Posted on 05/20/2015 9:21:49 AM PDT by Reeses
Owen Maroney worries that physicists have spent the better part of a century engaging in fraud.
Ever since they invented quantum theory in the early 1900s, explains Maroney, who is himself a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, they have been talking about how strange it is how it allows particles and atoms to move in many directions at once, for example, or to spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously. But talk is not proof, says Maroney. If we tell the public that quantum theory is weird, we better go out and test that's actually true, he says. Otherwise we're not doing science, we're just explaining some funny squiggles on a blackboard.
It is this sentiment that has led Maroney and others to develop a new series of experiments to uncover the nature of the wavefunction the mysterious entity that lies at the heart of quantum weirdness. On paper, the wavefunction is simply a mathematical object that physicists denote with the Greek letter psi (Ψ) one of Maroney's funny squiggles and use to describe a particle's quantum behaviour. Depending on the experiment, the wavefunction allows them to calculate the probability of observing an electron at any particular location, or the chances that its spin is oriented up or down. But the mathematics shed no light on what a wavefunction truly is. Is it a physical thing? Or just a calculating tool for handling an observer's ignorance about the world? ...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
So did Einstein. Maroney is bucking the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
He needs to start with the Alain Aspect experiment and work backwards.
And Blue Jays are not blue...
-JT
Yet in the whole of the universe there is no force that is either intelligent or eternal, and we must therefore assume that behind this force there is a conscious, intelligent Mind or Spirit. This is the very origin of all matter. (Planck, as cited in Eggenstein 1984, Part I; see Materialistic Science on the Wrong Track).
I *like* you.
:)
After a hard day of String Theory
Quantum Cat likes a nice meal -
Essentially all of the “problems” with “interpretation” of QM come from the insistence of physicists of stuffing it back inside intuitions formed from the only-approximately-true classical physics of Newton, as if those intuitions were somehow more real that what is actually observed in 2-slit experiments, the EPR experiment (no longer a thought experiment, actually done verifying “spooky action at a distance”), and the like.
I learned my physics backwards, learning quantum physics because it was related to mathematics I was doing before really learning classical physics by teaching diff eq and vector calculus. I see no need for an interpretation. The interesting thing is that classical physics emerges from quantum physics by decoherence and the statistical properties of large ensembles.
Well, if the act of measurement by a consciousness collapses the wave form and creates reality, then any sentient being is a ‘god’ at that moment. So, rather than theism, I guess we’d have omnitheism.
Here's a much less weird explanation: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality
Interpretations typically give up on either causality or locality. However if entangled waves are sharing the same location in an extra dimension we can't normally see then pilot wave theory could keep both.
All mathematical models are wrong but some are useful. For example infinities common in mathematics just don't exist anywhere in reality. The standard model is very obviously wrong, but has been very useful.
Or perhaps the individual spark of consciousness we call a soul exists and operates under the auspices of and rules established by an overriding Consciousness. The former created by the latter. Hence that nagging sense humanity has evidently always had, and which atheists so angrily and illogically (why be so angry with something you say you are sure doesn’t exist?) rebel from, that there’s some higher power behind existence.
The waveform of the cat food collapses when the can is opened.
See the totality of the universe as a pie.. cut the pie in half and you have to equal pieces..now cut one of those pieces in half..
You alter instantaneously not just the piece you cut but the piece you did not cut because its relative position in that totality also changes from part of two pieces to the largest piece.
at least that's my take on quantum...I could be all wet
The waveform of the cat food collapses when the can is opened.
No the waveform disperses and the cat senses the dispersing wave
.that’s why the cats all come running...
it’s like a form of RF.. and tha cats ears are antenna
Explains a lot, really.
I’m not angry. And I’d say believing in invisible, mind-reading critters in the sky passes for illogical rather than the reverse.
What most of us don’t have is a hokeus pokeus filter built in to filter out the bs.
It's all an illuuuuuuuuuuusion.
-PJ
Sheldon would call it "hokum."
-PJ
OMG.
I forgot he existed.
LOL
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