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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/02/23 in all areas

  1. Thank you. Yes, I'm familiar with it but it's not falsifiable, so I don't consider it an explanation of what I want to understand. Invoking a new universe every time a leaf makes a ripple on a pond is what I would call an ad hoc explanation.
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  2. That's good, so we can move on. On thing to note is that the mathematics of probability and statistics was not properly understood in their time. Startling though this my seem, both suffered from the shadow of Fisher, Pearson and Gosset through the end of the 19th and into the early 20th centuries. These men were not wrong but just dominated and thereby limited the subject until the mid and latter 20th century. The first physics text I know of to acknowledge that there are at least four significanly different meanings to the term 'probability' is in the Manchester Physics series Statistics - A guide to the use of Statistical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Barlow, published in 1989. I also note that there remain questions we do not know the answers to in Quantum theory, it is not perfect and has been continually updated from its inception. One of its founding principles, in Physics is that everything you might want to know, or indeed can know about the material world, can be derived from the wave function. But there have been bumps in this road. The first was the change from the original formula for the energy of an oscillator from nhν to (n+ ½)hν to introduce the so called zero point energy. The original theory was called the 'old quantum theory' and the replacement called the 'new quantum theory'. The second was the realisation that the original set of 3 quantum numbers (from the solutions to the quantum wave equation) was deficient and a fourth number not appearing in that equation was added. This fourth one was the spin quantum number. Who can tell what the next one will be ? Back to Wilczek He starts the section I post with his word 'Complementarity'. Now Yin and Yang or the idea of 'Two sides of the same coin' are thousands of years old. This is one idea the ancients got dead right. But they ancients did not have our mathematical sophistication to take it any further. We now know that what mathematicfians call duality and reserve complementarity for something different (I will explain in a moment) appears all over mathematics and the physical sciences. Even school mathematics. Some schools like to find practical demonstrations of maths and one such is an art or craft called curve stitching. How do you make a circle ? Well one way is to fix the centre and use a string and pencil to draw the circumference. Another way is to work you way round the circumference drawing tangents. This is done by stretching strings across suitable points outside the circle, all the way round. This dualism reappears in very advanced applied maths, in relativity, cosmology, engineering and other places using the duality provided by the relationship between an object and its boundary. But a line of strung tangents is not the same as a centre peg and radius, though they both show aspects of the same thing and each shows other things besides that are not shown by the other half of the dual. So it is with wave - particle dualism. Light shows neither all the characteristics of waves nor all the characteristics of particles, and you have to set your show up in advance to see either one or the other. You will never see both at the same time. It was these real observations in the material world about one or the other, but not both at the same time, that led Einstein to propose the word 'quanta' for the quantum characteristics and the rest is, as they say, history. OK complementarity Wilczek is a very talented physicist. Mathematicians use this term to denote mathematical objects that take complements. When we solve the Wave (differential) equation we are looking for solutions (there are an infinity of them) in what is known as the space if square integrable functions. That mouthful tells us the to form the square we are looking for functions and their 'complement'. Usually squaring something means to multiply by itself but Squaring such functions involves not multiplying by itself but multiplying by its complement. One result falling out of such a procedure is that order of multiplication becomes important because A*its complement is not equal to its complement*A. The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle can be derived from this. Telling you about the Physics, Wilczek describes how there are some pairs of quantities that when you measure them both the result depends upon the order of measurement in a similar fashion. In fact there is a similar theorem in the classical wave equation for a vibrating stretched string so it does not only occur in Quantum Theory. I think that is enough for the next installment, see if you can pick out these and any other important points from my Wilczek post.
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  3. Yes, I agree that there are strong probabilistic elements as well. When a sodium atom meets a water molecule is probabilistic, but what happens with them when they collide, it is deterministic.
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  4. Right. I missed that one. Would you care to elaborate, please?
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  5. Penrose does not involve consciousness to explain quantum mechanics, but rather he tries to involve quantum mechanics to explain consciousness.
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  6. With pleasure. As an appetizer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_formulation_of_quantum_mechanics#Effect_of_measurement_on_the_state This, of course, is not a projection, although it involves one. A projection is linear, and the denominator couldn't be farther from linearity in \( \left|\psi\right\rangle \). If we dismiss the denominator, interpreting it as some kind of ad hoc convention (more epistemic than embodying actual physics), then \( P_{n}\left|\psi\right\rangle \) is not unitary. So the result of postulate II.c cannot be the result of any approximation in the interaction term from the Schrödinger equation (the Hamiltonian). It just can't. That's why people today don't admit to II.c reflecting in any way the actual physics. If we did, we would have to admit that is beyond physics (consciousness, or what may have you.)
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  7. Nowadays that is a rather out of date view. A lot of misconceptions have arisen, historically, due to the choice of words made when originally formulating QM. They spoke - and we still speak - of "observable" properties and "observers", "observation" collapsing the wave function and so forth. Some people thought that "observation" implied a conscious entity to do the observing. But a moment's reflection shows you that can't make sense. Does anyone seriously contend that the reading on the dial changes when the observing experimenter goes off to get a cup of coffee? And what if the experiment is "observed" by the laboratory cat? Or a passing wasp? It's bonkers. The modern view is that it is interaction with another quantum system that collapses the wave function. So that can be part of a measuring device, whether or not anyone is looking at the measurement. Those people nowadays that maintain a role for consciousness in QM tend to be quantum woo charlatans like Deepak Chopra.
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  8. "Down with antisemitism!": There is a short video of a Zionist railing on two Anti-Zionist (proper Talmud-respecting Jews) Jews in the link.
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  9. Combined with Henry Ford (automaker and Nazi sympathizer)
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  10. Of course. The world would no longer be wrong if only they agreed with ME and MY personally preferred definitions of words. The problem is THEY are using the wrong views and need to think MY way.
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