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A while ago, I performed a computer simulation of the second law of thermodynamics. It involved a collection of identical entities that could be in one of two states, X or Y, with X transforming to Y and Y transforming to X at a rate governed by some rate constant. The simulation starts with all of the entities in state X, and proceeds to equilibrium. The conclusions that I drew from this simulation are: 1: The second law of thermodynamics is largely mathematical rather than physical because it is able to be simulated. 2: The rate constant is covariant with respect to time reversal. That is, it satisfies the requirement of general relativity. In other words, the thermodynamic arrow of time does not violate the principle of general relativity because the description remains valid even under time reversal. 3: The transition probability is not time reversible, applying only in the forward time direction. However, because the transition probability is based on entity counts, it is necessarily a positive number, unlike the corresponding time reversed value. 4: The transitions X to Y and Y to X in the forward time direction are not the same as the transitions Y to X and X to Y in the reverse time direction. The notion of microscopic reversibility refers to a transition and its reverse in the same time direction, not a transition in forward and reverse time directions. The transitions in the reverse time direction are not governed by transition probability. 5: Causality is governed by the transition probability and only exists in the forward time direction. The reverse time direction appears to be teleological.

I'm not exactly "pro-X" or "support X" but I kinda wonder what the heck else the world is supposed to do about all the people who are single-mindedly "working" towards rolling back the world to the age of Caliphates and eliminating anything and everything that could stand in the way? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate

He gained his Nobel prize for his work in irreversible thermodynamic processes during my first year chemical engineering course so a few of us dipped into his work out of interest (long before the pop-sci chaos carnival kicked off): Rather than his self-organisation stuff(which I found hard to grasp) my main take away at the time can be summarised in this little snippet from his Wikipedia page: Maybe that helps frame some of my earlier posts here and elsewhere. I'm averse to hard determinism and not just for religious reasons. If we loosen the thrall of determinism a little, then I can nod my head in agreement. Catalytic Synthesis of Polyribonucleic Acid on Prebiotic Rock Glasses has already got us up to sequences of several hundred nucleotides with no resort to 'quantum woo'. It isn't so much a question of increasing the number of physical interactions as such. More maybe assembling some virtual low probability microstate within a superposition to which a phenomenon like tunnelling can help bypass the sometimes significant energy barriers to gain access. (Woo alert!) To get around ergodicity issues etc. A classical, determinist model may be overly pessimistic by orders of magnitude if this isn't merely a pipedream. Precisely. So happy you butted in there 😁

I think what Seth means is QM allows for the final state in a complex multi-step reaction being "there" as a potentiality, so to speak, in the form of a quantum amplitude driving the process. Classical thinking, OTOH, seems to require first one step, then another, then another. Something like that?

No. We will not do your work for you. We will help you solve it. What have you done thus far?

"More than lack of food" implies lack of food and other factors, which I don't think is what you mean. I think you mean something other than lack of food. Because it seems obvious to me that lack of food there was not, at least for the general population before the situation got to the dramatic point it has. And I didn't. But I admit was somewhat lazy with my criterion. So here's some analysis taking your definition as the starting point. This doesn't seem to be the case for Gaza/Israel. Unless you're willing to accept several million people of the same ethnic and/or religious minority have met a very different fate for absolutely no identifiable reason. Some of those people of exactly the same ethnic and religious group seem to have made their way to the Supreme Court, the Knesset or the IDF. They are Israeli citizens: These data are from Israel only, not Gaza or the West Bank. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_members_of_the_Knesset For 20 years Gaza has been under the rule of Hamas. I'm not sure that Palestinians have been forcibly retained in Gaza for all that time. But I do get from testimonies that leaving is considerably difficult, and it must go through special permission, and ridiculously elaborate security measures, including digital cards and such. Nevertheless, here's a screenshot from the World Bank data webpage corresponding to Gaza+West Bank Which seems to imply that some people seem to have managed to trickle out, in spite of all those guards watching them from the turrets. Let's see about life expectancy Similar to Albania, considerably higher than Rwanda, about the same as Tunicia. All of those well-known concentration camps? https://data.worldbank.org/country/west-bank-and-gaza Population growth of only Gaza: Population of Gaza in 2005: 1,299,000 people. Population of Gaza in 2023: 2,300,000 people. Although I can imagine that it must not have been easy for many of them to leave due to the economic conditions --and that in spite of the large amounts of money thrown at them that could have been invested otherwise, as @MigL has observed before. Moreover, it is apparent that no Arab countries are willing to take regugees from Gaza, or no Arabs from Gaza are willing to go to other Arab countries, or both. They seem to like to go to NY or London, for some reason. Prisoners in their territory? Quite a number of them enjoyed work permits and crossed the border on a daily basis to work in the kibbutzim with their socialist benefactors. An opportunity to collect intelligence for the attacks that Hamas couldn't and didn't miss. So no, Gazans were not under guard when the attacks of October 7th happened. Frankly I find it impossible to recognize any condition from the definition you presented that applies here. What about the bit "those deemed political enemies" in your definition? Well, the logistics of the map of the West Bank doesn't look to me as the places where part of the population is divided according to what they think. It looks more like the logistics of urban guerrilla: Isolating places where the chances of getting shot from a window are more than so-and-so percent. And that's what they are. So there's nothing political about it. But of course the main issue is not political, in spite of many people trying to make it political. It's mostly that thing that shall not be named. It's that thing that shall not be named what gives it the character of an unsolvable problem. If you misdiagnose an illness you guarantee that it will never get better. If tomorrow all the Muslims of Palestine converted at once to, say, the Ahmadi Muslim faith --which are now a tiny, tiny minority there, the problem would be solved in a matter of months. Unfortunately, they are mostly Sunni followed by a minor amount of Shia, and the rest of the Muslims consider the Ahmadi heretics. So no, it won't work. And it never will. It takes a religious component for a problem to become so vicious, so stagnant, so irredeemably impossible as this one. It will never get better. Not for as long as the religious component of it survives. I grew up seeing the buildings of Beirut smashed to smitherines on the TV, and I'm pretty sure I'll leave this world with a similar scenery from the Middle East. Only this time on YT. Etc, etc. The situation is a tragedy for everyone involved, and it breaks my heart seeing Palestinian kids used as cannon fodder by Hamas, but pretending that the State of Israel is some kind of Khmer Rouge of the Middle East is just ridiculous. And no, it's not going to solve the problem either. It's going to make it worse and worse. This kind of hiperbolic discourse (like those morons saying "apartheid", "genocide", etc in the campuses) only weakens the arguments coming from any kind of progressive thinking. And if you ask me, they only make the Trumps and the Wilders and the far-right extremists more likely to seize power, not less. They're biding their time, make no mistake about it. Sorry for the lengthy diatribe. I will probably shut up pretty soon. It's a pain to participate in these debates, because the fog of propaganda makes the main arguments almost invisible.

If the particle is in a superposition of momentum eigenstates and its momentum is measured, then its state changes and becomes one of the momentum eigenstates (physically, a narrow range around such eigenstate). (It is after midnight here, so the follow up questions might need to wait.)

It would have to be in a momentum eigenstate I don’t think you can claim this. If a particle has a definite momentum its position is completely uncertain, so you can’t say measurement doesn’t change it. The eigenstates of the momentum operator are plane waves, which you can’t normalize. It’s not physical.

One thing is abundantly clear to me. Neither side is fighting "for Palestinians." Godwin's law.

Well, you're right. You must assume quantum mechanics, of course. It's not just plain non-commutativity. You must assume in particular the correspondence between observables-operators and eigenvalues-spectrum of measurement. That's why I didn't say Bell's theorem can be described in terms of non-commuting observables. I said they are the essence, but QM must be in the back of your mind. Bell's theorem is about whatever variables that can take on definite values at the same time. As the theoretical structure of QM forbids non-commuting operators to take on a definite value at the same time, there's the connection. But you do need the apparatus of QM, sure.

Concentration camps were not first created by the Nazis, and there is much more to a concentration camp than lack of food. You cannot just say "If it didn't look like what happened in Nazi Germany then it isn't a concentration camp." https://www.lbi.org/exhibitions/virtual-exhibition-last-stop-before-the-last-stop/concentration-camps-existed-long-before-hitler-came-to-power/

When the birthrate soars to where the average age is 18, that's usually a strong indicator that women are extremely oppressed in a society - basically chattel for breeding. And when you're at that point demographically then bad governance is perpetuated. Throw in confinement to a small space and it's a recipe for Calhoun's behavioral sink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink Again, while acknowledging the horror that is Hamas, I do not absolve Israel of its role in the past century of oppression and displacement. And creating that sink. Apparently when one calls on Israel for moral accountability, everything one has said will be falsely framed by someone as sympathy for Hamas or anti-Semitism.

Hi, new hard determinism convert again. I'm in a bit of a pickle. I couldn't really say "I did [this and that]" anymore, since it's not really me, right? It's everything that went in and through my body. How can I keep saying "I did [anything]" at all without being a complete bozo? Help me out here.