QM in a nutshell: “I don’t know the answer to this multiple choice, but I know it’s going to be A B C or D, and that’s the same as knowing the answer. Me not knowing the answer means there is no answer. I feel so much better.”
Just because a particle’s velocity and position can’t be known at the same time does Not mean a particle HAS NO velocity or position at a given time.
Yet that’s exactly what QM would have us believe. They are a whole culture of lab coats covering their eyes and believing the world has gone dark.
QM is the science of giving up.
Our inability to solve the problem has no bearing whatsoever on the possibility of the final state.
It’s like looking at a lighting rod and seeing lighting strike 1 inch to it’s left and asking yourself in shock, “Wow! What were the odds of that?” Well apparently 100%, since it happened.
QM is the gambler’s fallacy grown to the size of an institution. It’s a philosophy of acceptance for non answers based on existential confusion. A tolerance for fudged numbers, and claiming success when you got close enough to the mark when an actual answer presents itself. A stealing of credit. The science of hedged bets.
“Hey look, I told you the answer had a high possibility of being a positive number, I’m a genius!”
QM at best introduces randomness, or exposes us to a new unknown order. Chaos itself follows rules, else we wouldn’t be able to make statements about it, or calculate probabilities.
Free will as an actuality can not exist given our current understanding of reality. Quantum indeterminacy or not.
In our time line mutually exclusive events remain mutually exclusive. Our choices may branch into alternate time lines but that might as well be mythology for all the impact it has on our world. A cosmic game of woulda shoulda coulda.
In the here and now, events have only one outcome. If you want to pretend your brain world is somehow exempt from the laws of nature be my guest, but as for me, I’ll skip the magical thinking.
The illusion of free will is enough, and the existence of permanent unknowns is tolerable for me, but then, I’m a grown up like that. *shrugs*
I can’t imagine a more self important attitude. It’s like listening to arguments on how earth HAS to be the center of everything.
It’s puddle thinking.
It’s a religion infesting particle physicists. And until I see some of these quantum miracles (macroscopic teleportation, entanglement, and related quantum weirdness) applied at the macro scale, I’m not buying it.
The whole quantum world is viewed third hand. From instruments and abstraction to our sense organs and finally to us.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/writingscience/Ferris.htm
Read that.
Obviously there is more going on. And yet we invent fictional worlds or ignore the problem.
This is inexcusable behavior for scientists. And their laziness is infecting the future.
I don’t know much about QM on an intellectual sense, but this article is very well written and has some great thought provoking statements. Sorry, that I can’t interject something amazingly brilliant. But hey, at least it made me think.
Well to my understanding the three options for interpreting quantum weirdness is, ignore it it works, ignore it there is no answer, and “there HAS to be something more going on here, though I have no idea what.”
I may be letting prejudice from living at the macro scale get to me, but ignoring things doesn’t seem like a good idea in science, or in general really.
Did you check out the quantum weirdness article by Timothy Ferris? I’m still reading it. It’s really illuminating while staying down to earth.
This was a great article. The movie was great, probably because I’ve only seen excerpts from Walking Life. Based on your comment, it seems “there HAS to be something more going on here, though I have no idea what.” is where it’s at. What interpretation of QM does this fall in?
Maybe it’s as simple as Einstein being right. Maybe there’s a God, and God doesn’t play dice.
The proper name for the option in question is “Hidden variable theory.”
The link to quantum weirdness explores it in pretty good depth.
Glad you liked the article, and I’m with Einstein, random is an illusion. Not that I think that implies intent, but rather order.
I’m curious, Innomen. Do you think it’s possible to move faster than light speed? That in spite of the mathematics, we’ll eventually have an answer?
It depends on how you define move and from what perspective you view it.
I’m confident something like Event Horizon’s fold space or worm hole style drive will be developed eventually. All space travel is time travel after all, and speed is distance over time. Like Tim’s article says, from the photon’s perspective all travel is instant already.
As to actually propelling a craft faster than light, which would require infinite amounts of energy, no I don’t think so heh, at least until some new property of the universe is discovered. Like say being able to play with mass directly via some manipulation of the Higg’s boson?
I do like the mechanical inertial propulsion idea, a drive that converts current into inertia, I have a design for one I’d like to build just to find exactly where it would fail. Using mass to move a craft should only get more efficient as the craft gains speed and therefor mass, but I don’t think that’s actually going to allow penetration of light speed.
I don’t know enough about tachyons to comment really. However I will say this, Accelerating to beyond-light-speed I would think would be possible if the progression isn’t smooth. If you could somehow jump exactly-light-speed to beyond-light-speed, like how an electron tunnels through a nonconductor in a transistor, it would seem that at that point you’d be unable to slow down until you found a way to jump back.
This would also seem to avoid the issue of self collision inherent in a smooth crawl to beyond light speed (ignoring the energy demands). If time slows down as you approach c then wouldn’t it be true that time starts to reverse beyond c so you’d go into your own immediate past and collide with yourself. Since my readers like to call me on not being hat in hand enough with my claims, let me give the arm chair lawyer sophists a disclaimer, for the billionth time, for the record, this is just off the cuff speculation stemming from way too much SciFi. 🙂 I don’t think I know everything I could be wrong, everything I say is from my own limited knowledge. (And no degree or labcoat confers infinite knowledge, please keep that in mind doctors.)
P.S. Nothing happens “in spite of the mathematics.” Math is just an abstraction. It is not reality. It is a cognitive set of representations which can produce a simulation of reality. It is based on axioms that must be true in order to produce useful answers. Those axioms are undetectable, unprovable. (thanks Godel) So long as they are unprovable we can’t prove what is or is not beneath them, a lower more fundamental order could be present. If that’s the case the axioms upon which math is based could change. Math can’t be violated so long as logic itself continues to be enforced by reality. So long as one apple plus one apple equals two apples. But I can easily picture reality suddenly deciding that 1+1=3. That would not be in spite of math it would redefine math.
You see what I’m saying? Math assumes the rules of reality. Using math to say something is beyond reality is in a fundamental way absurd since reality is what gave us math in the first place.
I don’t like the cult of math. Its forced on children by the government to keep them busy with abstractions and to make them hate anything with the connotation of study, so that they’ll stay dim little workers, or obedient tuition paying product developing weapon refining conventional thinking grad students.
I picked up this book “What is Quantum Mechanics” by the Transnational College of Lex.
Some thoughts based on my imperfect quarter reading of it.
Math is a language, and nothing can be understood outside the scopes of language. Math is great because of its precision.
A really big problem with Quantum Mechanics is the problem of light (and electrons?) being both a wave and a particle. As I was reading the book it looks like the “argumentative flow” of the minds of QM are trying to explain experimental results with a single theory that encapsulates this contradiction. I don’t know, I’m reading this section on Planck’s solving the problem of “Black Body Radition”, and the equation that he calculated doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. As I was reading it though, I was thinking that this QM stuff really could explain everything. I’m not sure why I thought it, maybe because I thought, if you could explain light, and if everything is utimately made up of quanta (ie photons), then you could explain everything.
Anyway, I’m going to make my way to the library. There is a book there by Asimov that has a summary biography of the top 1500 scientists.
Btw, you know what’s kind of a bummer? That I don’t get a notification when there is a comment to a posting that I commented on.
The trick to QM for me is right up front Figuring out which path the writer of whatever you’re reading takes. If they aren’t hidden variable I tend to shrug and disregard the post. Did you read the quantum weirdness link? I want the rest of the book that chapter came from.
You sure you don’t have some kind of filter going? Other commenters seem to be getting their emails. Of course this comment is my most recent, so perhaps something happened?
The author of the book is taking a “what’s the story of QM” perspective starting with Planck (I think) and kind of grabbing the flow of the work between the other physicists Einstein, Shrodinger, Bohr et al. I skipped to the end and I couldn’t find any mention of copenhagen, many worlds, or hidden variable interpretations.
The one thing that is striking me is that it states the idea is that everything is made of “quanta”, (i.e. this new name for this weird thing called light which sometimes acts as a wave, and sometimes a particle). Doesn’t this mean that the fundamental particles of mass isn’t the atom but quanta(light)? I tried to figure out the math for this myself (e.g. how many photons are in a hydrogen atom), but I didn’t have the tools to figure it out. I’m thinking the problem is harder than I first anticipated.
Re email: I checked to see if emails from underlore.com were getting put into my spam folder by searching for “underlore” in my email (I use gmail), and there were no hits.
That’s because the anti hidden variable people when attempting to explain QM to the masses intentionally hide the hidden variables options because it is the most intuitive. They want to give people the choice of total ignorance or their quantum strange interpretation, because if they included the hidden variable option they’d end up recruiting for the wrong team. And since they consider HV to be wrong anyway, they feel justified in leaving it out for the same reason they leave out religion mythology.
To my understanding the fundamental particle hasn’t be the atom since the time of the ancient Greeks. I don’t think the standard model provides a single fundamental particle designation, but more like an array of particles with different functions, such as quarks with various states and the like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_model
Again to my limited understanding the elementary particle that contributes mass is the one the LHC is digging for right now, the Higgs boson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
As for your email, my test emails are happening and I get notification by email when you respond. They should be coming to you from [email protected], maybe try adding that to your contacts?