“All structured reality and it’s quantum substructures remain unaltered unless acted upon by an intervening agency.(a kind of quantization of the laws of inertia)”
I’m coming to appreciate the idea of “random variables” from statistics. When I first studied statistics, it took some effort to grasp the concept. I used to think, like most people, that measured quantities were fixed. My height is X and that’s that. But it isn’t that. Every measurement carries with it a margin of error, even in our macro world, thus my height has an uncertainty, a distribution, thus it is a random variable. We’re in luck that in the macro world these distributions have a fairly small standard deviation, so that any measurement is a good enough approximations for making decisions about most things. But like subatomic particles you really don’t know its “value” until you measure it, and next time you measure it, it may be slightly different, but in the macro world the small difference doesn’t matter.
Variables in the micro world appear to have much larger standard deviations, thus their distributions cannot be ignored when doing calculations, and so quantum mechanics must be done with statistical methods.
One other thing that I find interesting about this article is that it says they are now able to “capture” and manipulate particles between quantum states. One of the hallmark of quantum theory (and where it gets its name) is that particles can only exist in discreet states - quantized states. But if you can now capture and manipulate entities anywhere between two quantum states, does this mean that the most hallowed notion of quantum theory is out the window and that we are now back to a continuous nature?
Also, does this mean that the only reason up to now that scientists took on faith the idea of discrete states was simply ignorance about the conditions of whatever they were looking at? Because, according to the article, if they can get sufficient information about a subatomic entity then they can “catch” it between states. So, in essence, quantization is simply an “ignorance” effect.
That was a nice, thoughtful, and thought-provoking post. I enjoyed reading it very much. Thanks!