6 ms·

The Quantum Mystics

26 points by acangiano 16y ago

gacba 16y ago
There has always been a dichotomy between those who understand the science, what it tries to explain, the limits on those explanations, and those who simply latch on to the terminology out of convenience. What the Bleep Do We Know? was a terrible offender in the latter, although a fun exercise in mental masturbation nonetheless. Unfortunately, those who are in the latter camp will not (or cannot) understand the implications of this article...
- niels_olson 16y ago
  I must say, this article also strikes me as mental masturbation. He puts introduces concepts in a way that is academically very disjointed, but the juxtapositions might seem plausible to a casual reader of popular science books, eg, > The basic Schrodinger Equation which describes the electron in the hydrogen atom approximately (the electron is a spin 1/2 particle which is exactly described by the Dirac Equation) is <LaTeX of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation> Having studied quantum mechanics, I think, if anything, this article highlights why physicists occasionally state that no one understands quantum mechanics. The concepts simply cannot be adequately compressed into manageable English sentences, but the trained mind can genuinely operate on the problems using the symbolic language of math, then return to English to express the results. It's sort of like flipping from one programming language to another: they might all be Turing complete, but no one is implemented a sed VM in browsers. For that matter, I wonder if native speakers of highly iconographic languages like Chinese are able to approach such challenges.
gort 16y ago
The author lost me at "The evolution and growth of modern science has been accompanied by the adoption of a militant, materialistic, reductionist, and atheistic creed by many leading scientists and popularizers of science".
- itistoday 16y ago
  I think he's quite right about that.
  - gort 16y ago
    He says it like it's a bad thing. Militancy: the view that it's OK to tell people that they are wrong. Materialism: the expectation that things are made up of stuff that can be investigated by empirical experiment; which is to say, physics. Reductionism: the expectation that what things do is explained by what the things they're made of are doing [plus whatever outside influences exist, of course]. Atheism: the view that gods need explaining as much as anything else.
    - itistoday 16y ago
      He says it like it's a bad thing. It certainly can be. Militancy: the view that it's OK to tell people that they are wrong. This would be OK if the people to whom they were saying this to were actually wrong. The truth is quite often they don't have any evidence for this. For example, if a mystic were to go to the average physicist and tell them that they were God and they had created the Universe, they would laugh in the mystic's face, yet that doesn't mean the mystic is incorrect, it just means the physicist did not understand the mystic, nor were they inclined to attempt to do so. This sort of militarism is a block to knowledge and understanding. Reductionism: the expectation that what things do is explained by what the things they're made of are doing (what else would you expect - some sort of soul that imparts unexpected properties?) Reductionism assumes that fundamentally everything is made up of individual parts, a "lego-theory of the world" if you will, yet this is not what the known physics itself says is happening. Take the case of quantum entanglement, you have two "things" that yet act as one. Physicists are still baffled by this. Legos do not behave this way. Further, it must be acknowledged that even if everything is made up of "individual parts", these parts interact with one another, and hence they are not truly individual and separate, their behavior and any meaning that can be attributed to them requires the simultaneous acceptance of all other parts of the system, the understanding of mutual-interdependence (a mystical concept). Without the rest of the parts, the individual components are without meaning themselves. Meaning only arises out of the relationship between the various components, and that does not fit with the reductionist viewpoint. Atheism: the view that gods need explaining as much as anything else. No, atheism is the outright rejection of the idea of God. It is a religious belief in itself that requires a faith in the non-existence of any sort of God. It does not ask for an explanation of God, for if it did it would have to accept the possibility of a God.
lisper 16y ago
> Why does one interaction or “observation” appear to collapse the wave function and another does not? To be sure, there is probably some hand-waving explanation of this seeming problem with quantum mechanics in the advanced physics research literature. But really, is it understood? Probably not. Actually, this is quite well understood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
- ThomPete 16y ago
  It's not really well understood. Decoherence is an approximation it speaks of the appearance. The problem with QM isn't mathematic or experimental. It's philosophical. In other words it just doesn't make sense even though it's as proven as classical physics. You got non-locality up against locality (or discreet) Both are true. This is the paradox and no interpretation fully explains QM.
  - Retric 16y ago
    It's well understood in that we have a model which explains what happens to a high degree of accuracy. Unfortunately while people understand how to use the model it does not seem intuitive. IMO, that just means that while humanity understands it people don't. PS: I would argue that the same split occurs in several areas. I don't think any one person really understands a modern CPU, but get a large enough group of people together and we can still build them.
    - ThomPete 16y ago
      I am not sure I understand what you mean with this: "that just means that while humanity understands it people don't."
      - grhino 16y ago
        This is what I think he means. Considered as a whole rather than individual persons, humanity understands how to apply quantum mechanics, in particular, to collapse the wave function. However, few or no individuals actually intuitively understand the subtle details of modern quantum mechanics. If you can take the perspective of humanity as an entity which can "understand" things, then humanity knows a lot more than any individual knows.

26 points by acangiano 16y ago

gacba 16y ago

There has always been a dichotomy between those who understand the science, what it tries to explain, the limits on those explanations, and those who simply latch on to the terminology out of convenience. What the Bleep Do We Know? was a terrible offender in the latter, although a fun exercise in mental masturbation nonetheless. Unfortunately, those who are in the latter camp will not (or cannot) understand the implications of this article...

niels_olson 16y ago
I must say, this article also strikes me as mental masturbation. He puts introduces concepts in a way that is academically very disjointed, but the juxtapositions might seem plausible to a casual reader of popular science books, eg, > The basic Schrodinger Equation which describes the electron in the hydrogen atom approximately (the electron is a spin 1/2 particle which is exactly described by the Dirac Equation) is <LaTeX of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation> Having studied quantum mechanics, I think, if anything, this article highlights why physicists occasionally state that no one understands quantum mechanics. The concepts simply cannot be adequately compressed into manageable English sentences, but the trained mind can genuinely operate on the problems using the symbolic language of math, then return to English to express the results. It's sort of like flipping from one programming language to another: they might all be Turing complete, but no one is implemented a sed VM in browsers. For that matter, I wonder if native speakers of highly iconographic languages like Chinese are able to approach such challenges.

gort 16y ago

The author lost me at "The evolution and growth of modern science has been accompanied by the adoption of a militant, materialistic, reductionist, and atheistic creed by many leading scientists and popularizers of science".

itistoday 16y ago
I think he's quite right about that.
- gort 16y ago
  He says it like it's a bad thing. Militancy: the view that it's OK to tell people that they are wrong. Materialism: the expectation that things are made up of stuff that can be investigated by empirical experiment; which is to say, physics. Reductionism: the expectation that what things do is explained by what the things they're made of are doing [plus whatever outside influences exist, of course]. Atheism: the view that gods need explaining as much as anything else.
  - itistoday 16y ago
    He says it like it's a bad thing. It certainly can be. Militancy: the view that it's OK to tell people that they are wrong. This would be OK if the people to whom they were saying this to were actually wrong. The truth is quite often they don't have any evidence for this. For example, if a mystic were to go to the average physicist and tell them that they were God and they had created the Universe, they would laugh in the mystic's face, yet that doesn't mean the mystic is incorrect, it just means the physicist did not understand the mystic, nor were they inclined to attempt to do so. This sort of militarism is a block to knowledge and understanding. Reductionism: the expectation that what things do is explained by what the things they're made of are doing (what else would you expect - some sort of soul that imparts unexpected properties?) Reductionism assumes that fundamentally everything is made up of individual parts, a "lego-theory of the world" if you will, yet this is not what the known physics itself says is happening. Take the case of quantum entanglement, you have two "things" that yet act as one. Physicists are still baffled by this. Legos do not behave this way. Further, it must be acknowledged that even if everything is made up of "individual parts", these parts interact with one another, and hence they are not truly individual and separate, their behavior and any meaning that can be attributed to them requires the simultaneous acceptance of all other parts of the system, the understanding of mutual-interdependence (a mystical concept). Without the rest of the parts, the individual components are without meaning themselves. Meaning only arises out of the relationship between the various components, and that does not fit with the reductionist viewpoint. Atheism: the view that gods need explaining as much as anything else. No, atheism is the outright rejection of the idea of God. It is a religious belief in itself that requires a faith in the non-existence of any sort of God. It does not ask for an explanation of God, for if it did it would have to accept the possibility of a God.

lisper 16y ago

> Why does one interaction or “observation” appear to collapse the wave function and another does not? To be sure, there is probably some hand-waving explanation of this seeming problem with quantum mechanics in the advanced physics research literature. But really, is it understood? Probably not. Actually, this is quite well understood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

ThomPete 16y ago
It's not really well understood. Decoherence is an approximation it speaks of the appearance. The problem with QM isn't mathematic or experimental. It's philosophical. In other words it just doesn't make sense even though it's as proven as classical physics. You got non-locality up against locality (or discreet) Both are true. This is the paradox and no interpretation fully explains QM.
- Retric 16y ago
  It's well understood in that we have a model which explains what happens to a high degree of accuracy. Unfortunately while people understand how to use the model it does not seem intuitive. IMO, that just means that while humanity understands it people don't. PS: I would argue that the same split occurs in several areas. I don't think any one person really understands a modern CPU, but get a large enough group of people together and we can still build them.
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    I am not sure I understand what you mean with this: "that just means that while humanity understands it people don't."
    - grhino 16y ago
      This is what I think he means. Considered as a whole rather than individual persons, humanity understands how to apply quantum mechanics, in particular, to collapse the wave function. However, few or no individuals actually intuitively understand the subtle details of modern quantum mechanics. If you can take the perspective of humanity as an entity which can "understand" things, then humanity knows a lot more than any individual knows.