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Einstein and Schrodinger's Quest for a Unified Theory led to a Titanic Clash
StartsWithABang writes When it comes to the very nature of quantum mechanics — about the inherent uncertainty and indeterminism to reality — it's one of the most difficult things to accept. Perhaps, you imagine, there's some underlying cause, some hidden reality beneath what's visible that actually is deterministic. After all, a cat can't simultaneously be dead and alive until someone looks can it? That's one of the problems that both Einstein and Schrödinger wrestled with during their lives. An investigation of that story, their work on that front, and their friendship that ensued as both pursued that same end is thoroughly investigated here by physicist Paul Halpern.
...because this headline seems to have been cut sh
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
and not first.
Deal with it.
What is a titanic cl?
The ratio between the particle horizon and Hubble length is interesting.
Iceberg Incom
"After all, a cat can't simultaneously be dead and alive until someone looks can it?"
Why not? After all, falling trees make no noise when nobody's watching and bears also do not shit in the woods.
...if noone has understood it so far?
No, of course the cat can't be simultaneously alive and dead - that's Schrödinger's point.
I wish people would stop crapping on about that fucking cat when they have no idea what it means.
More hipster site spam from a serial hipster spam poster. Don't even need to read the summary, since it's all clickbait shoddily cooked up from other people's work anyway.
If you accept this universe is simply mathematical function, weirdnes goes away. Function, that is itself probably intersection of multiple functions, some of them being evaluated backwards of what we percieve as "time", therefore creating weird effects in our perceived direction of time. Actually, laws of physics in not all that interesting to me (beyond some level), because physics is going after "particles" and "forces" that happen to be in this function, describing this universe. There is infinite number of other configuration. Function y = sin(x) exists just like our universe, so does set of integer numbers or PI.
If "universe" is locally predictable in one direction (which becomes "axis of time"), then self-replicating features (life) can emerge. In the case of our universe, there is atomic/molecular level complex and yet locally perfectly predictable, that enabled (under "perfect circumstances"?) life forms. atomic/molecular level isolates low level quantum weirdness. After all, life doesn't care if this function is predictable at ALL levels, molecular level is enough, and it happens to be good for many other reasons. There is so many random things needed for universe to sustain life, that probably insignificantly small portion of functions has any self-replicating (living) features, let alone intelligent.
Why should I be surprised by weirdness of quantum world then? It never needed to be predictable in our direction of time.
839*929
Look,
1. if detecting a particle *determines* its state vs *observes* it state, (the main point of conflict) then:
2. There is no perfect isolation, a vacuum is not perfect, and does not shield magnetic fields or other effects.
3. Interactions with other stuff *IS* detection. That other stuff does get influenced depending on the state of the particle. The magnetic field does influence the world around it.
4. Your photon has a magnetic field, and that influences the matter around it, depending on its wave function.
5. And thus it is detected ALL THE TIME BY EVERYTHING AROUND IT, long before you put it through a diffraction grating, or whatever test you dream up.
6. Thus your Quantum uncertainty theory can never work, the particle/photon/whatever's state MUST be determined BEFORE *you* detect it by its interactions with other matter.
There's another REALLY dumb thing your missing. You're not detecting the particle when you look. Its only your perception of it created by the detection mechanism. So if I take off my glasses and look at a flock of starlings, it appears to be a dancing, jumping black mass. It's not, I know its not, but without my glasses, I can no longer see the individual birds, only a cluster big enough to fire the nerve in my retina.
Likewise all particle and photon measurements boil down to promoting/demoting electrons through stable states. Does that mean you can never have half a photon? After all, all photons we know are emissions from matter, and so must all be discrete? They can only be created and observed that way, so they must only exist that way. This is false reasoning. Bricks come from a brick factory, yet half bricks are easy to make. Never lose sight of the limits of your observation. If all you can see is whole bricks, you might look at a house and think the corners are fuzzy.
Then there's the 'it matches my equations so it must be true'. This is the dumbest thing of all. I think the sun and planets go around the earth, I make an equation to explain the weird loop-the-loops that planets do. Perhaps I add extra dimensions (like String Theory does), or maybe I invent some new matter or new energy (like cosmologists do). But I *can* make an equation that will predict the planets looping, and you observe them looping, ergo the planets and sun orbit around the earth? Of course they don't. I simply contrived a complex solution rather than give up on a bad idea.
Making and tweaking equations each time you hit a problem, then making an observation, if it fits you say "my theory works, I have proof", if it doesn't fit, you invent some extra tweak to your equation, this is a logical falsehood. Observation in such a case is not proof.
Is the cat "somebody" or not? Because if it is somebody, it can look itself. It may also be a "semi-somebody", that has the action of "looking" fail some times and succeed sometimes. All it this quantum-babble really boils down to is the question whether the cat is sentient or not. Now, most young children will count the family cat as a person, albeit a somewhat different one, but most certainly a sentient. The problem here is that young children may not have full sentience themselves and hence that evaluation may be flawed. On the other hand, it may be right on the mark and adults may just have given in to external factors and may have suspended their own judgment on many things, causing questionable sentience levels in them.
And then there is the question of whether all adults are the same. If you put a politician in the box, will he or she be forever caught in a dual-state, of will they manage to make an observation and either die or free themselves? Form the statements politicians usually make, they are clearly not capable of making accurate observations, but live in a wired fantasy-world where reality is different. Hence the box idea may actually be a good way to test politicians for fitness to lead: Sure, you lose half of the good ones, but all of them that cannot accurately observe reality will stay in there forever. That would dramatically reduce the number of politicians free to act (in itself a decidedly good thing), and make sure all those that do act actually have some appreciation of reality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
How many cats live to be 80 in cat years, never mind human years.
Now that is quantum uncertainty...
5. And thus it is detected ALL THE TIME BY EVERYTHING AROUND IT, long before you put it through a diffraction grating, or whatever test you dream up.
Stop using the pop-sci version of things where it is about being "detected" or not, and it comes down to whether it interacts with things in specific ways. Turns out the fact it has a magnetic field, or even that the wavefunction has infinite extent, doesn't cause it to be "detected" and there are plenty of ways interactions that can happen without "detection," whether with things like the slits in a double slit experiment, or more explicitly involving magnetic fields like the Aharonov–Bohm effect.
It's not, I know its not, but without my glasses, I can no longer see the individual birds, only a cluster big enough to fire the nerve in my retina.
That description would be apt, except for the fact that some interactions will then cause all of the birds at other locations to instantly disappear, or to change into other states. If readers are curious, they can look for much longer rebuttals of this in response to many of your other posts, but it makes it look like you've only read about quantum mechanics from news outlets, and not an actual text book or class notes.
They can only be created and observed that way, so they must only exist that way.
Oh, maybe your the same AC that has been saying photons can only be created or seen by discrete processes of changing electron levels in atoms. That is flat out wrong, as there are several processes the photons can be created or detected by, some of which are continuous (e.g. scattering and bremsstrahlung).
I think the sun and planets go around the earth, I make an equation to explain the weird loop-the-loops that planets do.
Of course you can make an equation with "loop-the-loops" or epicycles, but the only way to get it to match observations would be an infinite series that ends up matching the actual paths they make around the sun. Just like any function can be broken down into components by Fourier transform or many other transforms, whether or not it makes sense to a given situation, but you still make the same predictions in the end with the full series.
But go ahead, keep reposting your BS, over the last couple years you've managed to get +5 before someone notices sometimes, or even get a few by without any replies if you post them to a story late enough.
Yes, you remember the half of the story that most people forget, but that is useless without the whole story.
The point of the Schrodiner's cat experiment was to be a reductio ad absurdum argument, except it turned out that quantum mechanics is quite absurd by comparison to most physics interacted with on a day-to-day basis. That doesn't mean the cat is not both dead and alive. It turns out that quantum mechanics does allow for macroscopic superposition of states that are suitably isolated
So yes, the cat can be both dead and alive, as long as quantum mechanics is still believed to an accurate prediction of how things work.
Your photon has a magnetic field, and that influences the matter around it, depending on its wave function....And thus it is detected ALL THE TIME BY EVERYTHING AROUND IT
Sorry but that is just wrong. Photons do indeed contain an EM field but the photon is small in size. In addition the interactions are quantum in nature i.e. they either happen or they do not. You cannot use your simple, classical view of physics to assume that there is an EM field and so therefore there must be an interaction: the universe does not work like that.
Many of the high energy photons we produce in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC will travel through multiple layers of silicon before they interact in the calorimeter - not all of them though there is a chance for them to interact. If you passed them through a vacuum though the chance of them interacting with the remaining molecules would be tiny. Indeed if you assertion were right the LHC would not work because the protons in the beam would also be interacting with the beam gas all the time and the beam would rapidly dissipate.
People forget that. But that doesn't mean the model can't be useful as a conceptual framework or have predictive power if t conforms closely enough to actual data.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I never knew that Schrödinger joined at some point in Einstein quixotic quest for a classical unified field theory. Cool story, bro.
But I'm annoyed about the portrait of Schrödinger as Sancho Panza to Einstein's Don Quixote. Schrödinger was a major genius! He invented quantum mechanics, for fuck's sake! I'm particularly riled up by the statement
Embarrassed by the incident, Schrödinger would give up his quest for unity altogether and turn to other topics. Similarly, he would never collaborate again with a prominent physicist.
This seems to imply that Schrödinger never accomplished anything after he stopped collaborating with Einstein. Well, he helped discover DNA.
entropy happens
Customer Intelligence? Continual Improvement? Counterintelligence? Channel Islands?
The existence of the Halting Problem disproves determinism.
If the universe were deterministic, then it follows that with sufficient information about the universe one could theoretically predict the state of the universe at any given point in the future. However, if one took this information about the universe to predict what the outcome of some particular binary state in a closed experiment would be, and were to formulate the conditions of the experiment so that the outcome of it would always be the opposite of whatever the information about the future appeared to reveal about it (eg, if this program will terminate then loop forever, else stop), it becomes evident that no amount of information can ever be sufficient to actually predict the future with 100% confidence, and so the universe cannot actually be deterministic.
An interesting side effect of the universe being non-deterministic is that may allow for the existence of certain metaphysical concepts such as free-will, although a non-deterministic universe does not necessarily prove that they exist, it seems to at least makes such things plausibly consistent with reality.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is that a confidential informant on the Titanic, or a confidential informant of titanic proportions?
If I lock up Einstein, Schrodinger and Heisenberg in a room with a capsule of cyanide gas and a time release mechanism for the gas, would I be sent to jail? Or to the mental institution?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Einstein was both wrong and not wrong. Schrodinger was just gauche enough to evaluate the wave function.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Schroedinger should have chosen a different animal than cats, you know, 9 lives and so.
So the quantum physist is both dead and alive at the same time? And if the box is opened he stays dead or alive forever? Sounds like fun to me. How many of them are there and what are the odds of getting a large enough run of 'dead' results to get rid of them all and end this stupid subject for ever?
This is a statement of your faith in QM. It is a religious statement not a factual one.
No actually it is a factual statement which has been tested to a precision better than one part in a trillion. In fact it is one of the most precisely tested scientific theories ever discovered. Have you tested you theory on how things work to that level of precision? Have you even figured out what the predictions of your theory are to that level? In fact have you ever done any experiment whatsoever which has agreed with your ideas and disagreed with QM? If not then I think it is extremely clear who is taking things on faith rather than scientific fact.
That field is not confined by a vacuum, it may be tiny but it is there, and thus the particle *IS* detected because it MUST have an influence depending on its spin.
Go and read - and understand - a book on quantum field theory and then we can talk. Fields are quantized which is why photons have a chance to pass through matter without any interaction. The more matter there is the smaller the chance but it is not zero as you suggest...and if you understood QFT, and QED in particular, you would be able to calculate the chance of the interaction via the various possible channels.
There is nothing wrong with criticizing current scientific understanding - indeed that is often how we make progress - but to do so you must understand the current thinking first and then show how it is wrong and/or do an experiment to show that it is wrong. You cannot just dream up some theory off the top of your head and expect anyone to take it seriously. Established scientific thinking has had a lot of effort spent on testing and confirming it. Anything which will replace it needs to have a similar amount of care and attention to detail spent on it.
Stern-Gerlach,
Is my neutral particle a dipole? i.e. two large birds negative and positive spinning around each other? Well no, Stern Gerlach proves its not that. Perhaps its a flock of much smaller starling sized birds and a detector screen that only registers the flock? The effect on the smaller birds would be too small to be registered because their dipole would be tiny.
You expect the deflection, because even photons have a magnetic field, suggests no neutral particle possible, i.e. you'd expect deflection on everything (because particle + antiparticle = photon, a photon has a field ergo the particles have, so every particle must be made of +ve and -ve stuff including neutral ones).. So the fact its deflected in a magnetic field would be expected WITHOUT SPIN, as to whether proof its not a dipole is proof that its angular momentum is quantized?
Well SG always bugged me because the magnetic field only affects the spin that is in the axis relative to the field, yet even if it was quantized why would it nicely have spin related to the field? So even if it was quantized, if you were actually measuring the spin you'd still expect it to deflect by different smooth amounts, depending on the orientation of the spin to the field. The fact its a fixed amount surely means you are not measuring a spin effect AT ALL. Quantized or not.
On the other hand if the flock is made of small birds, you're not measuring the spin at all, you're measuring the deflection from the plus-minusness of the particle. i.e. your inducing the polarization in the flock which is then deflecting the flock.
So you might think you have a neutral particle, but if a photon even has a magnetic field and electric field, then its likely everything does, because every particle can be added to an anti-particle to make photons.
While a plot device in my book, I had a take on the idea one day that I think might be close to saying "why can't we have both"
If I put you in a box, and you have a cat in a box.. you can open the box to see, but I have four super positions - the cat , and your choice. If I am looking at you conducting the experiment, and fly away at the speed of light, you effectively are "in a box" from my frame of reference.
http://cruft-private-janitorial.com/?chapter=16
"The wonder isn't schroedingers cat, it's the box. Interactive effects are "observation"... so by blocking gravity, or all light, or whatever, you put something into quantum uncertainty. Measurement, interaction, is observation - so the universe observes itself. So it's not a whole universe created at each decision, but a split in the universe that propogates it's influence at the speed of light to the world around it. So, by seeing a twinkle in then night sky we are weakly entangled with every star in the heavens, by a smattering of photons. On a smaller scale there are infinite universes of choice, but they are very close by. It's speculated that the random decay of radioactive elements is actually steady, but we only observe particles within our local entanglement context, so we miss ones flying off in another nearby universe."
http://xkcd.com/224/
Table-ized A.I.
And even if someone came up with it and we all agreed, the only way to confirm would be to ask whoever/whatever created this hot mess of a universe, and we all know how that's been working for us so far.
Schrodinger's cat is impossible. It assumes that we are the only observers, but we are not. The air inside the container should also be regarded as an observer, as should the container lining. Whether it has a conscious or not is immaterial.
The essence of all I'm suggesting is this:
The quantum is an effect of the detector not the particle. I've simply moved the quantum effect from {particle} to detector{particle}.
Is that a plausible change? Does the detector have that property? So for a CCD, its an electronic device, i.e. discrete electron orbits hence DUH! Of course it does! That is true of all our detectors! They *all* have discrete quanta.
Bell inequality cannot distinguish between the two, hence it does not prove hidden variable is impossible. Don't believe me? You know you can simply video a flock of starlings and set a threshold over which it is detected, (i.e. take off your glasses), prove Bells, hence prove there can be no hidden variable, hence there is no such bird as a starling!
Once you make that change, the world becomes so much clearer.
Consider delayed choice quantum eraser. You can then see that the photon (flock) travels through BOTH slits and is only detectable above the threshold. Now you no longer need time travel, reverse causality or anything else magic it becomes simple.
All the consequences are determined by the initial state!