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How I learned to stop worrying and love uncertainty
- hartator 4y agoI don’t get why people overcomplexify quantum physics. Can’t everything be explained by the future holding more data than the present and past? Like if you view time as another physical dimension, you are not surprised by the world when you start exploring what is on let say on your left. The rest of the bed, floor, wall, outside of the house. And if you lose your cat, the universe didn’t magically split in multiple dimensions but the cat state is somewhere on your left. If you consider time just as a 4th dimension already written, you don’t need to make complex theories.
- blueprint 4y agoi think it's because they're in denial about parts of themselves which they don't want to see properly. quantum makes plenty of sense. for someone to claim it doesn't is a self contradiction.
- canjobear 4y agoThis has nothing to do with quantum mechanics.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoI mean it does, but it's a total violation of unitarity and OP doesn't appear to realize that nor understand its implications.
- hartator 4y agoEnlighten us. I am saying that time is an human construct and don't fundamentally exist in a linear past/present/future way. Which is a simple explanation to all quantum events.
- mjburgess 4y agoIf the future "holds more data" than the past then it's random with respect to the past, by definition. This is one of the major interpretations of QM. So if we have a function from past states to future states, we can't, eg., which of two past states occured (dead, alive). However, those who hold a many-worlds view (or chaos-theory view) do not believe you can just "insert data", since to do so is essentially equivalent to a blind miracle. To believe the future "holds more data" is to believe that at each instance things are happening without any prior cause, all of the time, and this is fundamentally inexplicable. "the future holds more data" view therefore basically gives up on the possibility of science in this case, indeed as a view, it can always be offered in place of a scientific explanation, and amounts to saying "its inexplicable"
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- blueprint 4y agoSuch a good comment. But I have a question for you. You said this is 'one of the major interpretations' of QM. But if the hypothetically greater future data is not observable by anything outside of the universal wavefunction, then is it not the case that the entire system is evolving without external observation, i.e., the system itself does not have to be able to verify that it "knows" what outcome will occur for it to be able to generate new data by a causal mechanism. So it sounds like randomness is not proven by what you said is definition, alone. Is this what you meant by it being "one of the" interpretations of QM?
- mjburgess 4y agoWell I define random to mean whenever P(X|Y) is neither always 1 nor 0, or to put that in causal modal terms: given an exhaustive description of all possible causes of Y, say X, then if X causes Y, *NECESSARILY* Y given X causation is a form of necessity, necessarily Y occurs or it doesnt In this case P(Future|Past) and P(Past|Future) are somewhere between 0 and 1. This isnt consistent with causation. ie., All possible information about all possible causes of Y (the future), say X (the past) are insufficient to gaurentee any given Y (any particular future). The "interpretation" element of QM is to say that we are really in this case, ie., that we have X = all possible information. There are several ways of denying that P(Y|X) in the case of QM should be read this way. You can say X is incomplete, either by saying there is non-local information we don't have, or global information we don't have. Of the "global" kind, which of many worlds we are in is a kind of global ignorance. So that if we had, P(Y|X, which-world) then we'd observe P(Y|X, whichworld) = either 1 or 0 --- as with classical mechanics P(CatDead|PoisonBox, worldA) = 1 P(CatDead|PoisonBox, worldB) = 0 etc. and, eg., P(F|G,M,m,r) = 1 if F=GMm/r^2
- howmayiannoyyou 4y agoPaywalled after you've read 2 articles, so guess I'll have to keep worrying.
- wordyskeleton 4y agohttps://archive.ph/ipQ0P https://archive.ph/ipQ0P
- yeswecatan 4y agoBeat me to it :)
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- theonemind 4y agoincognito mode/private browsing works on this one.
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- blueprint 4y ago"The statements that quantum mechanics makes about the subatomic world fly in the face of our natural intuition about the macroscopic world" plenty of atomic and higher scale systems behave like "quantum" systems. in fact if you incorporate decoherence, every "system" is "quantum". "The wavelike nature of matter doesn’t manifest itself at macroscopic scales" yes it does. that's how it was discovered and where qm came from. google the debroglie hypothesis. this article is ridiculous
- xchip 4y agoTL;DR: I have anxiety but let me pretend I overcame it using quantum mechanics. I also need your validation, which is the main purpose of this article.
- tetris11 4y agoRelated: https://xkcd.com/1240/ https://xkcd.com/1240/
- mjhay 4y agoThere's a lot of interesting philosophical/metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics, not the least of which is the particular observationally-equivalent interpretation (e.g. Copenhagen or Von Neumann-Wigner[0]). This essential subjectivity opens the floodgates to all sorts of quasi-profound nonsense. This is unfortunate, because quantum physics is easily a Copernican-level revolution in the relation of the mind, observation, and the world observed, but these lines of investigation have become radioactive due to association with the crystal-power crowd - who are among those trying to turn back the clock to a non-universal world of humans occupying a distinguished place at the center. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...
- bheadmaster 4y agoWell put. I had the exact same conclusion reading this article, but couldn't put it into words.
- jbirer 4y agoWhatever works.
- fedeb95 4y agoDisclaimer: I'm not a physicist or even a good mathematician. I've read some things about quantum theory, and other interesting reads is Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics" and Lazslo Mero's "Moral Calculations" which touches quantum theory very interestingly.
- Comevius 4y agoQuantum physics is a low-level approach to understanding the Universe, not you life. This is like saying that you studied the microprocessor executing a chess program in order to understand how chess is played. We don't live in the quantum world, we live under the reign of the classical laws of physics, which happens to be powered by quantum physics and not an alien supercomputer. Not that it matters what powers it until you need to understand the underlying platform, like you do for photosynthesis or microelectronics, both of which exposes quantum physics.
- edmundsauto 4y agoI think of it as something like "scale weighted abstractions". Quantum physics still matters on a human scale, just much much less than classical physics. Similarly, chess on silicon is massively more influenced by the information processing strategies than by the minor differences in silicon architecture. I believe there are entirely other types of computing structures. Our optimization of one type of information processor doesn't mean the others aren't good, or could be a superior strategy in the long run. It just means under the conditions which selected the initial winner, this one succeeded, and the following optimizations mean we'll keep exploiting this path until stopped. If the details are abstracted away, I wonder where the abstractions are leaky. Are there certain areas of existence (perhaps consciousness?) at the human plane where quantum effects dominate?