mandelbrot fractal, although I have never lived in one.
;-)
Or maybe we should all just believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the guidance of his noodly appendage, since these beliefs are sufficient to provide guidance to us, since all we need is Ramen anyway
I thank you for the discussion
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I think "acquired" is the wrong word here, isn't it? The information is available at both ends at the same time, but if one end acquires the information, the other end doesn't find out about it, surely? Otherwise it's trivial to get FTL communication, because the fact that the other end has determined the state of the particle is information in itself.
I always understood it to mean that both ends were reading the same set of information independently, but the information being read was only fixed at the time of the first read, no matter which end was responsible. That's more obviously non-communicative.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Even subatomic particles have to put up with politicians...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Our model of the universe - that is, the sum total of our theories and observation about it - is a simulation. It exists in our brains and in our books. TFA talks about the idea that "reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable". But of course our model of reality is made out of information!
A century or two ago we though that the information-universe was "compressable": determine the initial conditions and the deterministic rules, and (in principle) you had a complete description of the past, present, and future of reality. But it seems that the universe is not compressable: there's no complete model of it that's smaller.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Somebody had to say it.
...depending on how you look at it. It's only two words on average. Which bugs me. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Always confusing the observed universe with the real universe. The cat is alive, or it's dead.
No mention is made of Schroedinger, whose "cat state" they were alluding to. Einstein never made any "theory" about producing cat states. The EPR paper didn't really have anything to do with Schroedinger's Cat and quantum superposition of macroscopic objects, but rather the paper attacked QM on the grounds that it was not a local-realistic theory. One has to break at least one of those two assumptions about the physical world in order to get the answers that QM produces (and is supported by experiment), this result was proven by John S. Bell in the 60's using his (should be) famous Bell's Inequalities.
Schroedinger wrote his famous paper describing quantum entanglement and naming it for the first time after reading the EPR paper, and saying that entanglement was the "defining feature" of quantum theory. The paper also introduced his famous cat. Wigner extended the Gedanken experiment by introducing "Wigner's Friend" who had to look inside the cat box, and thus also becoming placed into a superposition, this time simultaneously seeing both a dead and alive cat. Both Schroedinger's Cat and Wigner's Friend have very little to do with the EPR paper.
Einstein was one of the people involved in developing quantum theory, but Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, de Broglie, von Neumann, etc who were more instrumental in its development weren't even mentioned. Einstein was very antagonistic towards QM, even after it had been extremely successful at describing physical systems and experimental results. He never really exactly thought QM wasn't right, just not complete in the local realistic sense. To the theorist, such experiments demonstrating the existence of cat states are simply to be expected, we'd be so much more surprised (and excited actually) if the experiments indicated something other than what QM would predict. To satisfy the ardent Local Realist, the Holy Grail is the Loophole Free Bell Test (close the efficiency/fair sampling, locality, random choice loopholes all simultaneously). That'd be a definitive experiment to finally nail the lid on the Einsteinian Realists, but for the majority of physicists, we'd hardly care because it's almost taken as given that the results will simply support QM and not local realism.
In the end, Nature is the final arbiter, and if QM predicts the results of experiment better than any other conceivable theory, then our bets should be on QM. There have been no compelling experiments to indicate that QM is anything other than correct, save the fact that it needs to somehow mesh with GR at some energy/length scale.
Joel Bloggs
http://www.quantiki.org/
ReferencesE ntanglement.php
http://cam.qubit.org/users/matthias/Entanglement/
Mathematics and logic are universal - I can still have views about a Mandelbrot fractal, although I have never lived in one.
I agree.
I thank you for the discussion
And you.
From a logical perspective, it's not fine.
The universe we live in (or anything remotely like it) is in many ways extremely improbable if viewed as the product of randomness, therefore it cannot reasonably be random, it cannot "just exist".
Now that this option has been eradicated, it's time to explore another one. However, there are many religious bigots who refuse to do this (and want to disallow anyone else to do this) for philosophical reasons.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
they would not be alive.
Pomo bullshit at its best! Insightful indeed....
"Bohr and his followers want to transfer a property of the mind (knowledge) to a property of nature (reality)."
Hey, mind and reality are not diametrically opposed opposites, as 3000+ years of western philosophy would have you believe.
I think in order to move forward, we are going to have to have a better idea about the relationship between mind and reality.
Note: I am not saying that people create reality with their minds or anything like that. All I am saying is that mind and reality are not opposites. They have some other kind of relationship, and we should more clearly define it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
> gravity might equal clustering of processors with similar tasks
Leading us back to the HHGttG explanation of earth...
If something being in a "state" which is simultaneously two mutually exclusive conditions seems kind of weird to you, well... you're right.
Remember highschool Algebra class? You would solve for some variable, find its value, then plug that value back into the problem you had at the beginning to double-check whether you got it right. If you ended up with something like "2=3", then you knew that you had done something wrong.
Likewise, if you think you see a contradiction in the physical universe, like something existing in two opposite states at the same time, it just means that you have made a mistake. Either your assumptions are wrong or your reasoning is faulty.
Reality isn't self-contradictory.
The first theories about the movement of the planets were monstrous things involving "retrograde motion". They predicted the locations of the planets accurately, but no one could make any sense of why planets should shuffle back and forth like that. Astronomers/astrologers put forth theories involving juxtapositions, elemental natures, or even the temperaments of the gods but none of that would lead to a better understanding. They were only trying to bind something understandable to the mathematics of a system which they didn't understand.
The fact that a theory gives accurate predictions is not sufficient proof that it "explains" anything. If the answer to "Why?" seems contrived, maybe that's all it is.
This is the state of modern subatomic physics. There are theories which apparently succeed in predicting new observations but the explanations are intuitively repulsive. Can there really be a particle which "spins both ways at the same time"? What is this "spin"? Why only two ways, and why isn't there an amount of spin instead of only a binary answer? Doesn't that just scream to you that the whole idea is flawed from the start?
What we need is a Copernican leap. Instead of just blindly accepting that things happen in a quantized way at subatomic levels, we need to figure out why it seems that way. When people talk about things appearing out of nowhere, vanishing, reappearing, etc. for no explainable reason, you have every right to laugh in their faces.
something happens in reality only the very moment you know it.
to say the electron has many velocities (wavefunction) before measurement but as soon as it is measured, it collapses (wavefunction collapse) into a single value.
I thought that this was exactly what was happening, because the result is perceived by the observer. Everything "is" (or is'nt, or carrot, what with quantum weirdness and all) but you can only see what is from the point of the observer, change perspective, and the perceived result changes. Light particle wave duality -- its a particle when you look at it, wave when not (theoretically). If the tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Bad example, but similar philosophy.
maybe I am on crack, but perception is 9/10ths of reality
|plastic....or gasoline?|
I'm not a quantum physicist. However, this article makes me wish I were. What strikes me about the situation is that the experts seem to be a bit dumbfounded by all of this. Some seem to be struggling with deep philosophical concepts due to the strange findings. What this tells me is these men are at the edge of our paradigm of thought. They are the people who have a chance to pioneer new ways of thinking beyond our 'logical' paradigm. It seems our current and most common paradigm of thinking applies to a certain level of phenomenon. These physicists are observing phenomenon beyond that level. An evolution of thought must take place.
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
The funny thing, of course, is that at the moment this very /. article is at the top of the search results . . .
Well this explains why not scientists are winning the lotteries around the nation. Randomness in its purest form. :)
So just set up a schedule of reading the entangled atoms. So once a month or whatever a message is untangled and the other end knows when they will be able to recieve the message.
FTL communications aren't limited to light beams. Mechanical force is also useful.
Suppose you took quantum particles and made a couple walkie-talkies out of them, or more specifically, just the pairs of microphone and speaker elements.
Then move the two walkie-talkies apart by X distance. Put one on a ship and send it, say, 38 light years away.
According to the quantum theory, the two devices would remain in instantanous contact despite the distance. Sound vibrations received by one device would be emitted by the other end as sound waves, and vice versa.
Bingo, FTL radio. Fast, effective, efficient.
Side effect: this process means SETI and the like are never going to find any signals from ET. No sane species would use slow light-speed radiowaves when there's a Quantum alternative.
OK,
String theory is in trouble because the only way scientists can make it work with reality is if we accept that there are a nearly infinite collection of alternate realities.
Now we get this proof that nothing works the way our vaunted intellects would expect.
I am now willing to believe that the world is only 8,000 years old and God thought the fossils were a real knee-slapper.
Very funny God.
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
Maybe that was Einstein and the others' original goal - just trying to understand women. Maybe this Quantum Mechanics thing is just a specialized case of the General Theory of Women.
And how can you be so sure that it does not happen this way? How can you know that the CNN news would happen if you didn't hear about it?
How can you say that the cat isn't dead and alive at the sam time if you didn't open the box?
Rethinking email
Except those inequalites assume that information doesn't travel faster than light, which is almost certainly untrue of a classical simulation where any amount of information can travel in no time at all simply by pausing the simulation. They also assume that objects have a well defined state (ie complete information), which is also not typically true of simulations. Consider for instance that a simulation could keep quantum-level state in a cache of some sort. Then our experiments would 'succeed' in observing this cached data and the cached data would cause the expected overall effects.
What all this means is that if we are in a simulation then abusing the simulation environment may have no effects we could possibly perceive, but our actions (building person-sized teleporters for instance) may overload the simulation and cause it to be canceled / reset. Of course with a simulated universe this big, everything is bound to happen sooner or later...
There's no way to tell whether you are detangling it or if the other side broke entanglement. Also, the concept of simultaneously reading the particles comes into a fair bit of question over long distances.
Scientists can not be divorced from science, or is it the other way around. In any event, science, as we know it, is not a description of the world, it is a human description of human perceptions; I think David Hume proposed this and a wit coined it as " no matter, never mind," meaning we are sure about neither our mind nor the outside world. Of course we are still doing science precisely because science is meaningful to us, but no bigger claim is made.
Instincts are wonderful, I will never do without them. But they are developed, rather than innate, and I find things very intuitive the third time I have to learn them. As for being wrong, that can't be helped; we are human.
I like to rationalize this (so that I can remain sane), by thinking of entangled particles as being a projection from a higher-order dimensional space. The entagled arttributes are therefore instantaneous in their action in that the distance between them is zero in the higher-order dimensions, but their observation in our spacetime still follows our rules (e.g., the speed of light). Because our observation mixes the results of our space-time with that those of a higher-order dimensionality, the results appear "spooky", but they are no more confusing than an interference pattern with an unknown waveform.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Hm, is it really slashdotting if one slashdot slashdot ?
Just saying it like it are.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
The EPR experiment is as close to magic as any physical phenomenon I know of, and magic should be enjoyed.
When did it become acceptable to go "Santa Claus" in the scientific laureate?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
An electron has a specific velocity, whether any person knows it or not.
This is a strong theory, backed by common sense. That is all.
Either that.. or use one of the many logins available here http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.nytimes.c om! Bugmenot rocks for all those PITA registration required sites.
Up until QM, physicists viewed the world the same way almost all scientists had viewed it up until that point: as a giant machine moving according to some fundamental principles of motion. If you look inside a mechanical clock, you'll see a bunch of gears that each follow simple rules of motion but together produce a clock that behaves as you would expect it.
The QM theory troubled Einstein especially because that way of thinking no longer worked anymore. For the first time, there was something truly, and irreducibly, random. Stuff happens, and it happens one way half the time and the other way the other half of the time, and there is nothing anyone in this universe can do about it. What is amazing is that even within this randomness, the "old" order is preserved.
We should keep asking ourselves, "Why?" Why does the universe behave this way? Is this really the end of the story or are there more fundamental principles of motion to understand? We should explore the standard theories and experiment and see how close they are to reality. We ask this question almost knowing we won't get a good answer. But we discover all sorts of neat things along the way.
On the separation of philosophy and physics, they aren't that separated after all. The difference is that physicists go out and do experiments, while philosophers talk about doing experiments. There is a large group of physicists--the theoretical physicists--that really blur the lines between philosophy and physics. What's really interesting is to listen to philosophers and see what they have to say about QM, at least those that really understand it. Yes, you can take physics and treat it as a tool. "We know X, Y, and Z, and that's it." But I am telling you, that isn't interesting. What is really interesting is asking, "Why is X, Y, and Z X, Y, and Z and not A, B, and C?" That's where new ideas come and ground-breaking experiments are proposed.
I sat through a class on particle quantum physics, and I watched as the professor pulled out charts from experiments he personally ran. "This is the predicted behavior. As you can see, it matches up pretty well, within the margins of error. It's always exciting when you get something so right. Except for these completely unexpected spikes here, here, and here. What causes these spikes? We don't know. But whatever it is, it is interesting, and we are spending a great deal of time and effort trying to understand these spikes. I have some ideas, my colleagues have others, and I am sure some of you have your own. I can't predict which ideas are correct and anyone who says they can is a fool. We have to look more and figure things out before we can say for sure what causes these spikes."
We have made significant progress since Aristotle first started writing things down and being methodical about his observations. But we are nowhere near the goal of understanding the universe. And what we do know seems to say we can't ever know what makes up the universe.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure if the dominate state is having 2 states at the same time, a single state object would seem strange.
It bothers me how people always say that time is the 4th dimention. Looking at the first 3 dimentions, you would think that the forth dimention would simply be perpendicular to the 3rd, as the 3rd dimention is perpendicular to the 2nd... (or many 2D's aligned perpendicularly to eachother) Why is it that the first 3 dimentions are considered spatial, but not the forth? Just because we cannot imagine it, doesn't mean it cannot be. Time is NOT the 4th dimention
The Digital Couture Collection
The problem is, the Detangle operation is a Peek, not a Poke. The result is random. The spooky bit is that the Peek on one end will always agree with the Peek on the other end. There is no way to actually transmit information FTL with the method described. Think of it this way: Take a deck of cards, shuffle, then cut it in half with a band saw. Send one half-deck across the galaxy at sub light speed, then "measure" the top half-card by looking at it on your end. Guess what? the top half-card on the other end will agree! The difference between the macro and micro scales here is that when you measure one property of your particle, you actually cause some other property of both particles to become less certain. You could actually use either particles or playing cards as an encryption method, but the cards have the flaw that a spy could look at one half-deck without disturbing it.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Some people commenting on this thread will find the transactional theory of quantum mechanics (powerpoint) of interest. (Less clear cut paper in HTML here).
In my opinion, this is the most reasonable, extant interpretation. From my perspective, it says that the paradoxes of QM are perceptual, arising from our perception of time as entirely forward moving. If waves move backwards in time (as in the transactional theory), everything makes sense, though it won't appear to make sense to us.
The particles are not like voodoo dolls that move on both ends when you apply a physical force on one end. The phenomenon is that when you measure some property of a particle on one side, its corresponding particle will be found to have the same value for that property when someone on that side gets around to measuring it. That is actually not so profound, but the thing that Einstein thought of as spooky was that the act of measuring a property of the particle on one end will cause some other property of both particles to become less measurable, otherwise you could measure one property on one end, the other property on the other end, and thus know both properties of both particles precisely which would violate the Uncertainty Principle.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
See my sig.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The problem with believing that physical reality is independent from the mind is that it is neither dependant nor independent.
Do you know that there are not enough nerves in the retina to display 100% of all light rays that enter it? Most of what you see and feel is guestimation by your mind. This doesn't change what a physical objects properties, but you have to keep in mind (no pun intended) that the mind isn't 100% digital like a computer.
You need the mind to perceive reality and you need reality to have a psychical mind.
Secondly, what you perceive does affect the outcome because you are physical doing physical things in the universe. Even passively you are breathing, blinking, heart beating, neurons firing... You are affecting the universe in some way. If you perceive certain results you will even go further and interact with the physical universe such as moving locations or possible destroying the organization or creating organization of matter. You know... Like believing god told you throw a dish across the room and breaking it and then gluing it back together because you realized that was a crazy idea.
Lets go on to the existence part on how and if the mind actually causes physical reality...
Imagine to yourself that you don't exist. Either you were never born or you just spontaneously combusted a few seconds ago. Now answer me this... Does the rest of the universe still exist?
Wait! Wait! You can't answer that yes or no... You know why? Because you do not exist.
Existence is a matter of opinion or rather if you are able to observe something. If you observe it (or its affects). Then it exists. If you do not observe it. Then it does not exist. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist for other people... Just not to you.
I would like to expand saying that if you observe its affects on the physical universe then it exists. Don't forget, you don't have to understand it or its affects on the universe to observe it.
This means everything in the observable universe exist and everything outside does not. However, this is extremely broad. Since all matter emits gravity and various types of emissions of light, reflection of light, and various other properties we can generally assume that reality is not just something we can close our eyes and it goes away.
If we are dead (or just never existed) we aren't around to observe this and the point of whether the universe actually exists is a moot point. We could not simply agree or disagree on the matter.
But if you subscribe to Quantum Immortality then you cannot not exist, because once you cease to exist or have memories, you would instantaneously find yourself as either yourself (or another sentient being) somewhere in the universe with the ability to observe and record memories of your self existing even though this could be a trillion years in the future or in another universe where life is possible.
I think what these Quantum mechanics were trying to explain (or figure out) is what really happens or what causes the universe itself to exist and along the way they realized it had something to do with observation and existence itself (which rather bothered them because they didn't want to get into philosophy). I don't think we'll figure that part out anytime soon.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
There is an exact point that differentiates the quantum world from the macro world. I forget the calculation, but at a certain size the probability effects approach/become zero. The calculation is the same for what happens to a cat or an electron but because of size the probability effects that govern an electrons existence/location/"movement" zero out for the cat, and cats occupy a "definite" location in space.
Don't have time to google the formula now, hope I remember this correctly (from one of Feynman's books).
Quantum theory gets much closer to the whys of ordinary life than any other yet has. Stuff happens because of the behavior of the smallest components of stuff, and quantum mechanics goes to a fairly small level. There may be an infinite regression of whys (or at least some further, unknown, levels), but the quantum theory responds more to why than to how. The practical results came long after the theory.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
EPR was not proposed as an attack on Quantum Mechanics as a set of equations, etc, but an attack on the Copenhagen interpretation, which is based on the Positivist philosophical position and says such things that a particle doesn't exist unless it's observed, has nasty things like collapsing wavefunctions, and has problems with observers being special in some way.
The EPR experiments were designed to show Spooky Action at a Distance. The Copenhagen interpretation of QM (championed by Bohr) has no local variables and tries to avoid Spooky Action at a Distance. Bohm's interpretation allows Local Variables (and particles that actually exist) but also forces Spooky Action.
--LWM
Try this. For your confusion.
When an evolutionist looks at various rings on a fruit fly, they make a leap and say, see that proves their is no God. Christians say, that proves nothing of the sort, you made an interpretation leap that is illogical. No they don't foolish child. The only reason evolution is an issue for a minority of Christians of the world , is that they see evolution and the existence of million year old fossils as a threat to their world view. That is all.
you said:
"Alternately, if schroedinger's cat is in an alive/dead superposition in the box, then if the cat experiences a sane and straightforward set of experiences yet the outside-of-box observer claims it to be in an alive/dead combo state, then outside the box observer and inside the box observer's consciousness lines must potentially deviate. If the cat experiences no trouble at all, but the observer measures it to be dead then they're already in different 'universes' from one another.
So my last questions: is everybody else around here soulless zombies due to the great improbability that I'd be traveling along the same path as the 'conscious' ones? If not, why the heck are all you people following my conscious line for (or me yours)? That is, if multiple consciousness can occur at the split points, yet any one consciousness experiences a fluid and non-confusing pathway then how do the others experience anything."
----------------
I've pondered the same things, but since I have little math aptitude, I just spin my wheels at this point. I'd be interested if someone is pursuing this thought experiment and knows how to present it in an accurate, yet qualitative way so a non-physicist can follow.
The known problem with this is that no information actually is transferred as far as we know; it is is only acquired at both ends at the same time (that is, you can't decide what you read).
Not quite. The problem is that you have no way of measuring the actual state without entangling it. So you can only read it once and don't know what the value was before.
Or at least this is the way it works with electrons. I believe that there are ways around this with photons in that certain crystals will split polarized portions of a beam along known polarity lines, thus allowing you to have some level of control over which state goes in which direction. This property is known as birefringence and is closely linked to the property of pleocroism (i.e. all pleocroitic/dichoritic crystals are birefringent, but not all birefringent crystals show different colors from different directions).
Note that this would only apply to wired environments (it would require single-mode fiberoptic cable) and would mostly be useful as a security measure. Being able to send instantaneous signals to Mars is beyond the possibilities of this technology.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The fundamental problem (from a neo-realist perspective) is not that observation inherently involves creating a property that didn't exist, but that at least for most subatomic particles, we can't read the data without re-entangling the particle. This renders it useless for a simple reason.
Lets say we have two electrons with entangled spins. We separate them. Put them in walkie talkies, etc. First, we can't just read and flip because in order to read the spin, we can only do this by entangling the electron with one of two electrons of known spins. In essence, in this case, measurement destroys the connection, but it has to do with the specific means of measurement, not the act of observation itself. THis is why non-communication is a problem with this idea. Now if you have a large series of electrons in a known order and have some non-entangling way of separating them according to their spin, you could get around this.
Now, there are ways to split light beams along polarity lines and I would suggest that it ought therefore to be possible to generate entangled beams of known polarities. In this case the polaritity of a photon determines which beam it ends up in and therefore you can know before you measure what the original state was. Of course measuring the state requires destroying the photon but if you have a single mode fiberoptic cable you can determine that the photons are arriving in order and have a virtually unlimited number of them. Note that this means that communication should be possible in a wired environment and I have seen articles purporting to use these properties as a security measure (yes, the communication might occur FTL, but in a fiber optic environment over short distances, this is not exactly a selling point).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
NT
I believe the existance of a working quantum theory means that the universe can be considered as a simulation insofar as there might exist a universe without quantum physics and just particle physics.
Or maybe quantum physics is a simulation for our universe?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
You keep throwing out this "50% this, 50% that" stuff. You're not understanding QM right at all. QM doesn't say Schrodinger's cat is "50% alive and 50% dead" at all. It says it is 100% alive and 100% dead simultaneously, until observed. Once observed, the wavefunction collapses, and the cat is one or the other.
-- Dave
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
First, I have found no reason to assume that FTL comm is a *fundamental* impossibility. It currently is due to a number of limitations which exist most subatomic particles (photons are exempt but pose other problems as they can't ever really be frozen in their current state and position complete with entanglements).
:-) The key point here is that I see no reason to assume that this separation process is entangling and therefore could be used to generate entangled photon sequences of known polarities.
Your main limitations are that the only ways we can measure these properties is by entanglement. This means that when we measure an electron's spin we have to do so by entangling it with another one, thus breaking the previous entanglement.
Hence currently you have no foreknowledge of the state of the electron (telling me that the electron doesn't have a state prior to observation is about as far removed from the observation-based scientific method as Intelligent Design is).
Now lets say we had a technology that would allow us to separate electrons based on spin. Lets say furthermore that this used some non-electron-based energy field (maybe some special form of polarized laser) that was entirely non-entangling. So now we can generate sequentially seven million entangled electron pairs with known states. We now have a sequence of seven million bits that could be used to send information. We know the spins. We can therefore measure when the spin changes to the other definite state. Make sense? Just because it is not possible with current technology doesn't mean that it is a fundamental impossibility.
Now, if this seems overly fanciful, consider that some crystals will split light into polarized components and refract these components differently. This is because the speed of light in the crystal becomes dependent on the polarization of the photon. If you want to see this effect, buy a piece of Iceland Spar and put it on a newspaper
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The spin they're talking about isn't the same kind of spin as in a top. It has more to do with polarity then a rotation. Spin is a confusing term as it relates to the real world. But I wonder how can they tell the difference between a cat state or no spin.
It seems kind of revisionist for people to say 'Einstein was a founder of quantum theory' when his idea was basically 'if it were true, we should see such-and-such, but that's absurd, so it can't be right'. Just because the 'absurd thing' has been shown to exist, doesn't mean Einstein should be given credit for founding Quantum Theory :)
;)
i an_doctrine)#Dispute_regarding_Isaiah_7:14
Consider that during Galileo's trial, Cardinal Bellarmine supposedly said "To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus Christ was not born of a virgin." Should we say then that Bellarmine was 'a founder of heliocentrism'?
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Birth_(Christ
Both Godel and Einstein had a gut-level belief that time does not exist, at least not in the sense that we understand it. Deutsch and other many-worlds theorists consider time as a sort of fixed manifold in which all possibilities exist. In other words, linearity of time is an illusion of our existence.
What I wonder about is this--if we take this view, can we not simply remove time from our equations? At the quantum-level, at least with fermions, can we not simply ignore time? If we do so, doesn't the the dual-slit experiment seem straightforward? Would eliminating the time variable make it easier to embrace the Bell inequality? I don't know the physics; I'm just asking.
What is time anyway? We measure it by means of observing regular motion, right? Is time not then just an emergent property of motion? If so, wouldn't this seem to indicate that time does not have true dimensionality, and so should be removed from our first principles exploration of fundamental physics? Relativity seems to indicate that time doesn't exist at the speed of light, anyway, right?
But there's also a theory that the real mathematician behind his work was Mileva.
interesting. any evidence for this ?
The main argument is that his seminal papers were written during the years that they were together, and after they split up, he never again produced anything of such importance.
What work of academic merit did Mileva Maric produce ?
If she was that seminal an academic, wouldn't there have been a major publication, before or after (or during) their marriage ?
The culture back then was not very interested in recording the details of a mere wife's contributions.
True. That did not stop historians from acknowledging works by other great women of the age: Noether and, eventually, Meitner. This Mileva rumor ("theory" is realy something else, BTW) looks quite fictional, I think.
Working for necessity's mother.
> The New York Times does give this story for free.
> But you do have to register (for free) with a valid email.
Then by definition it's not free if you have to do something for them to get it.
I will give you $20 for free if you walk to my letterbox and collect my mail. That's hardly a free $20 is it?
(Considering my letterbox is at the end of a 17 mile drive)
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I don't know if this is what the grandparent post actually meant, but this is the way I understood it: when the 'unit' goes into an 'unknown state' the simulation stores the unit as some sort of unknown state, and doesn't spend anymore CPU cycles on the unit until the unit is observed again, putting it out of the unknown state.
It seems like something reasonable for a simulation: if it is not important for the unit to be autonomous when it is in its unknown state, why not just assign it a random state when it is observed again rather than waste more CPU cycles on it?
Sounds Zen to me.
...either cats or surfing.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"Aye Yam what aye Yam..." doesn't actually make any sense. Neither does "We're here because we're here". It's a tautology, circular reasoning.
We know that some physical properties can vary, we can even create altered physical conditions in the lab to a certain extent; there are viable theories that claim that the conditions we measure are local, in a very large sense -- that elsewhere in the universe, physical properties might be different.
Regardless of whether they're local or universal, the vast majority of sets of physical properties cannot possibly support life. Not just "life as we know it" but any life. The likelihood of us being alive to observe the universe, as we are, in any given universe are very, very low.
In point of fact, the likelihood of us being alive in this universe are ridiculously low, too (at least hundreds of orders of magnitude against). The short way of saying that is "impossible". But in most other potential universes, they're much lower. Much less than impossible.
Sadly, the optimists are right: this is the best of all possible worlds, or at least near enough as makes no difference in the grand scheme of things.
Why is it the best of all possible worlds? The numbers tell us that it shouldn't be, that we shouldn't exist in any form. Which brings us to the Anthropic Principle.
The Anthropic Principle, in layman's terms, says that we observe a relatively benign universe because if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here.
That sounds reasonable, but in practice it isn't. Within the breathtakingly narrow set of conditions under which our existence is merely impossible, the actual conditions we observe are still unreasonably good. There are many, many more sets of possible conditions (but stil vanishingly few overall) in which we exist, but in much less benign circumstances. It is extremely unlikely that our conditions should be so good. The fact that they actually are so good speaks strongly against the Anthropic Principle.
My point is that the current, widely accepted idea that we (people, as well as the universe we're in) are an accident doesn't make rational sense, so it needs to be discarded and alternatives sought. Unfortunately, at this point we start to break potentially religious ground -- to threaten established religions -- and that precious rationality all too often gets tossed aside in the heat of such debate.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
NEITHER creation nor evolution fit the strict definition of science: the study of that which is observable and repeatable.
Wrong. Science is NOT the study of that "which is observable and repeatable." What is required for an idea to be considered scientific is that it must yield predictions that are testable by observation. Not everything must be observable; it is only required that there be observable consequences. Until fairly recently, for example, it was not possible to observe atoms, but atomic theory was considered to be scientific because there are observable consequences of the existence of atoms. Similarly, evolutionary theory makes numerous predictions about levels of genetic similarity between species, which can be tested by sequencing studies that yield results that are observable and repeatable.
The difference between the macro and micro scales here is that when you measure one property of your particle, you actually cause some other property of both particles to become less certain.
Thus, if you could measure the probabililty of all properties at once, you can transmit information by measuring a single property.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Just because you do not know it to exist doesn't mean it does not. Please remember, the world does not stop at the limits of your knowledge. Akira Tonomura's team created the double slit experiment using just single electrons at Hitachi in 1989. Guess what? The electrons, though there was only one in the device at any time, produced an interference pattern.
Ah yes, Hydrino Theory. Congratulations, you've just lost all your credability.
A hammer and 20 minutes later it'll be fixed.
It is never possible to determine how something "really works". The best we can ever do is to is come up with a theory that is logically self-consistent, agrees with all known experiments, and makes predictions that can be verified by future experiments.
You act as if all progress in physics stops once a theory is proposed. Theories are always challenged. It's simply that the more successful a theory is in its predictions, the harder it is to replace, because there is no unexplained data to guide the development of the theory.
Please also note that having a personal distaste for the conclusions of a theory, or a theory's inability to address questions you find important, does not translate into a flaw in a theory, nor does it imply the existence of a theory that you find more palatable or that is capable of answering the questions you want answered.
Ah, epicycles, the last refuge of those who want to deride physics but can't actually come up with any flaws.
The reason why epicycles were rejected was not because they failed to "explain" things. Newton's law of gravity didn't either; Newton even famously stated that he "did not frame hypotheses" when asked to speculate on the mechanism underlying his inverse square law. In point of fact, no physical theory ever has or ever can explain why that theory itself is true.
The reason why epicycles were rejected was simply that they are a non-predictive theory; they don't tell you anything other than the data you put into them. They are "mere curve fitting". On the other hand, Newton's law of gravity is extremely predictive: you just have to measure a few things like the gravitational constant and positions and velocities of bodies at a given instant, and you can predict the motions of all bodies everywhere at arbitrary times with no additional assumptions. Likewise, quantum mechanics is extraordinarily predictive. It is not even remotely comparable to epicycles, no matter how much you may want to assassinate it by analogy to a failed theory.
That turns out not to be the case. Interpretational questions in QM are still alive and well and hotly debated. The discourse, however, is at a level more intelligent than your asinine "any fool can see that QM is self contradictory". As I said, QM is provably consistent. The philosophical problems are not of self-consistency, but in interpreting the physical meaning of state reduction and explaining how the classical world emerges from quantum laws.
We have a definition of them in quantum field theory. Evidently you don't like that definition.
Who says they're made of anything? Any elementary particle, by definition, is not made out of anything: that's what makes it elementary. It may be that what we think are elementary particles really aren't elementary, and they are made of something smaller, like strings; but they don't have to be made of anything, and there is as yet no evidence that they are, despite much searching (see, for instance, "preons").
Given the presence of the electromagnetic force, it's possible for charges to either have or lack electric charge, but we have no way of predicting from first principles which or even how many charged particles there "should" be. Nor can we predict from first principles most properties of elementary particles, e.g. their masses. All efforts to make such a predi
From the article:
These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.
Any halfway competent C programmer can easily see this is simple pointer aliasing. Physics was clearly written in C++ - albeit with a very high precision floating point library. What is happening is that, to save memory on the galaxy, most of the different atoms we perceive are actually just the same one, aliased using pointers. There is some neat code in Physics.cpp which detects when an atom is modified and makes a mutable copy as required. Clearly in this case (with the atom, cat, whatever) something is fux0red in the code and it's not making a copy; hence modifying one atom modifies the perceived value of several. Fortunately as soon as a human observes it, atom->View() is called, and a stable copy of the atom is created and from then on the bug kinda disappears (all the atoms go about their business as normal).
As a bug, it probably got noticed in beta, but was considered low priorty, however now there's such a fuss about it, I'd expect an online patch to stop the scientist hax0rs exploiting "the Quantum effect" any millenium now, so don't go writing it into your world view.
(Incidentally, this is why people die, it's to avoid problems with them knowing too much and causing stack overflows, but that's another story)
[FrLz]
I've read a few books on quantum theory (written by physicists) that were full of mistakes, some of them easy to disprove, such as the complete idiot who wrote an entire book claiming to have resolved the problem of the poping of the quantum wave by positing, not multiple universes (as one side step has it), but simply multiple simultanious states of mind without ever considering that believing that an experiment turned out in a given way will lead to different actions on the part of the person who made the observation (ie what result he will write down in his lab book). The amazing thing in that case was that he ever got such a book printed and sold!
Then there was that ever popular book by Penrose, "The Emperor's new mind" that was full of naive bullshit about the limits of computability that any computer scientist could debunk in a second and even worse philosophy that claimed impossible magical abilities for the human mind that any cognitive scientist could have shot down in a second. His theory, that mind depends on quantum entanglement, remains interesting, but it's 100% unsupported by his stupid book.
I think quantum physics confuses the hell out of even the people who claim to understand it.
But we already know that 42 is the answer.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I suppose I should mention an actual physics book that claimed that electro magnetism could be explained without reference to spin, entirely through relativistic effects.
I don't remember the paradox that lead to, but I do remember talking to a scientist friend about it and agreeing that the formulation implied really freaky, unconsidered things about spin. He was convince that the formulation must be wrong.
I once had, or perhaps still have, a couple of physics books which posit that the effect that electromagnets have on each other can be formulated entirely from analyzing the statics attraction and repulsion of charged particles with special relativity.
The idea is that electrons move with relativistic speeds and thus if you have two wires running parallel, due to the space time effects, from the point of view of the moving electrons, the stationary positively charged nuclei will seem closer together and the moving electrons, further apart, thus creating a net positive charge for them to be attracted to.
From the point of view of the nuclei the situation is reversed, creating a net negative charge for them to be attracted to.
But when you consider that electromagnets also interact with spinning electrons you get a weird image where spin has to be a macroscopic field where the whole thing tilts in space-time together - the result just doesn't make sense from the point of view of single atoms or electrons.
I pointed this out to a scientist who told me that those physics books must just be wrong!
Since one of those books was written by a famous physicist, it brings up the question whether physicists tend to be fatally confused by quantum theory.
Or perhaps my scientist friend was wrong, and there's something macroscopic about quantum spin.
To preface this, I know next to nothing about physics. But, consider twins, and the idea that they can feel what is happening to the other when in entirely different areas. Are these products of one divided cell an example of this theory at work?
But there's a dupe already! It's in another reality along the spreading multiverse wavefront of the article, which in turn branch off their own dupes, which in turn... and of course this applies to particles which share two opposite spin states, just look at the huge internet particle called slashdot :)
Ow.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Who comes up with this Eistein crap all the time?
It's a well known fact that Eistein did not fully believed in quantum theory himself, but now people are saying he was one of its inventors?
Give me a break!
Thus, if you could measure the probabililty of all properties at once, you can transmit information by measuring a single property.
Well, if you could measure the probability of a high card being next in a blackjack deck, without knowing anything about the previous cards that have been played, you could make a fortune in Las Vegas.
But you can't.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Einstein was one of the inventors of quantum theory, most notably by postulating photons. His major contributions include the photoelectric effect, the quantum theory of the heat capacity of solids, Bose-Einstein condensation, and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. Einstein fully believed in the quantum theory, just not its probabilistic Born interpretation.
...of whether the situation is viewed through chaotic controls or more traditional parameterisation. For practical purposes, a few hundred orders of magnitude here or here isn't going to make any significant difference to the outcome.
Reading between the lines of what you said, I guess you'd expect chaotic effects to make the existing outcome even less likely than traditional views would expect?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Quis Slashdotiet Ipsos Slashdotes?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
needs clockwise & counterclockwise to be Synchronous?! :)t secure21.htm
Why, you're talking about the Perfect World Order!
You're also talking about MY ENGINE
http://www.newpath4.com/millenialdawnpowerandligh
because my engine does all of that plus makes a lot of
home electric current! {LAPTOPS >> no batteries/bat-charger/electrical outlet}
Well, so what? The Sky is Falling in 2006. We're being erased.p rocessexplainedindetail06062006.htm
http://www.newpath4.com/skyisfallingendoftheworld
Thanks for the enlightenment guy. Thanks for the heads up.
If they're looking for my engine then they're looking for me too.
Yea, and that was a serious statement. Dipshit mods.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
There is no cat.
Sean
But you can't.
Agreed, I can't. But just because I can't doesn't mean that nobody can, it just means that I can't.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The weak anthropic principle can be expressed in mathematical terms:
The probability to live in a universe that allows intelligent human life to exist under the condition that human life exists in the universe is exactly 1.
So you don't have a point. You would spent your time better at debunking the SAP(strong anthropic principle) and the FAP(final anthropic principle) both of which are either bullshit or logical trickery.
By the way, the last time I visited wikipedia to look up the definition, the WAP was formulated the wrong way around, and the SAP was formulated correctly - now it seems to me the SAP has no value different from the WAP(except that is has a diffent motivation), and the WAP by Carter is formulated in accordance with the mathematical definition above. Moreover, the german version of WAP/SAP differ.
The FAP is logical trickery, because if intelligent beings would ever die out completely, nobody in the universe would have the required intelligence to notice that the statement is wrong - so the statement cannot be refuted, it has a boolean value of "true" as long as philosopers exist, but it can be considered harmful insofar as it inspires the confidence that life and human life could never die out, even if the entire intelligent life-forms in the universe decided to commit universal seppukko just to put the theory to a test(of course, if they did that, maybe they would never have been intelligent at all, SCNR).
Likewise, intelligent design is logical trickery, because it cannnot be refuted without complete knowledge of the history of our universe; So, let me add the bon-mot: "Only an omniscent God can refute intelligent design, and I am sure he'll do that, if he exists." The inherent danger in the ID ideas is that ID proponents somehow believe that because one their claims cannot be ultimately refuted (except by God), they somehow have the authority to declare the rest of science "bullshit". There is no logic in that unless you are on crack.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Ptolemaic astronomers claimed that the sun, moon and planets circled around the earth. They didn't know why anything should circle around something else without being attatched to it. Maybe they thought that on a cosmic scale things just "quantized" into circles.
They corrected for apparent retrograde motion by adding that each of these bodies also circled around an imaginary point in a smaller circle called an epicycle. They had no idea why something should circle around nothing, but the circles within circles idea seemed to fit the data.
They had something right when thinking about things going around other things, even though they didn't know that objects attract each other. When the concept of gravitation came along, it was new and strange but it wasn't illogical. A teacher can tell a child that by gravity the earth is pulling everything downward; force at a distance like a toy magnet but a different kind. It makes sense.
However, objects being affected by moving imaginary points of nothing does not make sense. Why should this point of nothing act any differently than that point of nothing? Can "nothing" be said to follow a path? How can we detect one of these special "nothings"? What if two of these "nothings" collide? What if the whole universe is full of colliding nothings?!?
The idea of "virtual" particles springing spontaneously out of nowhere smacks of the same logical flaw. If nothing becomes something for no reason in one place, then logically we should expect the same thing everywhere. I've heard that this has already been speculated but really, it's just a re-hash of causeless effect, as nonsensical as epicycles.
So would you call me a heretic simply because I say that quantum theory doesn't make sense?
What I'm pointing out are that if you're picking among sets of essentially random parameters, the chances of a sentience being only just alive are enormously greater than a sentience living in relative luxury, as we are.
It's not reasonable that things should be so good. The conditions in which we live are literally too good to be true.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I have seen Creationists call big slabs of a couple of branches of science into question, centering around geology, paleontology and astrophysics and including thin slices of biology, but I haven't seen an IDer do even that.
I have also seen both IDers and Creationists make your point, but in reverse: without direct observation, all statements about our past are no more than inference, therefore definitely ruling invisible pink unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters, patriarchal creators, alien experimenters or nebulous biology-tweakers out of the question, however counterintuitive that may be, is not reasonable. The best you can hope to do is define reasonable limits to their abilities. If, one day, we find a Macroscope-like way of accurately reconstructing the past, it may become reasonable to do more.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
with entangled particles this could someday be possible. http://colossalstorage.net/home_entangled.htm
In disagreeing, Nobel laureates Leggett and Ramsay are, of course, completely consistent with the theory, by virtue of being both right and wrong at the same time.