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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."
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And suddenly LOGO turns out to be the programming language we need to encode the formula for everything.
Go, little turtle, go!
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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".
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make install -not war
No. No, they can't.
Squirrel!
Yes. Yes, they can.
Squirrel!
Maybe. Maybe, they could, or they couldn't.
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.