Posted on 09/29/2014 4:34:42 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Just, wow!
The more we know the more we know that we don’t know
Or
Science does not have all the answers and in some cases doesn’t know how to look for them
But a really interesting read none the less
Niels Bohr replied to Albert Einstein after one of these comments; "Einstein, stop telling God what to do."
Still a very good exposition about the last century's evolution from the modified Newtonian physics to the mind-wracking concepts of Quantum Mechanics and the derivatives from it.
ping for later
Oh dear, I’ve gone cross-eyed. Gimme a minute, my brain is re-booting.
CC
So.....this implies that there is a version of me somewhere that actually understood the whole article.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
“But here’s the twist. Unlike the mathematical theory of probability, this quantum recipe requires us to make different possible stories cancel each other out, or fully or partially reinforce each other.”
This shouldn’t be a “twist”. Really, it’s just a verification of deBroglie’s ideas that everything essentially has a wave nature. Any time you have interacting waves, you have to take into account wave harmonics, and wave harmonics describe exactly the kinds of situations that they are talking about here.
Waves that interact, having the same frequency and amplitude, while “in phase” with each other will form one wave with twice the amplitude. Waves that are out of phase cancel each other out. If one wave has half the frequency of the other, they can partially reinforce (every other wave peak is doubled) or partially cancel (every other peak canceled).
So, a lot of these seemingly strange consequences of quantum physics are easily resolved conceptually if you just remember that we are dealing with waves, and not little pinballs whizzing around. In QM, this is tacitly acknowledged by describing everything by its “wave equation” or “probability wave”, but conceptually, I think people still don’t really accept all the implications of it.
Anything that can happen, has happened. so conceivably yes.
P.S.
LOL!
CC
What I want to know is: where is the version of me that dated Angelina Jolie?
God does not play dice ....Einstein.
You don’t bring me flowers anymore...Streisand.
Seriously...I am a lay person, but I enjoyed the article. LOL.
Got kind of long.
I will read it all later.
Began drifting in to the 60’s/70’s triply dippy acid head thing.
Tao of Physics, Dancing Wu Li Masters etc...
I appreciate the post.
“There are two camps. Those that ignore the weirdness and crunch the numbers.”
This camp is the camp that understands it and understands what it means and is for.
This camp does not take it as religious or philosophical, but scientific.
Bump to read later when my brain isn’t so tired....
Somewhere out there is an alternate universe in which I fully absorbed and understood every word of this article. However, I happen to be living in the alternative universe in which I quit reading halfway through and then get up off the couch to grab a beer.
Great article, and thanks for posting. My brain hurts but I think I sort of get it, at least a little. What the author terms collapse theory has actually been around for quite awhile. In lay terms (if I understand it correctly) it is, in fact, observation that collapses the wave function, but then how do we account for an identical result from two independent observations? The answer is that they aren’t independent, that they are linked by the datum being observed. This is mathematically robust but logically it is entirely circular and hence unsatisfying. But that’s what I got out of buying a lot of beer for some really smart people.
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