3 ms·

I'm going to try to explain this in programming terms :) There's a longstanding interpretation that the wave-particle duality is actually caused by (e.g. elect

by fizx 11y ago

I'm going to try to explain this in programming terms :) There's a longstanding interpretation that the wave-particle duality is actually caused by (e.g. electrons) being particles riding invisible waves. This interpretation (Bohmian mechanics) has been largely ignored as "valid but uninteresting." A key reason why this isn't historically that appealing is that the state of the "invisible waves" in the neighborhood of a single particle is mathematically dependent on the instantaneous state of every other particle in the universe. If you assume the universe is a simulation, then the programmer would be a freshman computer science student who unnecessarily made stepping forward in time quadratic! The oil-droplet experiments are an accidental existence proof that you can get behavior similar to quantum behavior in particle+wave systems without the quadratic global update rule. Is it enough? There's still tons of open questions, and possibly (likely) yet another dead end.

stephengillie 11y ago
I feel as though this hypothesis was recently disproven - a measurement confirmed that the waves and particles were really the same thing, not one thing riding on the carrier wave of another.
- fizx 11y ago
  There's at least four mathematical representations of QM, ascribed to Shrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, and Bohm respectively, which are all mathematically equivalent. So you aren't really going to disprove only the Bohm picture, because it makes the exact same claims as the more common Shrödinger picture.
justifier 11y ago
where is the contradiction here? my understanding of 'natural' physics is as a relation between particle(s) and every other particle in the universe and our physics calculations trying to understand and predict those natural events wave away those relations valued insignificant to the desired probability threshold? contrived but applicable example, "assume you are on a frictionless plane with zero wind resistance" or in one of the most amazing results of applied physics in recent news : "Fred Jansen, Rosetta's mission manager at ESA, said officials predicted a 70 to 75 percent probability of a successful landing by Philae before the mission's launch in 2004. But that number assumed the comet was a rounded body, not the oddly-shaped world found by Rosetta."
- dghf 11y ago
  > my understanding of 'natural' physics is as a relation between particle(s) and every other particle in the universe The key word in the parent comment is instantaneous. This means that pilot-wave theory is not compatible with relativity, if I understand correctly.
  - cordite 11y ago
    Is it instantaneous or is it the known or observable state propagated at the speed of light? Perhaps unrelated, but they have already shown that entangled particles propagate state at the speed of light. So we probably wont have any Ender's game ansible communication devices any time soon.
    - dghf 11y ago
      AFAIUI, under pilot-wave theory it's instantaneous. It's how the theory gets round Bell's Theorem, which only forbids local hidden variables. (Again, I am an interested layman, not a scientist, so this comment may be nonsense.)
    - paulrouget 11y ago
      It is instantaneous. But if you want any information to travel, you'll need to use a mechanism named "feed-forward", which is limited by the speed of light.

by fizx 11y ago

stephengillie 11y ago

I feel as though this hypothesis was recently disproven - a measurement confirmed that the waves and particles were really the same thing, not one thing riding on the carrier wave of another.

fizx 11y ago
There's at least four mathematical representations of QM, ascribed to Shrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, and Bohm respectively, which are all mathematically equivalent. So you aren't really going to disprove only the Bohm picture, because it makes the exact same claims as the more common Shrödinger picture.

justifier 11y ago

where is the contradiction here? my understanding of 'natural' physics is as a relation between particle(s) and every other particle in the universe and our physics calculations trying to understand and predict those natural events wave away those relations valued insignificant to the desired probability threshold? contrived but applicable example, "assume you are on a frictionless plane with zero wind resistance" or in one of the most amazing results of applied physics in recent news : "Fred Jansen, Rosetta's mission manager at ESA, said officials predicted a 70 to 75 percent probability of a successful landing by Philae before the mission's launch in 2004. But that number assumed the comet was a rounded body, not the oddly-shaped world found by Rosetta."

dghf 11y ago
> my understanding of 'natural' physics is as a relation between particle(s) and every other particle in the universe The key word in the parent comment is instantaneous. This means that pilot-wave theory is not compatible with relativity, if I understand correctly.
- cordite 11y ago
  Is it instantaneous or is it the known or observable state propagated at the speed of light? Perhaps unrelated, but they have already shown that entangled particles propagate state at the speed of light. So we probably wont have any Ender's game ansible communication devices any time soon.
  - dghf 11y ago
    AFAIUI, under pilot-wave theory it's instantaneous. It's how the theory gets round Bell's Theorem, which only forbids local hidden variables. (Again, I am an interested layman, not a scientist, so this comment may be nonsense.)
  - paulrouget 11y ago
    It is instantaneous. But if you want any information to travel, you'll need to use a mechanism named "feed-forward", which is limited by the speed of light.