nessus42

18 ms·

91.
by nessus42 8y ago
> If the universe is an isolated quantum system evolving unitarily, how does the MWI help to understand the laws of physics that we observe? It definitively answers the question of when wave collapse occurs and what causes it. The answer
92.
by nessus42 8y ago
Also because it works 100% of the time, even if it doesn't ask or answer some questions that seem profoundly important.
93.
by nessus42 8y ago
> No, measurement is just a poor choice of name for a type of interaction some matter can have with other matter. That's not the Copenhagen Interpretation. Interpretations that claim this are called "Objective-collapse" th
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by nessus42 8y ago
In my opinion, Occam's Razor does not say that you should prefer the theory that has the simplest consequences, but rather that you should accept the simplest theory that explains the observations. The Everett Interpretation is clear
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by nessus42 8y ago
Well, I guess I can't argue with an unscientific poll, but it kind of boggles my mind that any scientist could take the Copenhagen Interpretation seriously. I mean it builds the term "measurement", which is an undefined and u
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by nessus42 8y ago
> Reality may be deceptive, but I certainly prefer to start with theories in which our experience is explained in a pretty simple and straightforward way: it looks like stuff is over there because there is stuff over there. We have sing
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by nessus42 8y ago
Yes, I'm not sure why this is a Nature article. As far as I understand things, very few physicists who care about which interpretation of QM is correct would choose the Copenhagen Interpretation in this day and age. The Copenhagen Inte
98.
by nessus42 8y ago
It's been a while since I studied this, and I know that some Copenhagenist try to wiggle their way out of this, but if you consider the probability waves in the Copenhagen interpretation to be "real" and "measurement&quo
99.
by nessus42 8y ago
I'm replying to myself here. I did a little research and discovered that Einstein was aware Bohm's interpretation, and Einstein seemed to think that it missed the mark. Einstein did die, however, two years before the publicati
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by nessus42 8y ago
In the Everett interpretation, everything is local.
101.
by nessus42 8y ago
> This is very false. But didn't Einstein write the following in his own book? “I believe in intuition and inspiration. … At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intui
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by nessus42 8y ago
> Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics Wait? Since when did Einstein not accept Quantum Mechanics? He won the Nobel Prize for his work in discovering an important part of Quantum Mechanics. Einstein rejected the Copenhagen Interp
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by nessus42 9y ago
There are a couple "interpretations" of QM in which there is no probability distribution. One is the "Many Worlds" interpretation. (AKA, the Everett interpretation.) In this QM wave functions never collapse, and the on
104.
by nessus42 9y ago
I don't get your P = NP example. If P = NP, it has serious consequences. E.g., as I understand it, a lot of cryptography will ultimately fail if we discover that P = NP. We have no reason to believe that P = NP, but on the other hand
105.
by nessus42 10y ago
IME it's a learned thing from only knowing languages that at least superficially resemble ALGOL. IME many computer programmers learned Lisp in college and for some reason hated it–I think in part due to the syntax and in part because
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by nessus42 10y ago
You underestimate the average programmer's aversion to Lisp syntax, despite it being the clearly superior syntax. If JavaScript had had Lisp syntax, then everyone would still be using Flash. Or some other plugin that provided a languag
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by nessus42 10y ago
> How long until there's a really good JVM written in JavaScript of some form and embedded Java apps end up running in JavaScript for performance and security reasons? That's an amusing idea. But it's extremely unlikely
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by nessus42 10y ago
I'm a HUGE fan of Scheme. And of Lisp, in general. But having seen in the "real world" how so many people are so adverse to Lisp's beautiful syntax, I'm pretty confident that JavaScript would never have caught on
109.
by nessus42 10y ago
Amazon just has such a huge head start in so many ways, it's difficult to imagine anyone catching up with them anytime soon. For purchasing online, most people just immediately type "amazon" into their web browser. People wil
110.
by nessus42 10y ago
Personally I love the thinness and lightness of my Retina MacBook. I can easily hold it with one hand. Or even with a few fingers. I can toss it around with ease. Maybe it's gratuitous to be that thin. It's certainly not gratuitou
111.
by nessus42 10y ago
You mean make the fans blast? Well, they're not that loud. The building H/V airflow is usually a lot louder. And my Retina MacBook doesn't even have a fan. (Though I also don't do a lot of software development on it, I h
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by nessus42 10y ago
I have a Retina MacBook next to my sofa in the living room and a 27-inch Retina iMac with 16GB RAM on the desk in my study. At work I have a four year-old 27-inch iMac with all SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. It's still going strong, and
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by nessus42 10y ago
Yes, that's exactly what I saw and used!
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by nessus42 10y ago
I read Parfit's book Reasons and Persons for a Philosophy class a number of years ago. One large section of the book addressed that age-old question: If you get into a Star Trek transporter, do you actually get transported somewhere
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by nessus42 10y ago
When I was in Paris, circa 2000, I came across some interesting pay toilets that were kind of like the Cadillacs of porto-potties. They were located on streets in nice shopping areas. You'd pay for the door to open. They had running wa
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by nessus42 10y ago
> For that reason, it seems absolutely absurd to me that someone would say with certainty that life exists elsewhere in the universe. I'm not sure you have a conception of how truly BIG the universe is. In fact, according to curre
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by nessus42 10y ago
It's when you do software development for services that are constantly changing and need to be up all the time, and you are not only responsible for the development, but also for the services being up all the time.
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by nessus42 10y ago
Yes, we use Kanban where I work. We've been doing "continuous delivery" and "DevOps" for years. It's not bad, but I still don't really like scrums.
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by nessus42 11y ago
From Wikipedia: Advocates for Tor say it supports freedom of expression, including in countries where the Internet is censored, by protecting the privacy and anonymity of users. The mathematical underpinnings of Tor lead it to be character
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by nessus42 12y ago
Philosophy is such a broad field that I think it would be hard to give a good overview of the entire field. Philosophers love formal logic, so that's one thing that's of interest. Once you have a good understanding of logic, Philo

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