Okay, can you clarify for me why exactly you can't? Is it because you can't actually control what state the measured atom, and thus the distant atom, will take?
Sure, I'll try: A quantum 'entangled' state means that two systems are in an 'undefined' state in the quantum sense, that are interdependent.
When one is measured, the other one will _instantanously_ adopt whatever state is 'required' to complement the other one. So one 'knows' instantly what the other is doing, so to speak. Which means a sort of information has been transferred at FTL speed.
The reason why this can't actually be used for communication is twofold: One is exactly as you said: Because you can't know which state you'll measure, you can't transfer information through that alone. The second reason is that, an entanglement between two systems occurs only if there's an (unmeasured) interaction between them.
That means you either separate the two systems from each other (as in the classic example of entangled photons moving apart), or as in this case, by letting them interact with photons - that travel at light speed. Either way though, light speed is the best you can do.
In this case it would be atoms, but I assume it still applies?
Yes. Setting up the entangled state here requires both atoms to emit photons, so that occurs at light speed.
It follows the same old rules. Although the state of one atom, once measured, will affect the other atom instantaneously, there's no possibility for FTL communication.
But without seeing the article it's fairly safe to assume this involves a microcontroller. I'm guessing an AVR -that's what I'd use, and people have been able to put together TCP interfaces on 'em.
Considering that, I doubt I'd consider this as a good project to 'get started' with electronics. Or microcontrollers even.. AVR's STK500 'starter kit' is a rather nice, if a bit pricey. (I've heard the Basic Stamp system is beginner-oriented. I have no experience with them though)
What about the assurances in the fact that protons with energies on the order of the energy in the LHC, and several orders of magnitude larger, have been bombarding the planet for billions of years without any stable black hole forming, ever?
I'm sure that for almost any event you can find some incredibly unlikely scenario of it triggering a sequence of events that will doom humanity. But it's not generally seen as a reason to stop doing things. Because it's never happened despite things going on for quite some time now.
When are these "experts" going to make up their freaking mind?!
It's not for them to say 'coffee is good' or 'coffee is bad'. That's for you to determine.
It's antithetical to scientific thinking to draw conclusions that aren't relevant or supported by the results. It is, however, something journalists love to do for them.
But anyway, are you really unable to fathom the idea that something can be good in some ways and bad in others? And that something can be good under a certain set of circumstances and bad under another?
Besides which, coffee hasn't been shown to be particularly bad for you unless you have a heart condition and need to avoid caffeine for blood-pressure reasons. It also contains some carcinogens - which is one of those sources of journalistic misinterpretation, because there's a big difference between 'contains carcinogens' and 'causes cancer'. Just because something contains a carcinogen doesn't necessarily mean that carcinogen is potent enough and the concentration sufficient to substantially change the risks of cancer, in particular once you take into account how much actually gets taken up into the body.
This would not be pursued to the extent that it has been if those questions have been laid to rest already. Most chemists and chemical engineers out there are familiar with ecology nowadays and performing such Life Cycle Analysis is routine.
For an actual example, see for instance "Environmental, economic and energetic costs and benefits of biodiesel and ethanol biofuels", Hill et al, PNAS, vol 103, no 30, 11206-11210.
The net energy gain (over the energy costs of production) is about 25% for corn ethanol, almost 100% for soybean biodiesel (probably higher for algae) and promises to be upwards of 300% for cellulosic ethanol.
Algae and cellulosic ethanol do not displace food crops. Land (and forest) do not sequester carbon to any significant extent - the decomposition process of dead plant matter releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.
I'm all for biofuels and algae is certainly promising, but AFAIK, it's nowhere near industrial production yet. (cellulosic ethanol is getting there though)
Note that it says:
The biofuel used in the demonstration flight was a blend of two different types of alternative oils - algae and jatropha.
They don't say how much algae-derived biofuel was in that mix. I'm guessing this is rather a way for the company involved to get attention and hence, more funding. I suppose the ends justify the means, though. It takes a lot of funding to start test plants for industrial production.
Actually they're not the second-largest corporate employer. That seems to be an incorrect inference on the part of the Washington Post, because the Dell Ireland website claims they're the second-largest *corporation*.. and the metric for that could easily be something other than employees, i.e. revenue. Of course, 1900 people isn't their entire Irish workforce either.
There are _definitely_ larger employers in Ireland. 1900 people at a single factory is enough to sustain a mid sized factory town of about 30,000 people (1/3 of Limerick). I know because I've lived in one. And I'm certain Ireland has a handful of towns that size and larger.
But just to grab some random Irish companies out of a hat and look them up: Eircom has 6,500 employees. Bank of Ireland has 16,026.
Poland does have high unemployment, and could certainly use the jobs more than Ireland. But it isn't one of the poorest nations in Europe. The linked article doesn't state that either, it says that Poland has some of the poorest regions in Europe. That doesn't necessarily say anything about the country as a whole - The average Polish person (nationally) is better off than the average inhabitant of the USA's poorest counties.
Albania is the poorest in Europe, much poorer than Poland. All East-European countries (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova) are poorer. Most ex-Yugoslav countries (Slovenia and Croatia are about on-par), as are Bulgaria and Romania.
The common market will tend to smooth things out eventually. That's the point of it. Eventually it shouldn't matter if a factory is in Poland or Ireland, since Poles are free to work in Ireland and vice-versa.
It's a beautiful place, beautiful volcano too.
Odd fact of the kind they tell tourists: It once erupted and killed everyone except a guy who was in jail in an underground cell.
Seems to me the author is repeating the mistake himself: By drawing a conclusion not supported by the data, in this case being the evaluation of the role played by computer models here.
And I agree with that datas: The problem isn't the computer/mathematical models. It's how they were used. In particular, people were using models designed to evaluate one kind of mortgage asset, and plugging in an entirely different kind of mortgage, etc.
The author grants that conclusion, but then makes the claim that although the problem wasn't caused by the computers themselves, that it was somehow exasperated by them. - I don't see how that's the case.
Computers and computer modelling makes it easier to create advanced derivatives and such. But it doesn't make us do it. Just look at the engineering world; We don't choose technically advanced solution just because we can. In fact, the tendency is to go for the simplest possible solution. ("KISS rule")
There's only one reason why you would create advanced, incomprehensible derivative structures: To con people, essentially. To obfuscate the risks. To create money out of nothing. (the most profitable way to make it)
That's not a new problem. There's a reason we created financial regulations, why we have book-keeping, demand financial transparency, auditing, etc. This happened because it was allowed to happen. Because nobody stepped in and stopped this obfuscation from happening. I don't blame the computer models. If someone cons you into signing a bogus, misleading contract - the problem isn't with the paper it was written on or the language that was used. The problem is with the law allowing such contracts to have legal force (which is a regulatory problem from another century).
To extend that analogy, this is a bit like standing in that situation and asking whether or not written contracts are a bad thing, and whether we shouldn't go back to simpler, oral contracts. The bottom line is: As long as it's profitable, there will always be people trying to obfuscate and hide information for economic gain, and there will always be a need for regulation and oversight to stop people from doing that. But blaming the methods by which it's done is pointless.
Well, besides being partially false and over-simplistic it should be held in mind that the actual context was that Stevens was supposedly argumenting against net-neutrality.
And in that context, it's just bizzare and does nothing to support the actual issue involved.
It should also be remembered, I think, that Stevens had earlier been subjected to hours of expert testimony on the subject. He knew full well he was bullshitting people with his incoherent argument even if his 'internet' did arrive late.
Yes, but McCartney is also an unusual artist by virtue of the fact that he owns the rights to a vast number of songs (something like 3,000) which he didn't write himself. Among others, Buddy Holly's back-catalog.
So, seeing it from the viewpoint of a rather large rights-holder releasing songs DRM-free, the shoe is on the other foot.
Really, this crap has gotten so bad there are some subjects that just CAN'T be discussed with 'ordinary people' anymore.
Vaccines, ADD/ADHD, Corn Syrup, Aspartame.. the list goes on and on. (And not too seldom, the conspiracy theories run together - "vaccines cause ADD!")
There's no such thing as a universal 'better'. What's better has all to do with circumstances, environment - It's the driving force of evolution.
So what's 'better' about PNR? Well, what immediately springs to mind is that it'd be similar to amino acids. And for life, amino acids and proteins are necessary. PNR could be considered 'more primitive' in the sense that it'd be more minimal - it could reuse a lot of the chemical pathways that would need to exist for amino acids.
What's 'worse' about it? I don't know. One likely reason that comes to mind is that it may not be stable enough for long chains, and hence, more complex life. That's the case for RNA. And the RNA-to-DNA transition in nature wasn't an easy one for sure: It's an very energy-demanding reaction that requires radical-formation. (in fact, chemists didn't even think radical reactions occured in biological systems until a decade or two ago)
When Turing first described a computer (a turing machine), it was essentially a mechanism where you put a tape in a certain state, manipulate it according to certain rules and in the end you get the tape in another state containing the "result" of your computation. What was so interesting about it it that it was theoretically possible to build a machine that would be able to do the manipulations automatically.
You miss the point entirely. Turing's machine _always_ gave the same result for the same data and could be mathematically proven to do so.
You can NOT predict the result of a quantum 'calculation'. You can predict the _probabilities_ of the various possible results.
This abandoning of what is mathematically provable is not a casual thing.
No, it's of real interest to theoretical computer science. Quantum computing defines a new class of algorithmic complexity: there are, for instance, sub-exponential quantum algorithms for problems which have only exponential-time classical solutions.
That implies putting the results of a physical measurement on equal footing with 'classical' methods, i.e. what can be done using pure math. If you do that, I think you're turning Computer Science from having been a branch of Mathematics into some completely different animal.
Algorithms are math. They can be proven mathematically, etc. These 'quantum algorithms' are something different - even if they're derived mathematially (which is how physics works nowadays), they're essentially a statement of: Put this physical system in a certain state letting certain properties of the system represent your input. Manipulate it a certain way, and the 'algorithm' shows us that you can achieve a resulting state which - probabilistically - provides a measurable value representing the result of the 'calculation' you wanted to perform. It is not mathematically proven or provable (beyond the proof that the most probable state is the desired result).
Which makes the methods essentially heuristics, not algorithms. And while that's perfectly good and useful for doing calculations and getting results, it is not a new kind of math, or any kind of math.
It's not a 'new toy' for computer science. Computer science has pretty much nothing to do with it.
Mostly, it's a toy, or rather, academic persuit for theoretical physicists.
You will not be seeing Quantum Computers taking over general-purpose computing tasks anytime soon. Personally, I'm very skeptical to whether we will ever see such a thing happen. Because it will almost certainly never be easy and affordable to deploy; because I very much doubt you could ever get the necessary long decoherence times required for a quantum computer of any size to work, in an easily achievable environment. (by which I mean something approaching room temperatures, for instance).
IOW, a computer that's a fancy elaboration on an NMR machine will never be a easy nor affordable.
Now that I read closer, I think I "get it". - They're trying to say something about mathematics using quantum physics, not vice versa.
Quantum randomness is a consequence of a system having an undefined state. What I think they're saying is that if you imagine the possible states of a quantum system as modeling logical axioms, the overall uncertainties of the system will replicate the undecidables of that system of axioms.
From the physics standpoint, that's not terribly 'deep'.
But then they draw on the work of this Chatain guy, who it appears to claim that kind of uncertainty explains Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem. So, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would be an experimental/empirical 'proof' of the incompleteness theorem.
I looked at this, an an apparently related PhD thesis (http://eprintweb.org/S/article/quant-ph/0812.0238).. I'm not so sure about the 'deepness' of the connection here.
It seems to me the basic rationale is along the lines of:
- In math, there are propositions that are undecidable given a set of axioms (Gödel)
- A guy named Chatain (Int J Theor Phys, v21, 941) suggested that undecidabilty is due to a kind of information-theoretical incompleteness. Or in analogy to basic math: You can't solve a problem with more variables than given relationships.
- Now, they went from this, to Quantum Physics, which says that an indeterminate property of a physical system will have a random value, experimentally. (Checking up on this, it seems this result has already been reached before though: Calude and Stay, Int J Theor Phys v46, p2013).
So.. seems to me they're saying "Yes, nature follows logic". Which is what Science always assumed. (and it'd be a bitch if it didn't)
Maybe I'm missing some very subtle points here. But it all seems rather trivial. A stating of the fact "that which is logically indeterminable is indeterminate".
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, can you clarify for me why exactly you can't? Is it because you can't actually control what state the measured atom, and thus the distant atom, will take?
Sure, I'll try: A quantum 'entangled' state means that two systems are in an 'undefined' state in the quantum sense, that are interdependent.
When one is measured, the other one will _instantanously_ adopt whatever state is 'required' to complement the other one. So one 'knows' instantly what the other is doing, so to speak. Which means a sort of information has been transferred at FTL speed.
The reason why this can't actually be used for communication is twofold: One is exactly as you said: Because you can't know which state you'll measure, you can't transfer information through that alone. The second reason is that, an entanglement between two systems occurs only if there's an (unmeasured) interaction between them.
That means you either separate the two systems from each other (as in the classic example of entangled photons moving apart), or as in this case, by letting them interact with photons - that travel at light speed. Either way though, light speed is the best you can do.
Yes. Setting up the entangled state here requires both atoms to emit photons, so that occurs at light speed.
It follows the same old rules. Although the state of one atom, once measured, will affect the other atom instantaneously, there's no possibility for FTL communication.
Is there any other kind?
But without seeing the article it's fairly safe to assume this involves a microcontroller. I'm guessing an AVR -that's what I'd use, and people have been able to put together TCP interfaces on 'em.
Considering that, I doubt I'd consider this as a good project to 'get started' with electronics. Or microcontrollers even.. AVR's STK500 'starter kit' is a rather nice, if a bit pricey. (I've heard the Basic Stamp system is beginner-oriented. I have no experience with them though)
It's still sounds like a fun kit though.
What about the assurances in the fact that protons with energies on the order of the energy in the LHC, and several orders of magnitude larger, have been bombarding the planet for billions of years without any stable black hole forming, ever? I'm sure that for almost any event you can find some incredibly unlikely scenario of it triggering a sequence of events that will doom humanity. But it's not generally seen as a reason to stop doing things. Because it's never happened despite things going on for quite some time now.
It's not for them to say 'coffee is good' or 'coffee is bad'. That's for you to determine.
It's antithetical to scientific thinking to draw conclusions that aren't relevant or supported by the results. It is, however, something journalists love to do for them.
But anyway, are you really unable to fathom the idea that something can be good in some ways and bad in others? And that something can be good under a certain set of circumstances and bad under another?
Besides which, coffee hasn't been shown to be particularly bad for you unless you have a heart condition and need to avoid caffeine for blood-pressure reasons. It also contains some carcinogens - which is one of those sources of journalistic misinterpretation, because there's a big difference between 'contains carcinogens' and 'causes cancer'. Just because something contains a carcinogen doesn't necessarily mean that carcinogen is potent enough and the concentration sufficient to substantially change the risks of cancer, in particular once you take into account how much actually gets taken up into the body.
This would not be pursued to the extent that it has been if those questions have been laid to rest already. Most chemists and chemical engineers out there are familiar with ecology nowadays and performing such Life Cycle Analysis is routine.
For an actual example, see for instance "Environmental, economic and energetic costs and benefits of biodiesel and ethanol biofuels", Hill et al, PNAS, vol 103, no 30, 11206-11210.
The net energy gain (over the energy costs of production) is about 25% for corn ethanol, almost 100% for soybean biodiesel (probably higher for algae) and promises to be upwards of 300% for cellulosic ethanol.
Algae and cellulosic ethanol do not displace food crops. Land (and forest) do not sequester carbon to any significant extent - the decomposition process of dead plant matter releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.
I'm all for biofuels and algae is certainly promising, but AFAIK, it's nowhere near industrial production yet. (cellulosic ethanol is getting there though)
Note that it says:
They don't say how much algae-derived biofuel was in that mix. I'm guessing this is rather a way for the company involved to get attention and hence, more funding. I suppose the ends justify the means, though. It takes a lot of funding to start test plants for industrial production.
Actually they're not the second-largest corporate employer. That seems to be an incorrect inference on the part of the Washington Post, because the Dell Ireland website claims they're the second-largest *corporation*.. and the metric for that could easily be something other than employees, i.e. revenue. Of course, 1900 people isn't their entire Irish workforce either.
There are _definitely_ larger employers in Ireland. 1900 people at a single factory is enough to sustain a mid sized factory town of about 30,000 people (1/3 of Limerick). I know because I've lived in one. And I'm certain Ireland has a handful of towns that size and larger.
But just to grab some random Irish companies out of a hat and look them up: Eircom has 6,500 employees. Bank of Ireland has 16,026.
The linked article doesn't state that either, it says that Poland has some of the poorest regions in Europe. That doesn't necessarily say anything about the country as a whole - The average Polish person (nationally) is better off than the average inhabitant of the USA's poorest counties.
Albania is the poorest in Europe, much poorer than Poland. All East-European countries (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova) are poorer. Most ex-Yugoslav countries (Slovenia and Croatia are about on-par), as are Bulgaria and Romania.
The common market will tend to smooth things out eventually. That's the point of it. Eventually it shouldn't matter if a factory is in Poland or Ireland, since Poles are free to work in Ireland and vice-versa.
It's a beautiful place, beautiful volcano too. Odd fact of the kind they tell tourists: It once erupted and killed everyone except a guy who was in jail in an underground cell.
And I agree with that datas: The problem isn't the computer/mathematical models. It's how they were used. In particular, people were using models designed to evaluate one kind of mortgage asset, and plugging in an entirely different kind of mortgage, etc.
The author grants that conclusion, but then makes the claim that although the problem wasn't caused by the computers themselves, that it was somehow exasperated by them. - I don't see how that's the case.
Computers and computer modelling makes it easier to create advanced derivatives and such. But it doesn't make us do it. Just look at the engineering world; We don't choose technically advanced solution just because we can. In fact, the tendency is to go for the simplest possible solution. ("KISS rule")
There's only one reason why you would create advanced, incomprehensible derivative structures: To con people, essentially. To obfuscate the risks. To create money out of nothing. (the most profitable way to make it)
That's not a new problem. There's a reason we created financial regulations, why we have book-keeping, demand financial transparency, auditing, etc. This happened because it was allowed to happen. Because nobody stepped in and stopped this obfuscation from happening. I don't blame the computer models. If someone cons you into signing a bogus, misleading contract - the problem isn't with the paper it was written on or the language that was used. The problem is with the law allowing such contracts to have legal force (which is a regulatory problem from another century).
To extend that analogy, this is a bit like standing in that situation and asking whether or not written contracts are a bad thing, and whether we shouldn't go back to simpler, oral contracts. The bottom line is: As long as it's profitable, there will always be people trying to obfuscate and hide information for economic gain, and there will always be a need for regulation and oversight to stop people from doing that. But blaming the methods by which it's done is pointless.
Well, besides being partially false and over-simplistic it should be held in mind that the actual context was that Stevens was supposedly argumenting against net-neutrality. And in that context, it's just bizzare and does nothing to support the actual issue involved. It should also be remembered, I think, that Stevens had earlier been subjected to hours of expert testimony on the subject. He knew full well he was bullshitting people with his incoherent argument even if his 'internet' did arrive late.
"Liberty" is a noun. "Free" is an adjective.
Yes, but McCartney is also an unusual artist by virtue of the fact that he owns the rights to a vast number of songs (something like 3,000) which he didn't write himself. Among others, Buddy Holly's back-catalog. So, seeing it from the viewpoint of a rather large rights-holder releasing songs DRM-free, the shoe is on the other foot.
Really, this crap has gotten so bad there are some subjects that just CAN'T be discussed with 'ordinary people' anymore. Vaccines, ADD/ADHD, Corn Syrup, Aspartame.. the list goes on and on. (And not too seldom, the conspiracy theories run together - "vaccines cause ADD!")
It's a sad state of affairs.
So what's 'better' about PNR? Well, what immediately springs to mind is that it'd be similar to amino acids. And for life, amino acids and proteins are necessary. PNR could be considered 'more primitive' in the sense that it'd be more minimal - it could reuse a lot of the chemical pathways that would need to exist for amino acids.
What's 'worse' about it? I don't know. One likely reason that comes to mind is that it may not be stable enough for long chains, and hence, more complex life. That's the case for RNA. And the RNA-to-DNA transition in nature wasn't an easy one for sure: It's an very energy-demanding reaction that requires radical-formation. (in fact, chemists didn't even think radical reactions occured in biological systems until a decade or two ago)
You miss the point entirely. Turing's machine _always_ gave the same result for the same data and could be mathematically proven to do so.
You can NOT predict the result of a quantum 'calculation'. You can predict the _probabilities_ of the various possible results.
This abandoning of what is mathematically provable is not a casual thing.
That implies putting the results of a physical measurement on equal footing with 'classical' methods, i.e. what can be done using pure math. If you do that, I think you're turning Computer Science from having been a branch of Mathematics into some completely different animal.
Algorithms are math. They can be proven mathematically, etc. These 'quantum algorithms' are something different - even if they're derived mathematially (which is how physics works nowadays), they're essentially a statement of: Put this physical system in a certain state letting certain properties of the system represent your input. Manipulate it a certain way, and the 'algorithm' shows us that you can achieve a resulting state which - probabilistically - provides a measurable value representing the result of the 'calculation' you wanted to perform. It is not mathematically proven or provable (beyond the proof that the most probable state is the desired result).
Which makes the methods essentially heuristics, not algorithms. And while that's perfectly good and useful for doing calculations and getting results, it is not a new kind of math, or any kind of math.
It's not a 'new toy' for computer science. Computer science has pretty much nothing to do with it. Mostly, it's a toy, or rather, academic persuit for theoretical physicists.
You will not be seeing Quantum Computers taking over general-purpose computing tasks anytime soon. Personally, I'm very skeptical to whether we will ever see such a thing happen. Because it will almost certainly never be easy and affordable to deploy; because I very much doubt you could ever get the necessary long decoherence times required for a quantum computer of any size to work, in an easily achievable environment. (by which I mean something approaching room temperatures, for instance).
IOW, a computer that's a fancy elaboration on an NMR machine will never be a easy nor affordable.
Now that I read closer, I think I "get it". - They're trying to say something about mathematics using quantum physics, not vice versa.
Quantum randomness is a consequence of a system having an undefined state. What I think they're saying is that if you imagine the possible states of a quantum system as modeling logical axioms, the overall uncertainties of the system will replicate the undecidables of that system of axioms.
From the physics standpoint, that's not terribly 'deep'.
But then they draw on the work of this Chatain guy, who it appears to claim that kind of uncertainty explains Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem. So, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would be an experimental/empirical 'proof' of the incompleteness theorem.
I looked at this, an an apparently related PhD thesis (http://eprintweb.org/S/article/quant-ph/0812.0238).. I'm not so sure about the 'deepness' of the connection here. It seems to me the basic rationale is along the lines of: - In math, there are propositions that are undecidable given a set of axioms (Gödel) - A guy named Chatain (Int J Theor Phys, v21, 941) suggested that undecidabilty is due to a kind of information-theoretical incompleteness. Or in analogy to basic math: You can't solve a problem with more variables than given relationships. - Now, they went from this, to Quantum Physics, which says that an indeterminate property of a physical system will have a random value, experimentally. (Checking up on this, it seems this result has already been reached before though: Calude and Stay, Int J Theor Phys v46, p2013). So.. seems to me they're saying "Yes, nature follows logic". Which is what Science always assumed. (and it'd be a bitch if it didn't) Maybe I'm missing some very subtle points here. But it all seems rather trivial. A stating of the fact "that which is logically indeterminable is indeterminate".