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Quantum physics: What is really real?
nature.com ^ | 20 May 2015 | Zeeya Merali

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 ...


TOPICS: Science
KEYWORDS: physics; pilotwave; quantum; quantumphysic; quantumphysics; stringtheory
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To: circlecity

So did Einstein. Maroney is bucking the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

He needs to start with the Alain Aspect experiment and work backwards.


21 posted on 05/20/2015 10:18:50 AM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: Reeses
Only things that are really, really real are really real, really.
22 posted on 05/20/2015 10:18:55 AM PDT by WayneS (Barack Obama makes Neville Chamberlin look like George Patton.)
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To: Salamander

And Blue Jays are not blue...

-JT


23 posted on 05/20/2015 10:26:42 AM PDT by Jamestown1630 ("A Republic, if you can keep it.")
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To: sparklite2
Wonder if the motivation behind this is to back away from physics which imply that all that we perceive as tangible reality is dependent upon an overriding Consciousness bringing it into "existence" Planck moment (10-44 seconds) to Planck moment? After all, a century of experimentation that established Quantum Physics as true, no matter (pun intended) how counterintuitive it seems to our mind and senses, can't be allowed to dissuade people from their faith in Atheism.

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”).

24 posted on 05/20/2015 10:30:28 AM PDT by katana (Just my opinions)
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To: Jamestown1630

I *like* you.

:)


25 posted on 05/20/2015 10:32:18 AM PDT by Salamander (Like acid and oil on a madman's face, reason tends to fly away.)
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To: Salamander; smokingfrog; Slings and Arrows

After a hard day of String Theory
Quantum Cat likes a nice meal -


26 posted on 05/20/2015 10:45:12 AM PDT by shibumi ("Walk Through the Fire, Fly Through the Smoke")
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To: Reeses

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.


27 posted on 05/20/2015 11:11:49 AM PDT by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know...)
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To: katana

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.


28 posted on 05/20/2015 11:20:31 AM PDT by sparklite2
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To: sparklite2
The classic wave-slit experiment showing photons are both waves and particles isn’t a test? And doesn’t show weird?

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.

29 posted on 05/20/2015 11:31:30 AM PDT by Reeses (A journey of a thousand miles begins with a government pat down.)
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To: sparklite2

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.


30 posted on 05/20/2015 11:35:15 AM PDT by katana (Just my opinions)
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To: shibumi; smokingfrog; Salamander

The waveform of the cat food collapses when the can is opened.


31 posted on 05/20/2015 12:00:48 PM PDT by Slings and Arrows ("Demonicide" - http://youtu.be/FgUWow7WT2Y | Facebook ID: Hopalong Q Ginsberg)
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To: Reeses
Any point only truly exist relative to all points....

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

32 posted on 05/20/2015 12:19:49 PM PDT by tophat9000 (An Eye for an Eye, a Word for a Word...nothing more)
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To: Slings and Arrows

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


33 posted on 05/20/2015 12:24:32 PM PDT by tophat9000 (An Eye for an Eye, a Word for a Word...nothing more)
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To: tophat9000

Explains a lot, really.


34 posted on 05/20/2015 12:29:03 PM PDT by Slings and Arrows ("Demonicide" - http://youtu.be/FgUWow7WT2Y | Facebook ID: Hopalong Q Ginsberg)
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To: katana

I’m not angry. And I’d say believing in invisible, mind-reading critters in the sky passes for illogical rather than the reverse.


35 posted on 05/20/2015 12:39:25 PM PDT by sparklite2
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To: SpaceBar

What most of us don’t have is a hokeus pokeus filter built in to filter out the bs.


36 posted on 05/20/2015 1:28:21 PM PDT by ully2
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To: Salamander
And color is just an illusion.

It's all an illuuuuuuuuuuusion.

-PJ

37 posted on 05/20/2015 1:40:15 PM PDT by Political Junkie Too (If you are the Posterity of We the People, then you are a Natural Born Citizen.)
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To: ully2
a hokeus pokeus filter

Sheldon would call it "hokum."

-PJ

38 posted on 05/20/2015 1:50:30 PM PDT by Political Junkie Too (If you are the Posterity of We the People, then you are a Natural Born Citizen.)
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To: Political Junkie Too

OMG.

I forgot he existed.

LOL


39 posted on 05/20/2015 1:54:13 PM PDT by Salamander (Like acid and oil on a madman's face, reason tends to fly away.)
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To: shibumi

40 posted on 05/20/2015 1:56:03 PM PDT by Salamander (Like acid and oil on a madman's face, reason tends to fly away.)
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