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The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought
- DaniFong 18y agoThe paper is accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1625 http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1625
- grouchyOldGuy 18y agoBut if I read the paper, won't I change its outcome?
- incomethax 18y agoOnly if the paper is a quantum state
- vinutheraj 18y agoyea this paper makes me think that quantum physics is bogus... even I could have made this bogus claim. IF I am not looking, shit happens, so how do I prove that I am not looking, by just peeping into it... what shit... what a scam.. now I feel that neone can be a quantum physicist !!
- DaniFong 18y agoThe mystery is how it can be so confusing, and how measurement and entanglement can be so mysterious, while at the same time, it can be so accurate a predictive theory. Any time you use a laser, as in an optical drive you rely upon a quantum effect that was derived before it was discovered. The energy levels of electrons in chemicals, of the affinities between chemicals, the reaction cross-sections of the fusion processes that power our stars, of the voltages in the millions of transistors in your microprocessor, you're relying on precise effects that are calculated with the quantum theory. It's not a scam, it's a mystery.
- koningrobot 18y agoHere's an article that says entanglement isn't all that weird: http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf. Admittedly, I'm not familiar enough with quantum mechanics to get it, but it's related and YMMV.
- tdavis 18y agoI read (most of) that and, to my own surprise, actually understood the principle behind it. I recommend it as well.
- anc2020 18y agoRead this and thought it made sense, but I'm not physicist. I'd really like to know what actual physicists make of this.
- eru 18y agoDon't you agree that clicking on a link should automatically cause the target to be rendered on the best suited available device? I.e. I had to prevent myself from reading the article online, so that I can read it in my dead tree edition later on in the train.
- michaelk 18y agoThe Economist + Physics = excellent
- Hexstream 18y agoDefinite proof that we live in a simulation and those who attend to it save up some computational resources by computing only what can be seen, and also they have a bug where they used a signed int instead of an unsigned int ;P
- Allocator2008 18y agoReally this result is consistent with the Everett - Wheeler 1958 thesis that the wave function never collapses. This I have held to be the case personally for a long while, and in light of that, this new result is not surprising. When you get right down to it, it is basically saying the wave functions of the entangled photons do not decay since they are never directly observed. Extrapolating from this one can say that in fact Wheeler and Everett were right, and the wave function never decays at all. Which of course leads to the "branching universe" idea, which to me will one day be seen as no more surprising than the "many galaxies" idea. Remember, the idea of other galaxies before the discoveries of Hubble and so on used to be only speculation, not universally held. Now we know there are at least 10^10 galaxies. Similarly the fact that the wave function never collapses, as Everett and Wheeler proposed will be held to be just as prosaic as the fact that there are other galaxies.
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoThis made my head hurt. So by not looking, scientists determined that while they were not looking in some spots there was a negative number of photons. This did not mean there exist anti-photons, just that weird things happen while we're not looking. (scratches head) A non-observation found unexpected results, which means that the known laws of physics don't need to change. I shoulda went into particle physics. It sounds like lots more fun than technology consulting.
- DavidSJ 18y agoEither Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was just refuted, or this is terrible scientific reporting.