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So it is a bit like a wave crashing at a beachhead?
by prox 6y ago
So it is a bit like a wave crashing at a beachhead?
- ben_w 6y agoAny analogy we can build from everyday experience to try to explain quantum mechanics is as incorrect as any analogy a 17th century alchemist could use to explain a smartphone. The maths is what it is and does what it does, and if you play with things at that scale you can build a new intuition, but it just isn’t like the macroscopic world.
- ctdonath 6y agoQuestion then is: why does scaling up from quantum become like the macroscopic world? Just as scaling up from bits and NAND gates can become like virtual reality.
- ben_w 6y agoIt takes a degree (or equivalent effort) to understand everything on the path from NAND to VR; It looks like a similar amount of effort is needed to fully understand going from QM to macroscopic — though even that much is a guess on my part, as my QM knowledge is PBS Space Time videos on YouTube and some of the Brilliant.org courses.
- OkayPhysicist 6y agoBell curves. When you look at the distributions, it becomes pretty clear that as you add lots of particles you approach classical physics pretty quickly, because the likelyhood of the average behavior to differ from the expected behavior falls towards zero very fast.