What, in relatively simple language, are the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics?

Also if events on a quantum level can't be determined, does that mean the whole concept of causality has to be re-worked?

What about the explanatory chain, does it come to an end at the quantum level and what are the logical implications of that?

Closer but not quite true either. :)

Funny isn't it Mr Noodles - i've not caricatured anyone else's beliefs (and all science is a theory remember), but you feel happy to pour scorn. Well whatever you think is clearly infallible, isn't it?

Hey, sorry didn't intend to be mean.

No. It just means that your observing and measuring them will affect certain outcomes.

Also if events on a quantum level can't be determined, does that mean the whole concept of causality has to be re-worked?

Quantum results are not absolutes, but rather probabilities. So while certain results are not uniform, result A can be more probabilistically favorable than result B.

What about the explanatory chain, does it come to an end at the quantum level and what are the logical implications of that?

Just because things are less predicatable does not predicate them being unexplainable.

only kidding there

besides i do not think all science is just a theory
i think it is also a methodology for trying to test/decide between theories insofar as that can be done
QM is sort of self-referential science

Exactly! How would flatbed scanners work if that were the case?

Scientist A: "I don't get this bit"
Scientist B: "That's caused by magic elves"
Scientist A: "But why do magic elves only work on bits of the universe I don't understand"
Scientist B: "Because you are an arrogant reductionist"

AYAYAAAAAYYYAYYYYYYY!!!

('tho I still don't understand what the actual ontological status of the cat is)

the usefulness of this theory is as yet unclear

Wouldn't that sorta rule out absolute determinism? Obviously (or not? Hume experts?) cause and effect is still operating. But determinism, as I am interpreting it, relies on the predicative abilities (forwards and back).

No, because it's just an analogy.

the basic point pete made holds: the material logic of activity doesn't isn't a one-stop shop whatever size you are

this is why newton's billiard balls stop being a useful model: billiards logic stops working

And people aren't quiet grasping the meaning of cat Gedankenexperiment.

depends what the statements are ?
when my central heating broke down i didn't call in a subatomic physicist to fix the boiler because 'the atoms weren't working properly'
(though obviously it would have been good to have that call recorded on Scottish Gas' helpline)

Being as they would be a subatomic physicist, what did you expect?

Good article, thanks! Nobel committee = fuckwits. One thing, I'm sure Scientific American know better than me but where it says an action performed on one particle (such as measurement) affects the other - well. it's just measurement, isn't it, not any old action? You can't wiggle one and have the other wiggle, as I read in some sf novel decades ago, or you could send ftl messages, which is still forbidden. The loophole with measurement is that you don't know what value you'll get when you measure, it's a correlation of random values.

There are some YouTube explainers posted in the wake of the Nobel win with better visualizations on all this, but yeah "no information" as it's described means exactly that. No fancy quantum radios, encryption, etc. I don't even think you could count on it as a good random number generator. Conceptually, this may be harder to bust than FTL unless you could somehow operationally work in higher dimensions. Searching on "weakly coupled interacting quantum field theories" will dig up some mathematics papers on exactly that, but that's the double black diamond ski run for that sort of thing. You gotta be both Doctor Strange *and* Carl Sagan to do anything fun.

I'm imagining a Wong Kar-Wai biopic of Chien-Shiung Wu and completely forgot about that overblown physicist movie that's coming out now.

ilx had some folks that drank the What the Bleep Do We Know? Koolaid back when

One of my best "wow, of course this is how it ends" expressions was when I learned that one of that movie's directors later ended up being involved in NXIVM

"You'll get no result unless you put enough in"

I'm somehow less impressed - less awestruck maybe - by the philosophical implications than I used to be. I mean even classical physics says the world doesn't confirm to our intuitions - solid matter being mostly empty space & all that. The implications of qm are perhaps qualitatively different - things (i.e. property values) not existing till you measure them can't be written off as an effect of scale like the previous example. But you could, perhaps, if you squint, write it off as a mathematical quirk of whatever the underlying reality is; after all something - perhaps represented by the wave function, whatever that is - does exist regardless of measurement. It's certainly hard to tease out any solid philosophical implications beyond 'things ain't what they seem', and yes tying it in to the mystery of consciousness is a fool's errand and easily leads to woo.

There's probably a boatload of practical implications of QC advances that will likely overturn a lot of BS philosophical arguments -- the one I'm looking forward to the most is crypto bro musings on the lofty nature of trustless decentralized society squashed by sufficiently powerful computers wrecking the entire encryption basis of all their funny monies.

Though fair enough, crypto bros have also done their part in exposing the moral flimsiness of tenured philosophers like MacAskill by having him credulously shill for them, then imploding.

Maybe this is more implications of attention-grabbing tulip-mania driving philosophical discourse than anything particularly quantum-y, though.

re: Wu and Oppenheimer, the article mentions Oppenheimer going to bat for her despite being unable to bring her along to the Manhattan Project -- maybe she makes an appearance in the movie?

Today in abstracts you can use: The binding of cosmological structures by massless topological defects

Assuming spherical symmetry and weak field, it is shown that if one solves the Poisson equation or the Einstein field equations sourced by a topological defect, i.e. a singularity of a very specific form, the result is a localized gravitational field capable of driving flat rotation (i.e. Keplerian circular orbits at a constant speed for all radii) of test masses on a thin spherical shell without any underlying mass. Moreover, a large-scale structure which exploits this solution by assembling concentrically a number of such topological defects can establish a flat stellar or galactic rotation curve, and can also deflect light in the same manner as an equipotential (isothermal) sphere. Thus, the need for dark matter or modified gravity theory is mitigated, at least in part.

I just assumed that once brollionaires get time machines and begin rolling coal with tachyons, the amount of space-time distortion these jackasses pollute places like the JFK assassination, Pompeii, the Titanic, etc. with would be a serious problem, but maybe these nexus types of events need to happen?