Can Fractals Make Sense of the Quantum World?

Keith found a New Scientist story about fractals and quantum theory. The article says "Take the mathematics of fractals into account, says Palmer, and the long-standing puzzles of quantum theory may be much easier to understand. They might even dissolve away."

Comments

Quantum Exploration

[fyngyrz]

So, the problem wasn't that God was playing dice with the universe, rather, it's just a nice Julia set?

Einstein must be rolling in the dimensions of his grave. Fractionally, of course.

Re:Quantum Exploration

[sakdoctor]

God is one of these role-play nerds then, with his 20 dimensional dice.

Re:Quantum Exploration

[xouumalperxe]

Aw, c'mon. Everybody knows algebraic dice notation is not commutative: d20 != 20D.

Re:Quantum Exploration

[dkf]

So, the problem wasn't that God was playing dice with the universe, rather, it's just a nice Julia set?

Actually, it's just that God's dice have a complex number of sides.

And suddenly LOGO

[thesandtiger]

And suddenly LOGO turns out to be the programming language we need to encode the formula for everything.

Go, little turtle, go!

Re:And suddenly LOGO

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Forward 30 Right 90 Apply Heisenberg Constant Forward 30

Re:And suddenly LOGO

[fyngyrz]

Forward 30 Right 90 Apply Heisenberg Constant Forward 30

"Where'd the damn turtle go?"

"Ah, it fell off the edge of the universe again." Start over from the flat spot on that atom, would you?

Re:And suddenly LOGO

[CookedGryphon]

It really *is* turtles all the way down??

Poppycock

[the eric conspiracy]

Using fractals as a way of viewing a problem can be useful, but it doesn't fundamentally offer any new ways to solve a problem over conventional methods.

Re:Poppycock

[fyngyrz]

Well, the point of the article is that if the underlying structure of the universe is fractal, then it shows why, for instance, you can measure the position or the velocity of an electron, but not both; the general idea is that instead of a linear reality, the universe exists along a fractal edge, and answers derived using current quantum methods are literally falling off the edge because they're not finely enough resolved - they don't take the foaminess of the edge into account, so they miss the answer and land in a space that literally isn't part of the real universe - they're undefined. This is an illuminating and interesting idea, and it may point directly to how we could measure both at the same time, which would make a lot more sense to some of us. Me included.

He's not incorporated all of quantum theory into his fractal idea, so this is far from certain, but it is a lovely idea.

Re: Poppycock

[Black Parrot]

This is an illuminating and interesting idea, and it may point directly to how we could measure both at the same time, which would make a lot more sense to some of us. Me included.

Whence the presumption that "makes sense" is a relevant criterion for evaluating hypotheses?

Our brains didn't evolve to operate on scales where quantum or cosmological phenomena are relevant. There's not the slightest reason to suppose that such phenomena, or their explanations, would "make sense" to us.

Re:Poppycock

[Goffee71]

And it'll help sell tee-shirts. Lets face it. those old quantum "I heart strange entanglement" tees were really lame!

Re: Poppycock

[GauteL]

There's not the slightest reason to suppose that such phenomena, or their explanations, would "make sense" to us.

If we were always to accept that a solution would never make sense to us, we would have missed out on a lot of our scientific discoveries.

Also, "reason to suppose" is not the only argument for investigating an issue. Sometimes "because it would be great if it was so" is an equally good reason.

In this case, it would be fantastic if there is an explanation behind it that makes sense to us. It would make the theories immeasurably easier to work with and might provide us with answers we could otherwise not comprehend.

Since it turns out that we have found many answers that "makes sense" to us in other areas of science, it is perfectly reasonable to hope that we can make sense of quantum mechanics one day as well, as long as we don't take for granted that there is a sensible explanation and mistake 'hope' for 'assumption'.

Re:Poppycock

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

"Your honnor, officer Speedtrap can't know I was there and driving too fast. I would like to call Mr. Heisenberg as a witness for the defense."

Re: Poppycock

[greg_barton]

Our brains didn't evolve to operate on scales where quantum or cosmological phenomena are relevant.

Our brains didn't evolve in the sky, and yet we make machines that fly, and it sure "makes sense" to a whole lot of people.

Re: Poppycock

[cjfs]

Your opinion is just as bad as those of the creationists in that if we can't comprehend it now, then we aren't meant to comprehend it.

I think he's referring to the feeling that we need to break things down into traditional categories (think wave vs particle) for them to "make sense" on an intuitive level. This is very different than never being able to comprehend them.

All it really means.

[tjstork]

Fractals are basically the incorporation of decisions into iteratively applied functions of some kind. Physics normally uses mathematics of varying degrees of curves and shapes and spaces to describe things and these functions are continuous to a degree, and so its pretty reasonable to think that such descriptions could be imprecise. Math tends to see "switch and loop and jump" statements as inelegant and those are the essence of fractals.

Re:All it really means.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh? Some fractals are the infinite sum of a bunch of cosines. No "switch and loop and jump" statements -- just a plain sum of continuous functions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function

Re:All it really means.

[tjstork]

He selects a subset of integers... if positive then... :-)

Fractal Math Reconciles Relativity & Quantum M

[Doc Ruby]

An old Canadian friend's brother turned out to be a mathematical physicist working at a Canadian university researching fractal spacetime. Garnet Ord's work supposedly reconciles the notoriously conflicting relativity and quantum mechanical models of spacetime. It seems that the time axis used to be treated as an integer variable, when in fact it's a fractional dimension: a fractal.

I'd say that making relativity and QM interoperate is a good way to "make sense of the quantum world".

WRONG

[ChienAndalu]

again EVIL people deny that only TIME CUBE can make sense of the world

No more multiple universes?

[BigHungryJoe]

If, as the article suggests, Palmer's theory eventually does away the need for multiple universes, then incalculable damage has been done to the world of science fiction. What fun is it if there isn't a world where the Nazi's won WW2? What's there in that for anyone?

Re: Woof... lots of implications

[Black Parrot]

Maybe quantum phenomena appear to be random because the universe's stack has collided with its heap, and all the variables this far down into the recursion are full of garbage.

Mmmmm.... nerd theology. Some hero will come along and separate the stack from the heap with his sword, and the universe will begin anew.

So then what about Bell's Inequality

[wnknisely]

Looks to me like this is an attempt to resolve the issue between classical and quantum physics different rules regarding "spooky-action-at-a-distance" by claiming in effect that Quantum Theory is incomplete. He's arguing that there's a deeper physics that's yet to be uncovered.

The problem is that Bell's Thm. tests for hidden variables - essentially "deeper physics".

And Bell's Thm. has been verified repeatedly.

So, either he's arguing that Bell's Theorem is taking us down a blind alley, or he's going to have to figure out someway to make both the fractal understanding and Bell's true. The article in New Scientist doesn't discuss that at all.

Re: So then what about Bell's Inequality

[Black Parrot]

or he's going to have to figure out someway to make both the fractal understanding and Bell's true.

Kind of like measuring position and velocity at the same time? Now he needs a fractal unifying meta-theory, I guess.

And then a fractal unifying meta-meta-theory, and then a ...

OK, maybe he has the right idea.

Re:So then what about Bell's Inequality

[FiloEleven]

Bell's Theorem states:

No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.

Personally, I don't see why people have such an issue with the existence of non-locality. David Bohm did a lot of work in this area, much of which is admittedly over my head but compelling nonetheless. Interestingly, he was drawn towards non-local hidden variables after working with plasmas, whose electrons act as a unified whole instead of individually. To my knowledge, no satisfactory explanation other than non-locality has been offered up for such behavior.

And now I'm stepping out on a limb and will probably be torn to pieces, but it just occurred to me that at its birth, our universe was essentially a point of infinite density, or something very like it. With the knowledge of such a beginning, it seems probable to me that there would be some degree of interconnectedness and therefore non-locality should not be written off so quickly.

Can Fractals Make Sense of the Quantum World?

[epr]

Since I couldn't bother with RTFA, I'm gonna go with a definite maybe.

Re:Can Fractals Make Sense of the Quantum World?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe. Maybe, they could, or they couldn't.

Who watches the watchers?

[gmuslera]

After applying fractal math on quantum problems you could notice something dissolving... but is your mind, not the problem.

Can Fractals Make Sense of the Quantum World?

[ciderVisor]

No. No, they can't.

Can Fractals Make Sense of the Quantum World?

[ciderVisor]

Yes. Yes, they can.

Black hole information loss?

[LagFlag]

The article loses me almost immediately when it states that information is lost in a black hole. Anyone who's read Susskind's book knows that this implies all sorts of unpleasantness like the irreversibility of the the S-matrix, and so it is likely incorrect; ie, information is not lost when objects fall into a black hole. This makes sense, because to an outside observer, an object never falls into a black hole, it only approaches the event horizon without ever quite reaching it. Therefore, one would expect that information from objects falling into a black hole is written on the surface of the event horizon. This represents the highest information density possible. This is Susskind's thesis, and it was my understanding that it is becoming the accepted view. Stephen Hawking was a proponent of black-hole information loss, and Palmer was a student of Hawking (20 years ago). Therefore, it is not surprising his theory is based on rejected premises.