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This article perfectly bookends my abandoned physics degree. 1. This reminds me a bit of the delayed-choice quantum eraser, which is one of the weirdest scient
by drc500free 4y ago
This article perfectly bookends my abandoned physics degree.
1. This reminds me a bit of the delayed-choice quantum eraser, which is one of the weirdest scientific outcomes and is the sort of thing that inspired me to pursue a physics degree. It implies a certain kind of time travel is possible, in the sense that in the present moment we can cause some past moments to collapse.
2. As my TA, Frank Wilczek successfully scared me off that physics degree by simply being so smart and having complicated things come so easily to him. Being confronted with the kind of horsepower needed to be successful in academic physics was eye-opening.
- quickthrower2 4y ago2. Seems sad to me, his job was to make sure you are inspired, or at least informed to make a wise choice, but not scared off. But maybe he didn't know.
- taneq 4y agoSounds like “informed to make a wise choice” still applies? I had a similar experience with mathematics, having been “good at maths” in high school and then making friends in university with people who are ACTUALLY good at maths.
- drc500free 4y agoHe definitely didn't know (he was just excited about showing us Einstein summation notation), and he definitely informed me to make a wise choice. Not every degree program is about ensuring the best median performance, some are only concerned with picking out the world-changers. And that's okay.
- bognition 4y agoAs a disillusioned phd I appreciate your response here. For years I’ve beaten myself up for not doing noteworthy science. For some reason your words have washed away a lot of guilt.
- drc500free 4y agoGlad it helped! It was a bit crushing at the time (and TBH I am still working through residual shame here and there), but it was kind of like washing out of Navy SEAL training. There's no shame in not hitting the very top of the mountain. Hardly anyone does.
- Daniel_sk 4y ago1. There is no retrocausality - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser#Retrocausality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser#... This is an often misunderstood effect and while it’s very weird, it (most probably) doesn’t break causality.
- xwolfi 4y agoThere is no retrocausality exactly because there is time resolution: causality with sort itself out whatever the cost, is what the quantum erasure experiment showed.
- jlbbellefeuille 4y agoThere is a series called “dystopia”on Amazon that demonstrates this in a roundabout way IMHO.
- andreareina 4y agoI like Sean Carroll's explanation: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2019/09/21/the-notorious-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2019/09/21/the-not...
- archibaldJ 4y agoSo it basically reinforces the many-world interpretation, which makes perfect sense, and it’s the most mathematically minimal of all too. Resorting to some kimd of retro-causality mechanism really shows how many people are uncomfortable with many-worlds. And many-worlds (though likely only scratching the surface of reality) is pretty much in the vein of panpsychism as it mirors the branching-out biology does with life/consciousness. That’s what I call a tasty correspondence of the universe We need a new mathematical framework that goes beyond spacetime and amplituhedron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron (from which more re-interpretations can happen, especially ones that can encapsulate consciousness more than just “an observer” (or worst leading to absurdity like the quantum suicide experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortal... which definitely played a role in affecting Hugh Everett’s self-abusive lifestyle leading to his very early death at 51, as well as the suicide of his young daughter > Everett's daughter, Elizabeth, died by suicide in 1996 (saying in her suicide note that she wished her ashes to be thrown out with the garbage so that she might "end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up w[ith] Daddy"), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III
- ace2358 4y agoWhen one of my physics class mates told me he was reading topology at the age of 7, I knew I would never make it with my mere hard work. I still love physics but I’m glad I never tried academia. I would have been chewed up
- andrepd 4y ago> When one of my physics class mates told me he was reading topology at the age of 7 Oh man, everybody with a physics degree met a guy like that, the sort who claims to have learned differential geometry at 2 or some such bs.
- popcube 4y agodon't worry, Richard Feynman read Trigonometric functions when he is 7 years old. that's guy better than Feynman!
- djenendik 4y agoGotta call the bluff. That's how I ended up a prof.
- sudosysgen 4y agoI was also reading topology around that age, doesn't mean I understood much if it, lol. In all likelihood you are far smarter than I am.
- paraph1n 4y agoHow does one end up reading topology at age 7? Were your parents math professors or something? Or were you just a very mathematically curious 7 year old?
- prox 4y agoNot same commenter, but we just went to the library as a family every 3 weeks. Around that age I was bored with the childrens section, so I tended to pick books on computing and quantum field theories :) I ditched the math side soon for the computing section though.
- CaptainNegative 4y agoSpeaking of causality, Wilczek had been a professor for 4 years before the first delayed choice experiment was proposed (1974 vs. 1978), which would normally disqualify him from being a TA/AI. Not doubting your experience, but I don't understand the timeline here. Were you using "delayed choice" to more broadly mean "which way" experiments? As an aside, Jeff Bezos had a very similar experience with his physics TA: https://youtu.be/eFnV6EM-wzY https://youtu.be/eFnV6EM-wzY .
- dilippkumar 4y agoAs an outsider who enjoys a certain flavor of conspiracy theories, your confusion about a timeline involving a professor investigating delayed choice experiments tickles me.
- divs1210 4y agoReminds me of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency.
- drc500free 4y agoHe was my recitation instructor at MIT circa 2002/2003. It was very confusing to have a recitation instructor win a Nobel prize a couple years later, I had no idea who he was until 2004. Thinking back, he was probably just running recitations for fun and to find future phd's, not grading assignments.
- a9h74j 4y agoDid he act at all like he had already won a Nobel prize? I want to rule out time travel.
- drc500free 4y agoHaha, I very much doubt his behavior changed in the slightest. He knew how the universe works at a deep level, and was so excited to have others learn about it too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- huachimingo 4y agoSometimes complicated things are just bad abstractions: you dont have a clearer framework yet.
- iancmceachern 4y agoYeah, it's the dog calculus thing
- Schroedingersat 4y ago> This reminds me a bit of the delayed-choice quantum eraser, which is one of the weirdest scientific outcomes and is the sort of thing that inspired me to pursue a physics degree. It implies a certain kind of time travel is possible, in the sense that in the present moment we can cause some past moments to collapse. Only if you assert the copenhagen interpretation. If you instead assert that the experimenter merely becomes entangled with one part of a superposition on measurement, causality is just fine.
- ibic 4y ago"delayed-choice quantum eraser" is so mind-boggling that I don't see any comprehensible explanations to me, a beautiful enigma that locks one of deepest secrets of our universe. And my brain simply refuses to accept any violation of causality - I consider causality possibly the most fundamental rules of physics, if it conflicts with others, I can only consider other rules to not hold.
- bottled_poe 4y agoIt certainly seems like a mind blower - Perhaps causality is not violated if the concept of causality is actually orthogonal to the concept of time. We perceive causality to be time-dependent, but could this be an illusory constraint from our frame of consciousness?
- layer8 4y agoMy feeling is that ultimately causality will turn out to be the same as “absence of contradiction”, and that time is just an emergent phenomenon in the causal network of all possibilities.
- mwint 4y agoThe Wikipedia article [0] has a fairly accessible introduction to non-physicists like me. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_erase...
- rogual 4y agoReading about these kinds of experiments always fills me with lots of little questions like "well what if we did THIS" or "what if we tweaked THAT slightly". I have the urge to try and "catch reality out", to expose the trick. Makes me wish you could do these experiments with a laser pointer and a piece of paper instead of needing lots of very expensive machinery and a research grant. Everyone should have the chance to play around with quantum weirdness.
- 4y ago
- usgroup 4y agoI think you’ve got to call the bluff and try to level up. Progress through Physics isn’t monotonic and a bit like the speeding cars of the freeway, you’ll probably meet those going faster at the traffic lights due to the throughout bottleneck of your environment. Grinding is a separate super power — few can grind at an elite level.