Read some context... literally the next line from your quoted article: "However, since Schrödinger's time, other interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been advanced by physicists, some of which regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real."
Schrödinger was very much trying to show that QM theory, which was in its infancy at the time, was absurd and therefore must have been incomplete or flawed . Just as Einstein was trying to do with EPR and when he questioned if the moon was there when nobody looks. They were trying to falsify their own theories by showing how fundamentally ridiculous they were. Of course a cat cannot be alive and dead at the same time. Of course things must continue to exist when nobody is looking at them.
However, they failed in falsifying the theory - instead, they just created excellent examples of how utterly bonkers QM really is. That QM theory (and later experimental evidence) shows that these absurd rules are in fact the ones that govern our reality.
In the words of Niels Bohr: "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word."
Victor: The seats are stuffed with eagle down, and the dashboard is made from the beaks of a thousand eagles. Also, there are some eagles under the floorboards Amy: That's an awful lot of eagle. Victor: Yes, and yet (sighs) Amy: What's wrong? Victor: It is just, the luxury edition has so much more eagle. It saddens me to think of you missing out.
I don't really know why people get hung up on the fact that QM is non-intuitive. There are many macroscopic physical phenomena that also defy intuition.
QM isn't just non-intuitive, it defies logic. How do you reason about a particle that doesn't have properties until you look at it? How do you think about a world where a cat is alive and dead at the same time?
Most other scientific models are easy to visualize and reason about spatially - until recently, we couldn't see atoms and the subatomic particles of the standard model, but we can easily imagine them. It's easy to think about electrons moving around in a circuit, or about gases expanding and contracting, or vibrations in a solid lattice.
Relativity started to bend that sense of intuition, because it allowed seeming paradoxes - how can two people born on the same day end up aging at different rates? How is it that if you are traveling at 99% of the speed of light, and turn on a flashlight, those photons still appear to be moving at the speed of light - whether observed by you, or by someone in a stationary reference frame?
Quantum mechanics breaks it entirely. It predicts all sorts of seemingly impossible things - and worse, experiments confirm those impossibilities.
Quick summary: "The size of your truck is inversely proportional to the size of your wallet."
If the best thing you can think of to do with $50k of disposable income is to buy the depreciating luxury 4x4 armchair that is the F250... you need to get more creative. And learn to value your time more.
The entirety of modern QM is around the wave equation, which is the state of the universe (or some smaller system in isolation). Bell's theorem shows that classical explanations don't work, but QFT works fine.
The problem isn't the theory - the theory is remarkably reliable according to experiment, as well vetted as any idea that has ever existed in science. What you don't understand is that this amazingly consistent wave theory is not the solution to the issue - it IS the issue. It predicts impossible things, and then they are confirmed by experiment. Bell's theorem doesn't rule out classical explanations - it shows that there are only a handful of explanations for QM behavior, all of which logically contradict our understanding of reality. Do you think that we live in a world where a single cat can be alive and dead at the same time? Where real paradoxes occur constantly? No, of course you don't. But that's the world that quantum mechanics proves we live in.
Feynman: " I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
Bohr: "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."
I advise you to pay attention to the premier physicists on the subject. If you aren't willing to listen to them, or spend the time to understand the math, you aren't going to get it.
No. Sorry to be blunt, but you have misunderstood. You should read this paper, and re-read it, until you have understood the nature of the problem. It isn't that there are no classical variables - it's that hidden variables of any type are provably impossible according to the experimental results. This is why Einstein asked "is the moon there when we are not looking?" Experiment shows that the particles cannot have properties (and therefore cannot be part of reality in a classical sense) while they are in superposition. Since they share properties instantaneously at the moment of collapse, they must share information.
Some quotes:
According to the Laboratory Record Argument below, there are no things (elements of reality, properties, “quantum events”, etc.) the relative frequencies of which could be equal to quantum probabilities.
As this simple example illustrates, no matter whether or not we are able to com- municate with EPR equipment, the very fact that we observe correlations which cannot be accommodated in the causal order of the world is still an embarrassing metaphysical problem.
Causality itself is upended by quantum mechanics. There isn't a classical explanation, and there isn't a comfortable interpretation. Experiment shows that our reality is built on logical impossibilities. Every physicist that has understood this problem has been deeply disturbed by it (Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Bell, Feynman) . It is fundamentally misrepresenting the science to pretend that there's a classical answer (or an easy answer) to quantum mechanical behavior.
A bit of pedantry that I think is very important: two entangled objects have no classical hidden variables. The wave equation is nothing if not hidden variables - they're just not linearly related to any classical observables.
No. Sorry to be blunt, but you have misunderstood. You should read this paper, and re-read it, until you have understood the nature of the problem. It isn't that there are no classical variables - it's that hidden variables of any type are provably impossible according to the experimental results. This is why Einstein asked "is the moon there when we are not looking?" Experiment shows that the particles cannot have properties (and therefore cannot be part of reality in a classical sense) while they are in superposition.
Some quotes:
According to the Laboratory Record Argument below, there are no things (elements of reality, properties, “quantum events”, etc.) the relative frequencies of which could be equal to quantum probabilities.
As this simple example illustrates, no matter whether or not we are able to com- municate with EPR equipment, the very fact that we observe correlations which cannot be accommodated in the causal order of the world is still an embarrassing metaphysical problem.
Causality itself is upended by quantum mechanics. There isn't a classical explanation, and there isn't a comfortable interpretation. Experiment shows that our reality is built on logical impossibilities. Every physicist that has understood this problem has been deeply disturbed by it (Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Bell, Feynman) . It is fundamentally misrepresenting the science to pretend that there's a classical answer (or an easy answer) to quantum mechanical behavior.
In the book, everyone's behavior is tracked, and risky behavior reduces your eligibility for life-extension therapies. So someone who is smoking, drinking, eating fast food, riding motorcycles, getting in bar fights, driving too fast, neglecting exercise, etc - will not be deemed a good investment of the life extension tech. What makes the novel a good read is that this is certainly a reasonable first pass at a fair model from a utilitarian perspective - you don't want to drop a limited resource on people who will waste it. What's the good of extending someone's life by 300 years if they are likely to die from risky behavior in the next 5?
It's an interesting discussion to have. Assuming the technology exists, who should get to live forever? The people who can afford it? The people who show they won't squander it via behavior tracking like this? Random lottery?
As has already been pointed out, Bell's inequality shows that you are incorrect. You are just playing semantic games by calling it a "single object". The math shows that two entangled particles have no hidden variables. Their state is only decided upon at the moment of measurement, and you can do all sorts of things to one particle to manipulate its state and find that its partner will mirror it exactly, instantaneously, across any distance. If this is not deeply weird to you, you have not understood QM.
To him (and Einstein), it was obvious that the cat could not be both alive and dead, and therefore the people pushing the superposition theory were obviously wrong.
It's a shame that his thought experiment has been taken to mean the exact opposite of what he was originally talking about.
Yes, and this is the same reason that in EPR, Einstein posited what amounts to entanglement, to show that "spooky action at a distance" was so absurd that the theory must be garbage. Unfortunately, both Einstein and Schrodinger were wrong, and rather than their thought experiments falsifying quantum mechanics, their thought experiments now serve as examples of how deeply weird our reality is.
What this is ACTUALLY showing is something very different than what everybody is focusing on.
There are 5 cross-cultural, scientifically supported and well researched personality traits. They are Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (sometimes referred to by its opposite, Emotional Stability), and Conscientiousness. These are well supported, and much more valid than your Myers-Brigg personality stuff or enneagram or astrological sign or whatever.
What these researchers have done is just a cluster analysis on a bunch of online personality test data, and found 4 correlated groupings of these traits along with a bit of demographic data. Everybody here bitching about the names of these clusters is missing the point. There's nothing particularly partisan about any of this, despite what the MRA snowflakes want to read into it. Really, the interesting thing here is that in this 5D space of human personality, these are the clusters that appear. There is actually some pretty cool statistical rigor here - finding the same clusters across 4 distinct datasets with different collection methods removes a lot of potential sources of error.
So, getting hung up on the names misses the point. Personally, I find each one pretty descriptive. Try to come up with your own names - chances are, you won't do much better than the original researchers, and a lot of the obvious choices seem far more biased.
Really, I think the way to do it is look at a flat investment, and see where it would get you with solar vs a given stock market gain. Inflation applies to both stock markets and electricity prices - so solar does just fine from an inflation perspective.
But let's just assume a 7% inflation-adjusted return for the stock market, and flat energy prices to take inflation out of the question. For myself, I've got about $1200/yr in electricity costs. A system that will cover all of those costs will run me about $10k (before tax rebates). If I build a solar system with cash, I immediately start getting a return in the form of $1200/yr savings. So, the system pays itself off in a bit more than 8 years. Taken out to 25 years, I get a total savings of $30,000. This is without batteries, btw, which aren't required or typical for a residential system in city limits. Maintenance is negligible - keeping your gutters clean is harder.
So, at the end of 25 years, I've got $30,000 in hand from a $10k initial investment, if I went with solar - although the payments (or really, non-payments to the utility) were distributed over time. By comparison, if I invested that same money in the stock market and got that 7% annual return you reference, I would have $34200 worth of stock. Solar works out to a 5.5% return in this scenario, as compared to the 7% from the market - and with less downside risk. This is without the tax rebate, btw - the numbers with the rebate are obviously even better, although that program will be phasing out in the next few years.
Additionally, solar panels are approximately as liquid as any property improvement (which is really what they are from an investment perspective) - you get the money back when you sell the home.
Of course, knowing which investment will be better requires knowing the future - you could end up in a historically bad 25-year period in the stock market, where returns didn't even beat inflation. Or you could be in a historically good period, where annualized returns were 17%. All investment involves uncertainty and risk, but at current prices residential solar seems to offer a pretty solid return for pretty minimal risk. This was absolutely not the case 10 years ago, when your payback time was 30+ years, and solar was an outright foolish investment compared to literally anything else.
Are you old enough to remember when rooftop solar was a big fad in the 1980s? I am, I remember lots of houses with rooftop solar. Affordable solar electric is just around the corner - and always has been. Until that happens, how about we quit burning coal, using stuff we already have, today, to cut CO2 emissions by half?
I don't disagree with your goals. I wasn't old enough in the 1980's to care about things like rooftop solar, but I am old enough to have been considering a solar panel install about 10 years ago - and as recently as that, the only thing that made any sort of financial sense on a residential level was direct solar water heating. Powering a home with solar panels was a fantasy for most, and only available for people who could afford to throw their money away for the sake of ideology or enthusiasm for the technology.
Things have changed dramatically today, and that's why I think it's important to emphasize that the big payoff for all that solar energy research has just recently arrived. I've crunched the numbers, and if you live in a sunny place and do the install yourself, the ROI for residential solar panels rivals that of the stock market, with much less risk. Even if you pay 3x as much to have the panels professionally installed, you'll still get a far better return than savings accounts, CDs, or bonds. So the past isn't a good benchmark for what we can expect for solar going forward, IMO.
That said, that's no reason to rest on our laurels. In a real sense, every nuclear plant gets shut down or cancelled means more carbon (and just plain pollution) going into the air from coal or natural gas. And I'll even go as far as to say that if we want to save as many lives as possible, we build out nuclear as much as possible because the evidence shows that the deaths per kWh are less than any other energy source.
There are a lot of numbers in that other report. Where are you finding the $250 billion you are looking at?
2nd plot from the top, "World Energy Investment By Region, 2016". Looking closer, the US investment that year was more like $275B.
I'm not sure why you are acting like I'm attacking solar
Because of this line: "By the way, after spending a trillion dollars in federal tax money (and more in state taxes), the US gets less than 3% of our energy from solar. So it has not worked."
That's a misrepresentation of the whole situation, which suggests that the research dollars into solar have been wasted, and that we have nothing to show for it. In fact, it has been an incredible success judging by the solar panel prices of today. At this point, left to its own devices, the free market will make solar a dominant source of electricity in the coming years. And we'll all enjoy cleaner air and cheaper energy because of it (entirely aside from the CO2 reduction).
That said, nuclear still compares favorably to solar in terms of safety, CO2 emissions, and cost. Really, if we aimed for a grid that had centralized baseline load supplied by nuclear along with distributed solar and wind, we would end up with cheaper, more reliable, cleaner energy than we have today and everybody wins. (Except fossil fuels, but that writing has been on the wall for a long, long time.)
You don't need to suggest solar research is a waste to promote nuclear. Really, fundamental research is exactly the sort of thing that federal dollars are best used for.
It looks like we spend about $250B / yr on energy infrastructure.
Yes, total global investment by all of the world's oil companies, governments, etc is about $250 billion.
No, double-check that link. $250B per year is US spending.
Here the Energy Information Administration reports 0.4%.
No they don't - in your link, they report 0.367 quadrillion btu, which amounts to about 1%. And, that's just from January to May, so during darker months of the year. What that link actually shows is a pattern of massive year-over-year growth in solar, which makes sense since prices have been dropping so dramatically.
Your central contention (that the money on solar investment has been wasted) is bunk. You should also support your $1T investment claim.
FUD doesn't help anyone. Your claim that the solar investment "has not worked" is nonsense. In fact, the exact opposite is the case - since solar is now price competitive, we're in the beginning stages of an energy revolution thanks to that investment. The research dollars and subsidies are finally paying off in a big way.
By the way, after spending a trillion dollars in federal tax money (and more in state taxes), the US gets less than 3% of our energy from solar. So it has not worked.
Ok, let's take your numbers at face value. It looks like we spend about $250B / yr on energy infrastructure. So over the history of solar research (you don't give a timeframe so I'm spitballing 40 years), we've spent $1T. Over that same time frame, we've spent at least $10T overall on energy infrastructure. So, 10% of the budget to give us 3% of the energy - not great, but not ridiculous either. Especially considering that has recently become cheaper than most everything else, and so will come to represent a much larger percentage of power very soon.
I agree with you about nuclear, btw - we should build more plants and use it for our base load. But you shouldn't use fallacious arguments against solar out of your support for nuclear. It's possible (and logical) to support both.
there is a President who understands the benefits of nuclear power.
Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
There may be presidents that understand nuclear power, but this one isn't among them.
Really? I find it pretty inspiring, at least to the extent that space tourism can be. The guy is bringing others with him, for one, which is a first among billionaire space tourists. He's also not just bringing buddies - he's essentially commissioning artists to create (presumably public) works based on their experience of seeing the moon, which is a tangible and accessible way of giving something back to a broader community.
Finally, there is a bit of a historical homage to this flight - it mirrors Apollo 8 in the overall mission profile, which was the first time any humans had seen the far side of the moon. If I remember correctly, upon seeing the moon close up, Jim Lovell commented that he wished they had a poet aboard who could properly articulate the sense of awe and wonder of the experience - as it was, it was left to some no-nonsense test pilots to try to inspire a global audience via grainy TV broadcast.
Anyhow, this is a PR stunt, certainly, but it seems to be a thoughtful one.
Was it worth $50k to you? One could argue that you wouldn't be here to write this lovely tome without that surgery...
Here's the thing - a rational actor would pay almost anything for life-saving medical treatment. In a strict, quantitative sense, yes, it is always worth it. Which is why healthcare is inherently a broken market from the outset. You need to have competition, information, and elasticity of demand for a market to function properly, and in many cases you don't have any of these. If you need an emergency procedure to save your life, you pay their price or die. You can't wait (no elasticity of demand), you can't go to a competitor (single provider in most areas, and in any case these things are often time-sensitive), and in terms of being an informed consumer, you have to take the doc's word for it on what procedure you need. Many times you don't even get to see or discuss the price up front.
There's no reason to think that a health care market will ever reach an equitable outcome without regulation imposed from the outside to correct the deficiencies inherent to the sector.
Isn't this one of the basic ideas behind free markets. The invisible hand at work. Why should we assume that what someone from a third world country needs is a cow. I think avoiding cash is based on people's general tendency to want to control others. Don't want them to do something with their charity that they don't approve of with the money.
Came here to say exactly this. Giving aid directly in the form of cash empowers the people on the ground to use it to best fulfill their needs. The biggest opponents of this kind of thing are the puritanical folks who don't want a single charitable dollar to be used for any non-necessary (in their opinion) expenses.
That said - this kind of thing does need to be implemented thoughtfully, because it's easy to imagine that organized-crime types will find ways to exploit this to enrich themselves off of charitable giving. As with most things, it all comes down to diligence in the implementation.
The Analects of Confucius Python for Data Analysis Eon (Greg Bear) - a bit dated, but fun Dracula (Bram Stoker) - worth it just to understand the source material for so much modern horror Apollo 8 (Jeffery Kluger) - Great, historical mission that isn't as commonly talked about as Apollo 11 or 13 Anthem (Ayn Rand) - Total garbage, should have known
The first group is not something that "the rich" can solve, and they can't really solve the second either.
That's exactly what the second group of people need. An opportunity to find work and earn a living and a place to stay while finding and applying for job positions.
Actually, "the rich" can, or at least we as a society can. Utah has had a lot of success giving the homeless exactly this - basic housing while they get back on their feet. It's cheaper, on the whole, than the police, ER, and jail costs that we would otherwise incur. It's not a silver bullet (nothing ever is) but there are meaningful policy steps that we can take to improve the situation.
What Keynesians give you is a responsible adult model of economic behavior - pay off your debts when things are good, so you've got some room to borrow when things are bad.
No it isn't. Your own link shows the fact that you are trying to deny - it shows a decrease in debt (both inflation-adjusted and unadjusted) after WWII. If it went back farther, it would also show debt being paid down earlier in the nation's history.
All you've really done through this whole argument is play semantic games to try to redefine the idea of debt being paid down, because you made a factually untrue statement several comments ago. Instead of admitting the fault and moving on, you have doubled down on ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.
Read some context... literally the next line from your quoted article: "However, since Schrödinger's time, other interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been advanced by physicists, some of which regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real."
Schrödinger was very much trying to show that QM theory, which was in its infancy at the time, was absurd and therefore must have been incomplete or flawed . Just as Einstein was trying to do with EPR and when he questioned if the moon was there when nobody looks. They were trying to falsify their own theories by showing how fundamentally ridiculous they were. Of course a cat cannot be alive and dead at the same time. Of course things must continue to exist when nobody is looking at them.
However, they failed in falsifying the theory - instead, they just created excellent examples of how utterly bonkers QM really is. That QM theory (and later experimental evidence) shows that these absurd rules are in fact the ones that govern our reality.
In the words of Niels Bohr: "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word."
Oblig. Futurama:
Victor: The seats are stuffed with eagle down, and the dashboard is made from the beaks of a thousand eagles. Also, there are some eagles under the floorboards
Amy: That's an awful lot of eagle.
Victor: Yes, and yet (sighs)
Amy: What's wrong?
Victor: It is just, the luxury edition has so much more eagle. It saddens me to think of you missing out.
I don't really know why people get hung up on the fact that QM is non-intuitive. There are many macroscopic physical phenomena that also defy intuition.
QM isn't just non-intuitive, it defies logic. How do you reason about a particle that doesn't have properties until you look at it? How do you think about a world where a cat is alive and dead at the same time?
Most other scientific models are easy to visualize and reason about spatially - until recently, we couldn't see atoms and the subatomic particles of the standard model, but we can easily imagine them. It's easy to think about electrons moving around in a circuit, or about gases expanding and contracting, or vibrations in a solid lattice.
Relativity started to bend that sense of intuition, because it allowed seeming paradoxes - how can two people born on the same day end up aging at different rates? How is it that if you are traveling at 99% of the speed of light, and turn on a flashlight, those photons still appear to be moving at the speed of light - whether observed by you, or by someone in a stationary reference frame?
Quantum mechanics breaks it entirely. It predicts all sorts of seemingly impossible things - and worse, experiments confirm those impossibilities.
Here comes a furious barrage of rationalization so that we don't have to acknowledge any possibility whatsoever of bias in STEM hiring. 3, 2, 1...
The F-250 XL gives me the Willie's. I have to have an XLT at the least.
Man, you must hate money. And/or financial freedom.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.co...
Quick summary: "The size of your truck is inversely proportional to the size of your wallet."
If the best thing you can think of to do with $50k of disposable income is to buy the depreciating luxury 4x4 armchair that is the F250... you need to get more creative. And learn to value your time more.
The entirety of modern QM is around the wave equation, which is the state of the universe (or some smaller system in isolation). Bell's theorem shows that classical explanations don't work, but QFT works fine.
The problem isn't the theory - the theory is remarkably reliable according to experiment, as well vetted as any idea that has ever existed in science. What you don't understand is that this amazingly consistent wave theory is not the solution to the issue - it IS the issue. It predicts impossible things, and then they are confirmed by experiment. Bell's theorem doesn't rule out classical explanations - it shows that there are only a handful of explanations for QM behavior, all of which logically contradict our understanding of reality. Do you think that we live in a world where a single cat can be alive and dead at the same time? Where real paradoxes occur constantly? No, of course you don't. But that's the world that quantum mechanics proves we live in.
Feynman:
" I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
Bohr:
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."
I advise you to pay attention to the premier physicists on the subject. If you aren't willing to listen to them, or spend the time to understand the math, you aren't going to get it.
No. Sorry to be blunt, but you have misunderstood. You should read this paper, and re-read it, until you have understood the nature of the problem. It isn't that there are no classical variables - it's that hidden variables of any type are provably impossible according to the experimental results. This is why Einstein asked "is the moon there when we are not looking?" Experiment shows that the particles cannot have properties (and therefore cannot be part of reality in a classical sense) while they are in superposition. Since they share properties instantaneously at the moment of collapse, they must share information.
Some quotes:
According to the Laboratory Record Argument below, there are no things (elements of reality, properties,
“quantum events”, etc.) the relative frequencies of which could be equal to quantum probabilities.
As this simple example illustrates, no matter whether or not we are able to com-
municate with EPR equipment, the very fact that we observe correlations which
cannot be accommodated in the causal order of the world is still an embarrassing
metaphysical problem.
Causality itself is upended by quantum mechanics. There isn't a classical explanation, and there isn't a comfortable interpretation. Experiment shows that our reality is built on logical impossibilities. Every physicist that has understood this problem has been deeply disturbed by it (Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Bell, Feynman) . It is fundamentally misrepresenting the science to pretend that there's a classical answer (or an easy answer) to quantum mechanical behavior.
A bit of pedantry that I think is very important: two entangled objects have no classical hidden variables. The wave equation is nothing if not hidden variables - they're just not linearly related to any classical observables.
No. Sorry to be blunt, but you have misunderstood. You should read this paper, and re-read it, until you have understood the nature of the problem. It isn't that there are no classical variables - it's that hidden variables of any type are provably impossible according to the experimental results. This is why Einstein asked "is the moon there when we are not looking?" Experiment shows that the particles cannot have properties (and therefore cannot be part of reality in a classical sense) while they are in superposition.
Some quotes:
According to the Laboratory Record Argument below, there are no things (elements of reality, properties,
“quantum events”, etc.) the relative frequencies of which could be equal to quantum probabilities.
As this simple example illustrates, no matter whether or not we are able to com-
municate with EPR equipment, the very fact that we observe correlations which
cannot be accommodated in the causal order of the world is still an embarrassing
metaphysical problem.
Causality itself is upended by quantum mechanics. There isn't a classical explanation, and there isn't a comfortable interpretation. Experiment shows that our reality is built on logical impossibilities. Every physicist that has understood this problem has been deeply disturbed by it (Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Bell, Feynman) . It is fundamentally misrepresenting the science to pretend that there's a classical answer (or an easy answer) to quantum mechanical behavior.
This is where it all begins...
In the book, everyone's behavior is tracked, and risky behavior reduces your eligibility for life-extension therapies. So someone who is smoking, drinking, eating fast food, riding motorcycles, getting in bar fights, driving too fast, neglecting exercise, etc - will not be deemed a good investment of the life extension tech. What makes the novel a good read is that this is certainly a reasonable first pass at a fair model from a utilitarian perspective - you don't want to drop a limited resource on people who will waste it. What's the good of extending someone's life by 300 years if they are likely to die from risky behavior in the next 5?
It's an interesting discussion to have. Assuming the technology exists, who should get to live forever? The people who can afford it? The people who show they won't squander it via behavior tracking like this? Random lottery?
As has already been pointed out, Bell's inequality shows that you are incorrect. You are just playing semantic games by calling it a "single object". The math shows that two entangled particles have no hidden variables. Their state is only decided upon at the moment of measurement, and you can do all sorts of things to one particle to manipulate its state and find that its partner will mirror it exactly, instantaneously, across any distance. If this is not deeply weird to you, you have not understood QM.
To him (and Einstein), it was obvious that the cat could not be both alive and dead, and therefore the people pushing the superposition theory were obviously wrong.
It's a shame that his thought experiment has been taken to mean the exact opposite of what he was originally talking about.
Yes, and this is the same reason that in EPR, Einstein posited what amounts to entanglement, to show that "spooky action at a distance" was so absurd that the theory must be garbage. Unfortunately, both Einstein and Schrodinger were wrong, and rather than their thought experiments falsifying quantum mechanics, their thought experiments now serve as examples of how deeply weird our reality is.
What this is ACTUALLY showing is something very different than what everybody is focusing on.
There are 5 cross-cultural, scientifically supported and well researched personality traits. They are Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (sometimes referred to by its opposite, Emotional Stability), and Conscientiousness. These are well supported, and much more valid than your Myers-Brigg personality stuff or enneagram or astrological sign or whatever.
What these researchers have done is just a cluster analysis on a bunch of online personality test data, and found 4 correlated groupings of these traits along with a bit of demographic data. Everybody here bitching about the names of these clusters is missing the point. There's nothing particularly partisan about any of this, despite what the MRA snowflakes want to read into it. Really, the interesting thing here is that in this 5D space of human personality, these are the clusters that appear. There is actually some pretty cool statistical rigor here - finding the same clusters across 4 distinct datasets with different collection methods removes a lot of potential sources of error.
So, getting hung up on the names misses the point. Personally, I find each one pretty descriptive. Try to come up with your own names - chances are, you won't do much better than the original researchers, and a lot of the obvious choices seem far more biased.
Really, I think the way to do it is look at a flat investment, and see where it would get you with solar vs a given stock market gain. Inflation applies to both stock markets and electricity prices - so solar does just fine from an inflation perspective.
But let's just assume a 7% inflation-adjusted return for the stock market, and flat energy prices to take inflation out of the question. For myself, I've got about $1200/yr in electricity costs. A system that will cover all of those costs will run me about $10k (before tax rebates). If I build a solar system with cash, I immediately start getting a return in the form of $1200/yr savings. So, the system pays itself off in a bit more than 8 years. Taken out to 25 years, I get a total savings of $30,000. This is without batteries, btw, which aren't required or typical for a residential system in city limits. Maintenance is negligible - keeping your gutters clean is harder.
So, at the end of 25 years, I've got $30,000 in hand from a $10k initial investment, if I went with solar - although the payments (or really, non-payments to the utility) were distributed over time. By comparison, if I invested that same money in the stock market and got that 7% annual return you reference, I would have $34200 worth of stock. Solar works out to a 5.5% return in this scenario, as compared to the 7% from the market - and with less downside risk. This is without the tax rebate, btw - the numbers with the rebate are obviously even better, although that program will be phasing out in the next few years.
Additionally, solar panels are approximately as liquid as any property improvement (which is really what they are from an investment perspective) - you get the money back when you sell the home.
Of course, knowing which investment will be better requires knowing the future - you could end up in a historically bad 25-year period in the stock market, where returns didn't even beat inflation. Or you could be in a historically good period, where annualized returns were 17%. All investment involves uncertainty and risk, but at current prices residential solar seems to offer a pretty solid return for pretty minimal risk. This was absolutely not the case 10 years ago, when your payback time was 30+ years, and solar was an outright foolish investment compared to literally anything else.
Are you old enough to remember when rooftop solar was a big fad in the 1980s? I am, I remember lots of houses with rooftop solar. Affordable solar electric is just around the corner - and always has been. Until that happens, how about we quit burning coal, using stuff we already have, today, to cut CO2 emissions by half?
I don't disagree with your goals. I wasn't old enough in the 1980's to care about things like rooftop solar, but I am old enough to have been considering a solar panel install about 10 years ago - and as recently as that, the only thing that made any sort of financial sense on a residential level was direct solar water heating. Powering a home with solar panels was a fantasy for most, and only available for people who could afford to throw their money away for the sake of ideology or enthusiasm for the technology.
Things have changed dramatically today, and that's why I think it's important to emphasize that the big payoff for all that solar energy research has just recently arrived. I've crunched the numbers, and if you live in a sunny place and do the install yourself, the ROI for residential solar panels rivals that of the stock market, with much less risk. Even if you pay 3x as much to have the panels professionally installed, you'll still get a far better return than savings accounts, CDs, or bonds. So the past isn't a good benchmark for what we can expect for solar going forward, IMO.
That said, that's no reason to rest on our laurels. In a real sense, every nuclear plant gets shut down or cancelled means more carbon (and just plain pollution) going into the air from coal or natural gas. And I'll even go as far as to say that if we want to save as many lives as possible, we build out nuclear as much as possible because the evidence shows that the deaths per kWh are less than any other energy source.
There are a lot of numbers in that other report. Where are you finding the $250 billion you are looking at?
2nd plot from the top, "World Energy Investment By Region, 2016". Looking closer, the US investment that year was more like $275B.
I'm not sure why you are acting like I'm attacking solar
Because of this line: "By the way, after spending a trillion dollars in federal tax money (and more in state taxes), the US gets less than 3% of our energy from solar. So it has not worked."
That's a misrepresentation of the whole situation, which suggests that the research dollars into solar have been wasted, and that we have nothing to show for it. In fact, it has been an incredible success judging by the solar panel prices of today. At this point, left to its own devices, the free market will make solar a dominant source of electricity in the coming years. And we'll all enjoy cleaner air and cheaper energy because of it (entirely aside from the CO2 reduction).
That said, nuclear still compares favorably to solar in terms of safety, CO2 emissions, and cost. Really, if we aimed for a grid that had centralized baseline load supplied by nuclear along with distributed solar and wind, we would end up with cheaper, more reliable, cleaner energy than we have today and everybody wins. (Except fossil fuels, but that writing has been on the wall for a long, long time.)
You don't need to suggest solar research is a waste to promote nuclear. Really, fundamental research is exactly the sort of thing that federal dollars are best used for.
No, double-check that link. $250B per year is US spending.
No they don't - in your link, they report 0.367 quadrillion btu, which amounts to about 1%. And, that's just from January to May, so during darker months of the year. What that link actually shows is a pattern of massive year-over-year growth in solar, which makes sense since prices have been dropping so dramatically.
Your central contention (that the money on solar investment has been wasted) is bunk. You should also support your $1T investment claim.
FUD doesn't help anyone. Your claim that the solar investment "has not worked" is nonsense. In fact, the exact opposite is the case - since solar is now price competitive, we're in the beginning stages of an energy revolution thanks to that investment. The research dollars and subsidies are finally paying off in a big way.
I would mod you way up if I hadn't already commented - very informative post.
By the way, after spending a trillion dollars in federal tax money (and more in state taxes), the US gets less than 3% of our energy from solar. So it has not worked.
Ok, let's take your numbers at face value. It looks like we spend about $250B / yr on energy infrastructure. So over the history of solar research (you don't give a timeframe so I'm spitballing 40 years), we've spent $1T. Over that same time frame, we've spent at least $10T overall on energy infrastructure. So, 10% of the budget to give us 3% of the energy - not great, but not ridiculous either. Especially considering that has recently become cheaper than most everything else, and so will come to represent a much larger percentage of power very soon.
I agree with you about nuclear, btw - we should build more plants and use it for our base load. But you shouldn't use fallacious arguments against solar out of your support for nuclear. It's possible (and logical) to support both.
there is a President who understands the benefits of nuclear power.
There may be presidents that understand nuclear power, but this one isn't among them.
Really? I find it pretty inspiring, at least to the extent that space tourism can be. The guy is bringing others with him, for one, which is a first among billionaire space tourists. He's also not just bringing buddies - he's essentially commissioning artists to create (presumably public) works based on their experience of seeing the moon, which is a tangible and accessible way of giving something back to a broader community.
Finally, there is a bit of a historical homage to this flight - it mirrors Apollo 8 in the overall mission profile, which was the first time any humans had seen the far side of the moon. If I remember correctly, upon seeing the moon close up, Jim Lovell commented that he wished they had a poet aboard who could properly articulate the sense of awe and wonder of the experience - as it was, it was left to some no-nonsense test pilots to try to inspire a global audience via grainy TV broadcast.
Anyhow, this is a PR stunt, certainly, but it seems to be a thoughtful one.
Was it worth $50k to you? One could argue that you wouldn't be here to write this lovely tome without that surgery...
Here's the thing - a rational actor would pay almost anything for life-saving medical treatment. In a strict, quantitative sense, yes, it is always worth it. Which is why healthcare is inherently a broken market from the outset. You need to have competition, information, and elasticity of demand for a market to function properly, and in many cases you don't have any of these. If you need an emergency procedure to save your life, you pay their price or die. You can't wait (no elasticity of demand), you can't go to a competitor (single provider in most areas, and in any case these things are often time-sensitive), and in terms of being an informed consumer, you have to take the doc's word for it on what procedure you need. Many times you don't even get to see or discuss the price up front.
There's no reason to think that a health care market will ever reach an equitable outcome without regulation imposed from the outside to correct the deficiencies inherent to the sector.
Isn't this one of the basic ideas behind free markets. The invisible hand at work. Why should we assume that what someone from a third world country needs is a cow. I think avoiding cash is based on people's general tendency to want to control others. Don't want them to do something with their charity that they don't approve of with the money.
Came here to say exactly this. Giving aid directly in the form of cash empowers the people on the ground to use it to best fulfill their needs. The biggest opponents of this kind of thing are the puritanical folks who don't want a single charitable dollar to be used for any non-necessary (in their opinion) expenses.
That said - this kind of thing does need to be implemented thoughtfully, because it's easy to imagine that organized-crime types will find ways to exploit this to enrich themselves off of charitable giving. As with most things, it all comes down to diligence in the implementation.
The Analects of Confucius
Python for Data Analysis
Eon (Greg Bear) - a bit dated, but fun
Dracula (Bram Stoker) - worth it just to understand the source material for so much modern horror
Apollo 8 (Jeffery Kluger) - Great, historical mission that isn't as commonly talked about as Apollo 11 or 13
Anthem (Ayn Rand) - Total garbage, should have known
The first group is not something that "the rich" can solve, and they can't really solve the second either.
That's exactly what the second group of people need. An opportunity to find work and earn a living and a place to stay while finding and applying for job positions.
Actually, "the rich" can, or at least we as a society can. Utah has had a lot of success giving the homeless exactly this - basic housing while they get back on their feet. It's cheaper, on the whole, than the police, ER, and jail costs that we would otherwise incur. It's not a silver bullet (nothing ever is) but there are meaningful policy steps that we can take to improve the situation.
No it isn't. Your own link shows the fact that you are trying to deny - it shows a decrease in debt (both inflation-adjusted and unadjusted) after WWII. If it went back farther, it would also show debt being paid down earlier in the nation's history.
All you've really done through this whole argument is play semantic games to try to redefine the idea of debt being paid down, because you made a factually untrue statement several comments ago. Instead of admitting the fault and moving on, you have doubled down on ignorance.
If you want even more unequivocal evidence that the U.S. economy was once managed by responsible adults: When the US Paid Off the Entire National Debt
Just admit it. You were wrong.