Meyer tries to beat up on free software for not offering warranties.
As I understand the GPL, software developers can charge money for allowing customers to sue them for breach of warranty. A lot of customers would be willing to pay this cost, because it indicates reliability.
Of course there's nothing evil about charging money for a warrantied product when the unwarrantied product is free. Meyer didn't do his homework very well.
This is basically correct. Measurement collapses a wave into a particle, and the mechanism of measurement is quantum electrodynamics.
There can be electrodynamic interaction without measurement, however. A wave can travel through a crystal or a fiber-optic cable, and be modified by electrodynamic interaction, without collapsing into a particle state.
If measurement depended on human consciousness, how would we ever have particle-like behavior? When a light wave falls in the forest, it is "measured" by the trees, which turn the wave into a particle and take its energy from it, even if no human being is around.
When a wave goes through a crystal without collapsing, however, it generates no heat. When a laser goes through a crystal, the crystal heats up because some of the waves collapse and become particles. The waves that go through may interact with the electrons in the crystal, but they leave no trace. If they left a trace, we would have measured them.
It also is possible to turn a wave into a particle and then into a wave again. But none of this has any grand philosophical implications.
Measurements are special, but human beings are not.
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Meyer tries to beat up on free software for not offering warranties.
As I understand the GPL, software developers can charge money for allowing customers to sue them for breach of warranty. A lot of customers would be willing to pay this cost, because it indicates reliability.
Of course there's nothing evil about charging money for a warrantied product when the unwarrantied product is free. Meyer didn't do his homework very well.
This is basically correct. Measurement collapses a wave into a particle, and the mechanism of measurement is quantum electrodynamics.
There can be electrodynamic interaction without measurement, however. A wave can travel through a crystal or a fiber-optic cable, and be modified by electrodynamic interaction, without collapsing into a particle state.
If measurement depended on human consciousness, how would we ever have particle-like behavior? When a light wave falls in the forest, it is "measured" by the trees, which turn the wave into a particle and take its energy from it, even if no human being is around.
When a wave goes through a crystal without collapsing, however, it generates no heat. When a laser goes through a crystal, the crystal heats up because some of the waves collapse and become particles. The waves that go through may interact with the electrons in the crystal, but they leave no trace. If they left a trace, we would have measured them.
It also is possible to turn a wave into a particle and then into a wave again. But none of this has any grand philosophical implications.
Measurements are special, but human beings are not.