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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.
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.
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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Bohr and Heisenberg made a popular interpretation of the duality paradox called The Copenhagen Interpretation. Needless to say, Einstein disagreed with this interpretation.
"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."
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.
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
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.
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?
Yes, but wouldn't the act of observing the slip up change it's state?
Cogito, ergo sig.
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.
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
"I've been curious what is the justification for support of: particles are in multiple simultaneous states until measured causing the distributed probabilities to collapse into a definite known state"
The famous double-slit experiment demonstrates the problem very well. Imagine shooting electrons through a wall with two slits. The slits are close enough that each electron, given the vagueness of its exact position, could go through either slit. After going through the slits, the electrons register themselves on a detection screen of some kind.
Well, if you have a sensor at each slit watching to see where the electrons go, they each go through either one slit or the other quite nicely, and they register their impacts on the screen in a nice bell distribution.
However, if you don't check which slit the electrons go through, there is equal possibility of going through both. Therefore, bizarrely enough, they actually *do* go through both slits at once. The detector then records a more complicated ripple pattern of impacts, as each electron's ghostly half interferes with the other half in a wave pattern.
So when we say there are two opposite states existing at once in the quantum world, it is actually true, and the effect is often bizarre. But the state of a particle behaves itself when you decide to "look" at it.
"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."
Schödinger introduced the cat just to point out this weirdness. What does the cat see? Is he both alive and dead at once? Does the universe split into two timelines? Adherents of the "Copenhagen Interpretation" would, I think, argue over whether or not the cat qualifies as an observer, and can collapse the quantum randomness on his own.
Another, more intriguing interpretation, is that at last, when you look at the cat and see whether he died or not, your observation propagates a randomness-collapsing wave *backwards in time* that forces the past action of the cat living/dying to resolve itself. There are variations of the double-slit experiment (like measuring the slits after the electron's already through) that reinforce this idea.
Note that I'm not a physicist, and not necessarily good at explaining things.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
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
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?
What you are suggesting is a hidden variables theory. Basically, each quantum particle should "know" the results of all possible measurements that someone might perform upon it, and act accordingly.
The problem is that experimental results rule out any "reasonable" hidden variables theory! For more information, check out the EPR Paradox and Bell's Inequality.
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.
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"
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.
"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.
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.
Yep, you're absolutely right, in fact the summer of my freshman year of college I spent the summer working in my advisor's lab, and one of the things I did was set up an ultra high resolution double slit experiment using an image enhanced CCD system, a specially constructed detection box a HeNe laser, polarizing filters and enough neutral density filters that the measured intensity of the laser (At this point invisible to the eye) was on the order of nanowatts, such that the number of photons hitting the detector was 12 per frame. I then assembled the aggregate images into a quicktime movie. And guess what? With only 12 photons per frame, you still develop an observable diffraction pattern.
m
Check it out here:
http://www1.union.edu/~malekis/QM2004/qm_heis3.ht
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.
Even subatomic particles have to put up with politicians...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"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
Me too. Specially because it's not hard to find common examples of this happening with no strange situation. Take Earth, for an instance. If you look it from the south pole, it's spinning clockwise, while if you look it from the north pole, it's spinning counterclockwise. At the same time. I'm sure my example is fallacious, but that proves that this simple explanation of "spinning clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously" is incomplete, and therefore, confusing.
So say we all
Instincts are wonderful, until you apply them to a situation in which they aren't appropriate. Then they'll help you be wrong more often than you would otherwise. In such a case you need to develop new instincts. Saying quantum mechanics doesn't make sense in the context of my life of baseballs and refrigerators and therefore must be wrong may be a useful starting point to test a theory, but is not a scientific way of judging it.
Science isn't an accumulated body of knowledge. It is a method for generating that knowledge. The method may be followed to a greater or lesser degree by scientists.
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.
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
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
...either cats or surfing.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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]