Posted on 07/31/2011 7:28:30 AM PDT by decimon
Is this why my Kindle is missing random pages? And because the page number is not shown before or after the missing pages I can never determine exactly which pages are missing? I wonder what will happen if I hold a paperback version next to it and see if the systems interact. Flipping paper pages will determine which electronic page numbers can be seen?
Einstein was reportedly stopped by the same police officer and answered "according to my reference frame, officer, I was standing still and YOU were speeding past me." The confused officer then wrote himself a ticket.
Same people who say that over very long periods of time, all variables average out to be constant?
Perhaps as the universe expands the quantum fabric of space (quantum 'foam'/vacuum energy) thins and its properties change.
I'm not sure the 'expansion' of the universe is an accurate assumption.
Maybe the chaos (differences in potential) is what provides the quantum foam/energy that is what makes matter/the Universe exist.
As usual, the most important things in our Universe are the smallest and hardest to see, ergo the hardest to understand.
They mistakenly gave you the experimental Quantum Kindle. The very act of viewing some pages makes them move elsewhere.
I had to reread it, but this appears to be no more than a theoretical physicists theoretical thought experiment. There doesn’t seem to be any science here, only postulation. It’s interesting in its own right, but really is not a science story about quantum mechanics.
I’m not fond of academics dweebs, but when you write a response like that it just shows you to be the ignorant one due to your lack of understanding of the subject matter. If you spent the time to understand quantum theory and then wrote a reply, you would find the humor in this article much more interesting. But you choose to write a post calling the author an idiot only because you don’t understand the subject. This is sad to see at FR.
Based on my EPR and Uncertainty Principle followup posts, it should be obvious that I DO understand the subject to some degree. If you knew anything at all about the subject you would have realized that. Clearly you don’t. The author is an “idiot” because he presented the story, which was supposed to be a QUANTUM PHYSICS one, as some other dopey thing, failing to get into any detail whatsoever about the actual scientific finding. I’d bet you don’t have the foggiest idea either of what the finding was.
I read your follow-ups and it still didn’t give any indication of your knowledge of the subject. Perhaps you’re a better physicist than a writer.
My apologies.
It's only as abstract in its formulation as it needs to be. In a sense it's an expression of ultimate pragmatism. Feynman takes this approach in his Lectures on Physics. He counseled that one should simply learn to use it, and not try to "understand" it, "... or you will go down the drain into a blind alley from which no one has ever escaped." ( from The Messenger Lectures, not the L on P. )
I absolutely agree. Or maybe not.
Yes, it works, or so they say. I’m not sure that anyone would be able to convince them that it doesn’t, even if it did not.
Sure it works, and works great. It’s fabulous. Couldn’t have built the internet without it ... and lasers ... MRI’s ... and don’t forget its founding achievement, explaining the spectrum of incandescent light, followed shortly by the atomic spectra, including all their multifarious subtleties.
I mean ... it works!
These claims that you couldn’t have the internet and lasers and MRI’s is just another example of what I was talking about. Grandiose claims that are easily uttered, but not so easily proven or disproven except to a very tiny part of the population, who are very invested in these theories. But it’s the quantum weirdness part that is the most difficult to accept. They claim to have proven it experimentally, but I suspect that some day, the quantum weirdness idea will be regarded as a wrong turn that took decades to correct. Maybe it’s just my suspicion with the art of statistics. It’s too easy to manipulate statistics or misinterpret them. It’s happened many times before. The global warming thing is a pretty good example.
It's called confabulation. Old drunks are masters at it.
I should think we are all invested in QM, as much as we are invested in Newton and Galileo. Solid state physics was founded by Felix Bloch in 1928 when he described the basics of electronic band structure in solids, just 2 years after the introduction of Schrodingers equation.
The transistor wasn't invented by theorists, and I'm sure there was a lot of empirical thinking that went into it, but all this thinking had to be in terms of the quantum theory of solids, simply because there has never been any other theory remotely capable of accounting for the phenomena being manipulated.
The laser wasn't invented until the sixties, and again the thinking required was entirely in terms of quantum states and transitions. The same goes even more for MRI's which is based on the technique of NMR, which is a can't be thought of in any but quantum terms.
But it’s the quantum weirdness part that is the most difficult to accept. They claim to have proven it experimentally, but I suspect that some day, the quantum weirdness idea will be regarded as a wrong turn that took decades to correct.
It was experiment that drove the founders of QM into acceptance of its counterintuitive aspects in the first place. The recent ballyhoo of proofs and demonstrations of it are in the nature of "failures to disprove" it under extreme and rarefied conditions, which used to be considered "thought experiments".
I always say, just look at a Sodium vapor streetlight through a diffraction grating ( which is no more than a piece of film in a slide photo holder, ) and see the emission "lines" ( separate images of the streetlight in this case. ) That's the original quantum weirdness, the quantum jump, which is in complete contradiction to any conceivable theory of continuous point motion. The explanation of these emission lines in fact served to establish the axioms of QM by the mid 1920's, and there ensued an explosion of scientific understanding and technology eclipsing all that came before. Why you would want to think of this development as some kind of mistake is beyond me.
(Now sinking rapidly to the bottom of my "to do" pile.)
Cheers!
[Rim shot]
Well done, dr. lew; now here's a poem for the two of you.
Schrödinger's cat's a mystery cat, he illustrates the laws;
The complicated things he does have no apparent cause;
He baffles the determinist, and drives him to despair
For when they try to pin him down--the quantum cat's not there!
Schrödinger's cat's a mystery cat, he's given to random decisions;
His mass is slightly altered by a cloud of virtual kittens;
The vacuum fluctuations print his traces in the air
But if you try to find him, the quantum cat's not there!
Schrödinger's cat's a mystery cat, he's very small and light,
And if you try to pen him in, he tunnels out of sight;
So when the cruel scientist confined him in a box
With poison-capsules, triggered by bizarre atomic clocks,
He wasn't alive, he wasn't dead, or half of each; I swear
That when they fixed his eigenstate--he simply wasn't there!
Cheers!
What I meant by “invested” is that there are only a few who claim to understand all this, and they make their living by understanding it. If they suddenly realized, “It doesn’t work,” I would not necessarily feel comfortable that they would tell us. And if it did not work, I would not feel comfortable that they would realize it.
Having said that, it does appear to be the prevailing view, and I certainly don’t have the proof that it’s wrong.
Do you have any research you can point me to about the defraction grating? I think the only thing I’ve read about that was Feynman’s explanation in Quantum Electrodynamics. It’s been a while, but I don’t remember thinking at the time that it proved quantum mechanics. I guess I don’t think of the idea of a discrete quantum is so amazing, so if it’s only that to which you are referring, then maybe it just did not surprise me when I read it.
It’s the idea that you can test the spin of a particle on one side of the universe, and instantly determine the spin of another particle on the opposite side of the universe without any kind of predetermination of those parameters that I find difficult to accept. I do not fully understand the mathematics of Bell’s theorem, but I suspect I would find it difficult to accept the spooky action idea even if I did. To me, the conclusions are so amazing that they must be wrong. Something must be missing. Rather than trying to come up with a string theory that can explain that, I would be trying to come up with a proof that it’s wrong.
Of course, I realize that a lot of researchers have tried to do that and failed, but then history is full of examples of incorrect experimental research that took the science on a rabbit chase.
By the way, how do you know so much about this?
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