― Jonathan Z., Wednesday, 3 December 2003 12:46 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 12:51 (twenty years ago) link
― stevem (blueski), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 12:53 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 12:53 (twenty years ago) link
― Ricardo (RickyT), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:24 (twenty years ago) link
Chaos is awesome.
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:43 (twenty years ago) link
― neil simpson (neil simpson), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:46 (twenty years ago) link
― ken c, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:49 (twenty years ago) link
Oh, and wot everyone else said.
― Johnney B (Johnney B), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:53 (twenty years ago) link
Really it's more accurately stated as the more accurately you want to know property a, the less accurately you can know property b.
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:53 (twenty years ago) link
Again, technically incorrect (at least according to quantum science) - it's that observation will affect your results.
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:55 (twenty years ago) link
― ken c, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:55 (twenty years ago) link
― stevem (blueski), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:55 (twenty years ago) link
― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 13:56 (twenty years ago) link
― Snowy Mann (rdmanston), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 14:26 (twenty years ago) link
Provided that properties a and b are noncommuting.
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 14:37 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 14:49 (twenty years ago) link
2 The universe IS intelligent/conscious.
― Pete S, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:04 (twenty years ago) link
― Spinktor the Unmerciful (mawill5), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:05 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:07 (twenty years ago) link
― Spinktor the Unmerciful (mawill5), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:09 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:12 (twenty years ago) link
― Spinktor the Unmerciful (mawill5), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:12 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete S, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:15 (twenty years ago) link
― Lynskey (Lynskey), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:16 (twenty years ago) link
― Ricardo (RickyT), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:22 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:23 (twenty years ago) link
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:24 (twenty years ago) link
― Jeremy the Kingfish (Kingfish), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:26 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete S, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:26 (twenty years ago) link
― Spinktor the Unmerciful (mawill5), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:28 (twenty years ago) link
― nickalicious (nickalicious), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:29 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete S, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:29 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:30 (twenty years ago) link
― nickalicious (nickalicious), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:30 (twenty years ago) link
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:31 (twenty years ago) link
― possible m (mandinina), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:31 (twenty years ago) link
― nickalicious (nickalicious), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:31 (twenty years ago) link
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:32 (twenty years ago) link
― possible m (mandinina), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:34 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete S, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:35 (twenty years ago) link
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:35 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete S, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:36 (twenty years ago) link
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?
― Jonathan Z., Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:38 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:39 (twenty years ago) link
― Dale the Titled (cprek), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:39 (twenty years ago) link
No. It just means that your observing and measuring them will affect certain outcomes.
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.
Just because things are less predicatable does not predicate them being unexplainable.
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:43 (twenty years ago) link
― Spinktor the Unmerciful (mawill5), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 15:44 (twenty years ago) link
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:25 (twenty years ago) link
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)
― Snowy Mann (rdmanston), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:27 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:28 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:29 (twenty years ago) link
― Snowy Mann (rdmanston), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:29 (twenty years ago) link
― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:32 (twenty years ago) link
Being as they would be a subatomic physicist, what did you expect?
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:35 (twenty years ago) link
― Spinktor the Unmerciful (mawill5), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:36 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:37 (twenty years ago) link
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:38 (twenty years ago) link
― Jonathan Z., Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:39 (twenty years ago) link
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:40 (twenty years ago) link
― possible m (mandinina), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:44 (twenty years ago) link
― Spinktor the Unmerciful (mawill5), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:45 (twenty years ago) link
― possible m (mandinina), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:46 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:47 (twenty years ago) link
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:47 (twenty years ago) link
But wouldn't you have to be at absolute zero? Which pretty much kills entropy.
― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:48 (twenty years ago) link
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:49 (twenty years ago) link
Yup, which is why its not possible at this time. Please hang up and try again.
― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:50 (twenty years ago) link
that to fix a system you need to understand its constituent parts ?
ref: micro-vs-macro: did anyone here see a Horizon prog a few months ago (or more?) about freakishly huge waves (eg 100 ft) of really short duration that randomly sink loads of ships per year?
as far as i can recall there was a suggestion that these things were some kind of macro-world equivalent (or even a kind of 'manifestation') of 'waves' as understood via quantum weirdness - conventional hydro-whatever theory couldn't understand them atall - they even had a Proper Quantum Physicist Filmed In Front Of Scribblymath Whiteboard on the prog, making all the comparisons and predictions...once they had figured what they were looking for, satellite imagery showed these isolated monster waves popping up then disappearing all over the oceans
i reckon it must have been Scary-Science crud, otherwise this macro-manifestation would be really really famous by now ?
― Snowy Mann (rdmanston), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:51 (twenty years ago) link
― Snowy Mann (rdmanston), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 16:55 (twenty years ago) link
Quantum theory in respect to philosophy of mind is a total red herring. Roger Penrose is a stunningly intelligent mathematician – that he fell for it's charms is something I've yet to come to terms with. http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/quantum.html
I sound very big-headed there, but the Penrose thing really does get to me.
― Alan (Alan), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:04 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:21 (twenty years ago) link
― Ricardo (RickyT), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:25 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:26 (twenty years ago) link
― Ricardo (RickyT), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:28 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:32 (twenty years ago) link
― Jonathan Z., Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:35 (twenty years ago) link
― Aimless, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:37 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete S, Wednesday, 3 December 2003 18:11 (twenty years ago) link
there was no suggestion that this was any sort of macro quantum effect...
i am sad at the penrose hate as he wz my non-euclidean geometry lecturer - and he invented this: http://www.cameron.edu/~lloydd/webdoc1.htg/section2/PENROSE.GIF
and this: http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/blackholes/teacher/graphics/black%20hole%20diagram.jpg
― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 21:54 (twenty years ago) link
― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 21:56 (twenty years ago) link
I realize this makes me a big gay meerkat, but I was enjoying reading this debate till ya misspelled "pore." PORE NOT POUR DAMMITALL! Unless you mean that you are going to turn into a liquid and flow around the pages till you've absorbed all the knowledge and then turn back into a Mr. Noodles again. That would be thexthy.
― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 23:09 (twenty years ago) link
― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 23:11 (twenty years ago) link
...
I have to stop thinking about politics. I spent all holiday listening to my mother scream at the president on TV and all I can hear is this embittered voice in my head. Somebody, quick, convey the essence of light and matter in one simple catchy lyric so's we can all smoke a doob and listen to the stereo!
― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Wednesday, 3 December 2003 23:24 (twenty years ago) link
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Thursday, 4 December 2003 02:07 (twenty years ago) link
― dleone (dleone), Thursday, 5 February 2004 06:19 (twenty years ago) link
― Jonathan Z. (Joanthan Z.), Thursday, 5 February 2004 11:02 (twenty years ago) link
The Nobel prize for physics this year went to three experimenters who have, independently and over the years, finally proved that local realism is false. (Local: influences can't travel faster than light; realism: things have definite properties or values even when you're not looking them.) I thought this had been done long ago but apparently there were loopholes - the last experiment, as far as I can tell, was in 2017. I used to be very keen on this stuff, actually knew the maths behind Bell's inequalities, held a candle for hidden variable theories.
― ledge, Thursday, 27 October 2022 07:47 (one year ago) link
Interesting backstory on that Nobel win:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-little-known-origin-story-behind-the-2022-nobel-prize-in-physics/
― Elvis Telecom, Monday, 10 July 2023 17:13 (one year ago) link
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.
― a holistic digital egosystem (ledge), Monday, 10 July 2023 19:58 (one year ago) link
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.
― Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, 11 July 2023 07:08 (one year ago) link
ilx had some folks that drank the What the Bleep Do We Know? Koolaid back when
― New No-No Bettencourt (Sufjan Grafton), Tuesday, 11 July 2023 07:26 (one year ago) link
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
― Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, 11 July 2023 07:54 (one year ago) link
"You'll get no result unless you put enough in"
― Mark G, Tuesday, 11 July 2023 08:20 (one year ago) link
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.
― a holistic digital egosystem (ledge), Tuesday, 11 July 2023 08:23 (one year ago) link
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?
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 11 July 2023 23:06 (one year ago) link
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?
― Elvis Telecom, Sunday, 9 June 2024 05:20 (two months ago) link