3 ms·
> Similarly, as the number of particles in a system increases, the less you have to worry about Heisenberg uncertainty bounds on your momentum/position measurem
by simiones 3y ago
> Similarly, as the number of particles in a system increases, the less you have to worry about Heisenberg uncertainty bounds on your momentum/position measurements.
I don't think this is correct. In fact, in certain systems, the Heisenberg uncertainty can get amplified as the number of particles increases - which is why we end up needing the addition of the Born rule in QM to predict classical observations, and can't just deduce them from the base equations. And also why we end up predicting a particle can go either left with some probability or right with one minus that probability, instead of being able to say "that particle will go right".
- jameshart 3y agoYet you can generally catch a thrown ball. The point of the analogy was that the halting problem - like the uncertainty principle - is a result that says that you can’t know certain things about systems - and with small systems in particular figuring that out can be as complex as the system itself. But they don’t prevent us from doing useful things with larger systems. It struck me as a similar result to this paper - though only by analogy, not like, in some deep way.
- tsimionescu 3y agoMy point was more that Heisenberg uncertainty doesn't simply go away because of the size of the system, it is explicitly not an element of classical physics. If you apply the equations of QM to a system of any size, you'll see compounding uncertainty, not an attenuation. The fact that classical objects have deterministic trajectories is not a consequence of statistics + Heisenberg uncertainty, it is explicitly in contradiction to Heisenberg uncertainty, requiring an extra element to be added to the theory (the Born rule).