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 ...
Glad you’re not one of the angry ones. Can’t have a civil discussion with fanatics at either end of the scale. Beliefs and disbeliefs are what they are and you are fully entitled to yours as I trust you agree we are all entitled to ours. Oh, and invisible critters in the sky ... floating around on clouds I take it? Can’t say I believe in that sort of thing either or really know anyone who does.
Excellent thread! Thanks!
Actually sent this post to my daughters along with some of the cat pictures to make them pay attention!
So, what consciousness or “God” collapsed all the original particles making up the matter in the Universe created out of the so-called “Big Bang”? You would expect, therefore, most, if not all, quantum physicists to be ultra-religious - yet most are atheists. Seems somewhat hypocritical to me, unless, of course, there is a better classical explanation than the Copenhagen Interpretation.
TYou were “in Quantum Mechanics class in grad school...” Is that a fact?
Dr. Mills is, perhaps, the most brilliant scientist in the world today and he will soon be universally recognized as such with the unveiling of his SunCell technology. The discovery of lower energy states of hydrogen, i.e., below the ground state, as a new limitless source of clean energy is truly the greatest invention in the history of mankind, worthy of several Nobel Prizes.
I don’t know if I agree with it, but here’s a thought ...
“In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.”
Martin Rees, British cosmologist and astrophysicist as well as Astronomer Royal of the Royal Observatory.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2015/05/todays-galaxy-insight-why-the-universe-exists.html
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