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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 26, 2017 9:06:27 GMT -5
I considered starting last night when laughter got the invitation from Reefs, started think it through, but realized I had too many gaps to do it right, and all I had last night was my phone, so that was nixed, didn't want to do this on my phone. I also realized, like laughter, that's it's going to be a little work. But on my Mother's top bookshelf is a book that's been there for probably 45 years, Einstein, The Life and Times by Ronald W Clark. I think I pulled it down years ago, but didn't browse much. The copyright is 1971, I'm sure it was my sister's (I'm sure I didn't buy it). So anyway, I pulled it down this morning and filled in some gaps. And then with the further invitation by Reefs, decided to give it a go. So, trying to be as brief as possible, from the beginning.
In the late 1800's some physicists felt we knew just about everything in physics, with the exception of two dark clouds upon the horizon. One of these clouds was the problem of black body radiation. This concerns the energy coming off a heated body. The math of the time showed the energy coming off a black body to be infinite. But of course this did not match experimental results, and didn't in and of itself make sense. Max Planck had been considering the problem for over 15 years. At the time energy was consider to be a constant flow, sort of like water over a waterfall. So Planck decided to ~kind of~ reverse engineer the math to make it fit the experimental results. For this result Planck had to imagine the energy coming off a black body, not to be a continuous flow, but come in what he called quanta (from Latin), discrete packets of energy. This would kind of be like standing at the edge of a very slow moving waterfall and the water filling a bucket, before it tipped over the edge. Individual drops of water could not go over the edge, only buckets of water. One bucket of water would represent one quanta of energy. Planck solved the riddle, but he believed it merely to be a mathematical trick. That paper came out in 1901, and nobody considered Planck's math to be directly related to reality.
Now, if you happened to have watched the program about Einstein on NGEO, Genius, Einstein and his wife Mileva got the idea for a paper, in 1905, from a German physicist named Philipp Lenard (he was the guy who continually opposed Einstein, and eventually became a Nazi), who had been exploring another phenomenon in physics, the photoelectric effect. Physicists knew that when light hits a sheet of metal, electrons are ejected (and it leaves the metal sheet with a slight positive electric charge). But what physicists didn't understand, if you increased the amount of light, it did not increase the number of electrons emitted. However, if you shined light of a higher frequency on the metal sheet, then that did increase the number of electrons emitted. So this was a curious phenomenon, but nobody understood the why of it.
But in 1905 Einstein put the photoelectric effect together with Planck's quanta idea. He proposed that light of a certain frequency ~comes in~ certain ~packets~, IOW, light came in particles. When a quanta of light hits the metal, the energy releases this electric effect. OK, I need to back up some here. It's was Newton's opinion that light was particle in nature, what he called corpusles. But then about 1800 a physicist named Young designed a double slit experiment showing light is a wave. So basically for 100 years physicists knew light was a wave phenomenon. So in his 1905 paper Einstein showed light was a particle, a quanta of energy (later these light quanta came to be called photons). For about ten years Einstein's photoelectric effect paper continued to be theory, but by about 1915 there were experiments showing that Einstein was indeed correct. And for light of a higher frequency, the photons did indeed carry a bigger wallop.
So Einstein showed the reason for the photoelectric effect, and that Planck's quanta was not merely a mathematical trick, but was the way reality worked. And later even after Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was proven during a solar eclipse, he was given the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect, not Relativity. IOW, Einstein got the Nobel prize for quantum physics, not Relativity.
So Planck gave birth to quantum mechanics, and Einstein gave it a slap on the bottom, got it breathing. But physicists were left with a problem, how could light be both a particle and a wave? Other physicists began exploring it more, Neils Bohr primarily, but it took about 20 years for a group of physicists to work out further the math, and along with this came the utter bizarreness of quantum mechanics.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 26, 2017 10:06:47 GMT -5
OK, I felt like I had to get that out of the way, felt I had to give a basis for further discussion. Now the fun begins.
So after the 1905 paper by Einstein and verifying experiments, we are stuck with the question, how can light be both a wave and a particle? (And we are still stuck with that question today).
Neils Bohr had studied some Taoism, so he came up with the idea of Complementarity, light is both a particle/photon, and a wave (is both "yin" and "yang"). And indeed, depending upon the experimental setup, light sometimes behaves as a wave, sometimes behaves as a particle/photon. So in the 1920's this bizarreness stayed around. One physicist asked himself, Can nature really be this crazy? I think it was Neils Bohr who said, If you don't think QM is crazy, then you haven't understood it. And even Richard Feynman, in the '50's or 60's said, Nobody understands QM. He also said that any question in QM can't be reduced to the double-slit experiment (which we will get to). He said, any QM question, all you have to do is say, you know the double-slit experiment?, it's like that.
OK, what's not to understand? Well, in the 20's by the work of several physicists, they started getting the math right, they arrived at a mathematical description of QM. And QM has been subjected to more experimentation than any other theory in physics, and it has never been shown to be wrong. So physicists know the math works, but they do not understand a description of the actual world that the math points to (or that experiments point to). So in the 20's the heavy hitters were Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, who was a student of Bohr (and if you watched Breaking Bad, this is where the name Heisenberg came from), Erwin Schrodinger (of cat fame), Louis de Broglie, Paul Dirac. Einstein himself played a big part, by simply saying, when another's paper came out, That's an important paper. And later in the famous Bohr-Einstein battles, Einstein help QM a great deal, by opposing it. When Einstein thought he had put another nail in the coffin of QM, Bohr had to resolve the problem Einstein brought up (usually in thought experiments, but there was one last great effort, the 1935 Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky "spooky action at a distance" paper. More later on that, and David Bohm and John Stewart Bell, and Bell's Theorem).
So Heisenberg came up with his very complicated matrix mechanics. And then Schrodinger came up with a much simpler wave mechanics. And then somebody showed that matrix mechanics is the same as wave mechanics. And during this time Heisenberg developed his uncertainty principle, this gets to a basis problem in understanding QM. Turn on a ceiling fan, or imagine one. The fan exists in our macro world, the world of classical physics. QM deals with the world of the very small, the subatomic world. When you look at the ceiling fan, on, you don't see individual blades, you see a ~swirl~ of blades, you see more-than four or five blades. However, with the right instruments we could measure both the speed and direction of the blades. But in the quantum world, things are very different, and in the '20's these physicists saw the craziness of what the math was showing. QM is a statistically based theory. Let's take a hydrogen atom for example, one proton, one electron. The proton would be maybe an orange on the fifty yard line in an NFL stadium. The electron would be a fly, somewhere in the stadium. But even that's not correct in the quantum world, let's look at the fly-electron. In the quantum world, alone, all by itself, there isn't a fly-electron at any one place and with a certain momentum. If it could be said to exist at all, it could be anywhere within the stadium, we just can't know where, until we do an experiment, actually measure where the fly-electron is. And then if we find out where it is, we cannot simultaneously measure its momentum. But we can do a different experiment and measure its momentum, but likewise, we then cannot know where the fly-electron is. So this is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in the quantum world, for example, you can't know both simultaneously the location, and the momentum, of aspect of the quantum world. If we go back to our ceiling fan, to look at it it appears that a blade is in more places than one, but we know it isn't really. But really, in the quantum world, it cannot be said that the fly-electron even exists, unless we measure it. This is why QM is a statistically based theory, all physicists can do is mathematically show the probability of the fly-electron being at a certain place at a certain time or having a certain momentum at a certain time. And further, there is a very slight probability that our fly-electron could be anywhere in the universe, not just in our NFL stadium.
So I prefer to say that in the quantum world, electrons don't exist. There is a fly-electron-wave/field-"cloud", that exists. Unlike the ceiling fan blade, where we know it does actually exist at a certain place, the fly-electron does not, it actually exists at all places allowed by QM, simultaneously.
So, this world, is formed from/out-of the quantum world, there aren't two worlds really, there's only one world. So the things we see and use and manipulate daily, are made-from probabilities, "things" that don't exist in actuality.
So the real question now is, how can this be? How can things, that seem to be (you ate breakfast this morning, you are sitting in a chair), be formed-from no-things?, no-things that are not? And QM is a statistically based theory because in each instance, we cannot know about a particular single quantum event, because it occurs randomly. We know what might happen by adding up the probabilities. The words cause and effect are not found in QM.
This is why Einstein until the day he died did not consider QM to be the final theory concerning how the universe operates. He was a 'believer' in cause and effect, determinism. He famously stated in a couple of different ways, God does not play dice with the universe.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 26, 2017 11:21:50 GMT -5
This will be a kind of addition to post #2 (I'll try not to let them get longer than that).
So what is the cross-over from the quantum world to our world of the five senses? How do we get from the micro quantum world to the macro world we live in? What turns the probabilities into "realities"? Let's go back to our fly in the stadium. In the quantum world, with no fly-electron, all we can-know is where we might find the fly-electron if we were to make a measurement, all we have are probabilities. This is called a superposition. In the quantum world the not-is-now-fly-electron is in a superposition of possibilities, this is called the wave function. A measurement is what is needed to collapse the wave function, and tell us, depending upon the experimental setup, either where the fly-electron is, or its momentum.
So this brings us to a central question in QM, the measurement problem. So I think maybe next we will discuss the double-slit experiment, how simply observing, or not observing, and not necessarily interfering in any way directly, we can ~turn~ a photon, which certainly seems to be a particle of light, is even defined so, into a wave, or particle. This is the famous observer effect.
Now, interestingly, before too long we can begin to bring in the Seth information, and A-H and LOA. Probability is very interesting. Five minutes from now is a probable future. A might happen or B might happen or C might happen. You're approaching a Y intersection. You might not know which way you are going to turn. You might think you are going to turn right, but you turn left instead, at the last second. What happened? All of life consists of these probabilities, hundreds every day. Maybe Seth and A-H and QM can shed some light on tomorrow. And maybe even what didn't happen yesterday, or how the present can change the past. This has been experimentally proven, the future can change the past. This is known as the delayed measurement double-slit experiment, proposed by John Wheeler. Yes, it works, but no, we don't not know why. I think we will find some day that light is both particle and wave, simultaneously, until a measurement is made. The other day ZD posted a great Einstein quote, after studying and thinking about light all his life, he still didn't know what a photon is.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 27, 2017 9:22:19 GMT -5
Anybody can chime in at any time, views, questions. At some point down the road laughter is going to disagree with me, as we've disagreed in the past. One thing which will come up could be called Einstein's Moon. There is a pretty good book on quantum entanglement with that name by F David Peat. With all the quantum discussion going on and the observer effect, Einstein once in exasperation asked, Does the Moon disappear if nobody is looking at it?
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Post by Reefs on Jun 27, 2017 9:22:33 GMT -5
Nice work, SDP. Seth often mentions our faulty cause and effect theory which is based on a misconception of time and the fact that scientist only acknowledge this physical plane of existence because they only look at things with the outer senses, which are built to perceive camouflage patterns (time, space, matter). And so the deeper they look into those camouflage patterns with the camouflage senses, the deeper they go into camouflage and confusion. The conventional cause and effect theory is faulty for 2 main reasons: 1) the illusion of successive time 2) interlocking planes of existence.
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Post by Reefs on Jun 27, 2017 9:39:44 GMT -5
Anybody can chime in at any time, views, questions. At some point down the road laughter is going to disagree with me, as we've disagreed in the past. One thing which will come up could be called Einstein's Moon. There is a pretty good book on quantum entanglement with that name by F David Peat. With all the quantum discussion going on and the observer effect, Einstein once in exasperation asked, Does the Moon disappear if nobody is looking at it? Reminds me of Seth's space continuum: Now replace 'Mark' with "Moon'...
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 27, 2017 11:06:59 GMT -5
OK, now we get to one central issue with QM, the role of the observer. I'll discuss briefly the double-slit experiment by Thomas Young about 1800, and then apply the quantum question to it. First, the difference between a wave and a particle. A wave is spread-out over a distance. Let's look at a water wave. First, it has a crest and a trough, sort of ~ ~~~~~~~~. Next, the water itself is not moving, except as this crest-trough "up and down" motion. A particle is FAPP, a solid object with a specific location. The curious thing we have already discussed is that light sometimes acts as a wave, sometimes as a particle (photon). About 1800 young devised an experiment to determine if light consisted of waves or particles. From experiments the movement of water as waves had been shown and the movement of sound as a wave. So Young set up a barrier, with two small slits close together to let light through. The idea was that if light is a wave, different parts of the wave would hit the wall, some troughs hitting one slit, some crests hitting the other slit. Behind the wall with the two slits is the target. If there are bullet patterns at the target, then light must consist of particles. But at the target was a pattern of dark blotches and lighter blotches forming a diffraction pattern. Where crests combined the two were added together and formed bright spots on the target, where troughs combined, the waves canceled each other and dark places resulted at the target. So for 100 years it seemed that Young have shown that light consisted of waves. Then came Einstein's 1905 paper that showed light consisted of quanta. At the library this morning I found a book, Seven Brief Lesson on Physics by Carlo Rovelli, 2014. He quotes part of the 1905 paper and I think it's worthwhile to give. " It seems to me that the observations associated with blackbody radiation, fluorescence, the production of cathode rays by ultraviolet light, and other related phenomena connected with the emission or transformation of light are ,re readily understood if one assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space. In accordance with the assumption to be considered here, the energy of a light ray spreading out from a point source is not continuously distributed over an increasing space but consists of a finite number of "energy quanta" which are localized at points in space, which move without dividing, and which can only be produced and absorbed as complete units". As already mentioned the "energy quanta" of light later came to be called photons. So Young's 1800 experiment was eventually altered to show exactly what the nature of light actually is, and this became the modern version of Young's 1800 experiment. We can set up the experiment to fire individual single photons at the wall. If you have only one slit open, there is a bullet patterns at the target behind the wall. This shows that light does indeed have this particle nature Einstein showed in his paper. OK, but we're not through. Now let's have the same setup, the only difference, open a second slit. You fire single photons, one at a time. But with two slits open you get the diffraction pattern, which shows light consists of waves. But let's step back and see what this means. To be more clear, imagine firing a gun at the wall. If you fire a gun, even with two slit open you will always get a bullet pattern, because a single bullet can only go through one of the slits. But that's not what we find in the experiment, with two slits open, firing single photons (and many different "projectiles" have been used, from electrons to rather more complex items called Bucky-balls), we get the diffraction pattern. It appears that the photon is somehow going through both slits and interfering with itself (somehow the crests of single photons are adding or the troughs of single photons are canceling each other out). How can this possibly be? This, as already quoted by Richard Feynman, is the central question of QM, how can something be both a particle and a wave, and in this instance, light? Then they decided, OK, let's make an observation at the slits themselves, not just at the target behind the wall with slits. Let's just call the observing device a camera (for this post), and put one camera at slit A and another camera at slit B. We'll jump ahead a little, but we have the ability, in any firing of the protons, to turn off both cameras or turn on either camera A or B. Same setup, fire single photons, both slits open. What we're trying to do is see which slit the single photon actually goes-through, because like a real bullet, a single photon can only go through one slit. Right? But it turns out that with the cameras at the slits, we get the bullet (single photon) pattern, we don't get a diffraction (light) pattern. We haven't done anything else different, only put cameras at the slits. So, the physicists are at this point saying wtf is going on? How does the blooming photon know we are looking at it? How does merely observing, effect the pattern (either bullet pattern of diffraction pattern) at the target? So then they decide, OK, we'll just turn on camera A. If the photon goes through slit B, it can't know we're watching slit A, (no camera at B). But we get the bullet pattern. Mind you, both slits are open. So then they try turning off camera at slit A, on at slit B. Same thing happens, bullet pattern. But they are asking, OK, if we are watching slit A, and the photon goes through slit B, giving the bullet pattern, how does the photon know we are watching *him* at slit A? And vice versa. With both slits open, having either one camera or two, at either slit A or B, the photon is acting as if only one slit is open, bullet pattern. Merely turn off the cameras, you get the diffraction pattern, showing wave phenomenon. OK, if you understand the setup and what's occurring here, you understand the big mystery of QM, you understand that there is a big mystery in QM. Nobody understand to this day what is going on here. Not going into it yet, but just briefly mentioning the Wheeler delayed observation experiment, the seemingly time reversal effect. If you put the camera, and observe (or not) after the photon has gone through the slits, you determine whether you will get a bullet pattern or a diffraction pattern at the target. That is really a mind blower. Observing, after the photon has gone through the slit-wall, you determine (cause), essentially, did a particle or wave go through the slits. You determine what has happened, after it has happened. (It's seems you either have time travel, or precognition, pick one). Isn't this fun Next maybe we will go into the 1935 EPR (Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen) paper, Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" last great battle with Bohr, which we now know as entanglement, or non-locality. (Guess what? Einstein loses, we find in the late '60's and early '70's).
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 27, 2017 11:27:50 GMT -5
Nice work, SDP. Seth often mentions our faulty cause and effect theory which is based on a misconception of time and the fact that scientist only acknowledge this physical plane of existence because they only look at things with the outer senses, which are built to perceive camouflage patterns (time, space, matter). And so the deeper they look into those camouflage patterns with the camouflage senses, the deeper they go into camouflage and confusion. The conventional cause and effect theory is faulty for 2 main reasons: 1) the illusion of successive time 2) interlocking planes of existence. Thanks. Yes, QM seems to fit quite well with Seth. Oh...just want to add here, briefly, concerning the famous quantum leap (we would get to it eventually, but it's important). Say we have an electron in an atom. If you add energy to it (and photons are the energy currency), it absorbs a photon, it jumps to a higher energy "orbit". Now, it does this without traversing either time or space. It just disappears from one place, and appears at the place (allowed) for its higher energy. (But this doesn't seem to be such a big deal, as the quantum world seems to already exist outside time and space, as we know them. It's just peculiar from our normal classical-Newtonian-physics-world). Einstein never believed QM was the final theory, because it doesn't deal with cause and effect. But, and for a lot of reasons we will eventually get into, it seems the universe is set up specifically, with this quantum nature, so as to be malleable, be able to be subject to "plasticity", not just psychologically, but "physically", that is, subject to be able to be manipulated and molded, by consciousness, by individuated consciousness.
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Post by zendancer on Jun 27, 2017 13:20:59 GMT -5
Anybody can chime in at any time, views, questions. At some point down the road laughter is going to disagree with me, as we've disagreed in the past. One thing which will come up could be called Einstein's Moon. There is a pretty good book on quantum entanglement with that name by F David Peat. With all the quantum discussion going on and the observer effect, Einstein once in exasperation asked, Does the Moon disappear if nobody is looking at it? I've been busy with other stuff, but when I get a chance, I'll toss out some pointers. Seems like a good summary so far.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 27, 2017 14:52:02 GMT -5
Anybody can chime in at any time, views, questions. At some point down the road laughter is going to disagree with me, as we've disagreed in the past. One thing which will come up could be called Einstein's Moon. There is a pretty good book on quantum entanglement with that name by F David Peat. With all the quantum discussion going on and the observer effect, Einstein once in exasperation asked, Does the Moon disappear if nobody is looking at it? I've been busy with other stuff, but when I get a chance, I'll toss out some pointers. Seems like a good summary so far. OK, good, thanks.
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Post by zendancer on Jun 27, 2017 18:56:04 GMT -5
Okay, here's my take on this. Scientists look at "what is," and they then think up abstractions that create a model of "what is." All scientific paradigms, like all world-views, are therefore meta-realities. The scientific method works like this:
1. Scientist John Doe makes a truth claim, such as, "The planet Saturn has rings around it." 2. Other scientists are sceptical and ask, "How can this truth claim be proved/verified?" 3. John Doe then issues injunctions, such as, "Get a telescope, learn to use it, focus it upon Saturn, and then decide for yourself (based on your own direct sensory perception) if the truth claim is valid. 4. Other scientists might take John Doe's truth claim at face value, or they might want to follow the injunctions and see for themselves if they wish to make the same distinction as John Doe (if they wish to agree with the truth claim).
Scientists, like most humans, know virtually nothing about ND, and they assume that the world they imagine is real. They do not distinguish between "what is" and what they imagine about "what is." They live under the illusion that they are separate entities confronting an external reality composed of separate things, events, qualities, and relationships, and they assume that time and space exist. They do not understand the difference between looking at "what is" like the lens of a camera (without imagining) and thinking like a graphics generator hooked to a projector (imagining what they see).
"What is" is a seamless living whole that can see as well as imagine. If we/IT simply look, we see ourself as we are--undivided. If we only look, we do not see things; we see "what is." All thingness is imaginary. This seems to defy common sense, but in this case common sense is based upon our habitual way of think/seeing rather than simply seeing. We are so habituated to imagining what we see in terms of boundaries defining things that we ignore the underlying unity of all. If reality were speeded up, the error in our thinking would become obvious. If, for example, a seed became a sapling in one minute, and then became a tree a minute later, and then became a dead tree a minute later, and then became a rotten tree on the ground, and then became a spot where a tree used to be a minute later, it would be obvious that no boundaries are static--that they're all imaginary and that everything is constantly transforming into other stuff and that the only real stuff is unimaginable.
The scientific paradigm has constantly changed as more and more distinctions have been made that seemingly explained "what is" and, most importantly, allowed scientists to predict what might happen. Newton's paradigm was state of the art for a while, but as scientists probed more deeply in to the world of the ultra-small and the world of the ultra-big, problems began to develop, Even so, scientists still assumed that there was a real world of things and events happening in space and time until Einstein challenged some of the fundamental assumptions. Ironically, Einstein could not accept the probabalistic nature of QM, and remained a proponent of scientific realism.
When I was in high school, protons, neutrons, and electrons were the primary imagined components of matter, but by the time I left college, the world of imagined subatomic particles had expanded considerably to muons, mesons, ad infinitum, and finally to quarks with qualities like "strangeness," etc.. As physicists crashed particles together at higher and higher electron-volt potentials, new ideas had to be imagined in order to explain what was seen in cloud chambers and on the screens of test equipment. As time went by, it seemed obvious to me that no smallest particle would ever be found because whatever scientists were looking at in their labs would subdivide (imaginatively) indefinitely as they ramped up the power of their equipment.
My breakthrough came with a simple realization--that all subatomic particles are IDEAS ABOUT "what is" rather than independently-existing things. Something unknowable is doing something unknowable in some way that is unknowable, and any attempt to visualize what's happening is doomed to failure. This doesn't mean that we can't use math to make probabalistic predictions about various things that might happen, but it means that "what is" is only knowable via direct perception, and any attempt to imagine that it can be known, intellectually, in some way that can be visualized below the level of direct perception is a fool's errand.
I have a good friend who insisted to me that atoms exist because they can be seen. I said, "No, all that can be seen is light and dark areas on the screen of a piece of test equipment, and scientists conclude that they are looking at atoms." ITSW, people look at ________________________and imagine trees, rocks, and other stuff. What is ____________? All I can say is, "Take a look." This does not mean that one can't use the scientific method to think about ______________________in scientific terms, and construct various meta-realities that may help us understand how ______________________may manifest in the future (and the odds of those manifestations), but _______________and the meta-realities we imagine about ________________________are two distinctly different things. One is a thing and the other is a no-thing. LOL
From my POV, QM is accurately pointing us to something fundamental--that all imagined thingness is a superposition of infinite potentiality which can only be dealt with probabalistically.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 28, 2017 9:27:51 GMT -5
Good post ZD, a few comments. But present scientific abstractions, specifically QM, allow scientists and inventors and then manufacturers to manipulate the world. In the '50's the transistor became inventable because of QM, IOW, no QM, no transistors. I read recently that 25% of products we use today have come-from QM in some way or another, TV's, computers and smart phones for example. IOW, the world we live in today, another example, smart houses, comes about from these abstractions, figuring out to the extent possible, how reality works.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 28, 2017 10:24:11 GMT -5
Scientists are putting billions of dollars today into quantum computing. So what is quantum computing? Your computer operates via binary language, 1's and zeros. When I was in 7th grade (about 1964) we started this "new math", I hated it. I don't know what happened but the next year we went back to old math. But it was then that I learned that "base ten math" was purely arbitrary and that all math could be done by using only 1's and 0's. I remember ~they~ tried to teach some of this, but my brain just would not get interested. But anyway, it's not just math that can use only 1's and zeros, but everything on your computer is ~created~ from a series of 1's and 0's. I'm sure most of you know this. A computer is just a bunch of off and on switches, flip it on it represents a one, flip it off it represents a zero. So, every single bit of information is either a one or a zero. We could sort of call a quantum computer a non-dual computer. Our macro-classical world is a world of duality, it's ~constructed~ from ~this~ and ~that~. The Chinese called this and that yin and yang. This originated from the dark side of a tree, shade from the sun, and the bright side of the tree, in sunlight. So yin would be zero and yang would be one. But from our earlier posts we see that the quantum world is different from our macro world. In the quantum world there are no 1's OTOH and 0's OTOH. There are only 1's-and-0's, simultaneously. So, a quantum computer makes use of this. In a quantum computer there are no bits, there are qubits. A qubit is a 1 + 0 (simultaneously). So a quantum computer is (will be) vastly speedier at solving certain problems than an ordinary computer, instead of working with 1's and 0's, it works with a superposition of 1 + 0. Richard Feynman is credited with ~seeing~ the possibility of quantum computers, inventing theoretically the quantum processor. But, the last I heard and as far as I know, quantum computers are only up to factoring the number 15, you learned that probably in 3rd or 4th grade. OK, now we get to the subject of the post, which is not quantum computing. But why is quantum computing so difficult? Because, it is difficult to maintain the superposition of the simultaneous 1's + 0's. The superposition must be maintained until the computer arrives at the answer. This means the qubits must be kept apart from anything in the macro-classical world. Without reading up on it, I suppose they are using magnetic fields to isolate the qubits (simultaneous 1's + 0's). Again, why? Because once the qubits touch anything in the classical world, they change from being quantum bits to not-quantum-bits. This phenomenon is called decoherence, it's going from the superposition (of 1's + 0's simultaneously) to entry into the classical-macro-world. Now we get to entanglement, as was promised yesterday. Einstein probably saw as deeply into the quantum world as Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dirac, de Broglie and Max Born (left him off the earlier list). So Einstein saw that, if QM is correct, once two particles interacted, they would be forever linked. This means that whatever you did to one particle world effect the other particle, instantaneously, and no matter how far apart the particles may become in the future. Instantaneously is the primary concern. Instantaneously means superseding the speed of light. IOW, if two particles interact, and then separate from each other so that they are light years apart, they ~know what each other are doing~ and effect one another, instantaneously, despite being further apart than light could travel to otherwise connect them. Einstein called this spooky action at a distance. So the 1935 EPR paper is about spooky action at a distance. Now, before we go further, this does not technically violate Einstein's nothing goes faster than the speed of light "rule". (There are other permitted violations, space itself can expand faster than the speed of light). There is no technical violation of the speed of light rule, because, in entanglement, information is not transferred faster than the speed of light. (We will skip the explanation for the why of this, until later, but it's based on quantum randomness in the quantum state, which entanglement is). OK, edit: back to this briefly. Entanglement cannot be used to send information from one entangled particle to the other paired-particle, because we are still dealing with randomness. So if we have entangled pairs A and B, however we effect A, it will still be random. So we cannot code what happens to A and send the information to B (across the galaxy for example). Taking a coin flip for example, whatever happens to A, will be H's or T's, we cannot know. So although particle B will respond as we effect A, we likewise cannot know if B "gets" H's or T's. If that doesn't make sense, google it. Now, we can code information, via entangled particles (and this is one of the major things quantum computers will be used for, unbreakable encryption, but the code ~key~ [whether indeed the "coin" came up heads or tails] will have to be sent via "snail mail", IOW, below light speed). end edit The EPR paper was Einstein's last great stand against Bohr. It seemed obvious to Einstein that nature just could not act in this manner, this "spooky action at a distance". So in 1935 this was merely one of Einstein's thought experiments, could not be verified experimentally. David Bohm, who worked with Einstein at Princeton (NJ), worked on what are called hidden variable theories. This was trying to develop a means to 'save' determinism at the quantum level, to show that God does not play dice with the universe. And later in the '60's an experimental physicist, John S. Bell, came up with an idea to experimentally prove if Bohm/Einstein was right (if there are hidden variables), or if Bohr was right. Now, at this point Bell was in the hidden variable camp, he wanted to prove Einstein correct. So in 1964 Bell published his possible experimental proof paper, Bell's Theorem. But it was not until the late '60's that the experiment was actually done, and it was statistically shown that Einstein was wrong, entanglement is a fact, there is spooky action at a distance. I don't even remember this first guy who proved this, but later in the early '70's Alan Aspect devised a better experiment which left without question that entanglement is how nature works. Now, we have two concerns. Once two particles interact, they are forever linked, and what happens to one instantaneously effects the other. This is called non-locality as well as entanglement. Einstein died in 1955, but it would have been interesting to hear him comment on spooky action at a distance, verified. The other concern is being able to experimentally verify the entanglement. So in verifying entanglement we have the same problem that we do with quantum computers, losing the quantum state through decoherence. Again, we have to keep the entangled particles separated from interacting with the macro-classical-world, which would destroy our ability to verify the entanglement. But the entanglement has been done over distances of over a mile, through optic fibers, and verified. Several different laboratories and physicists routinely have done the experiment, but the one that comes to mind is Anton Zeilinger. www.edge.org/response-detail/26790So this brings us to our first crossroads. Does the world out there really exist, or not? Are there rocks and trees and planets and people, out there, independent of observers? Or is there merely quantum "soup" until there is an observer? I've tried to walk through this post carefully to show that yes, there is an external world, it's been around for about 13.8 billion years. How do we know this? Because in two different cases I've shown how fragile the quantum state actually is. If the quantum state interacts with the macro-classical-world, the external world out there, decoherence takes place, the quantum state is ~destroyed~ (we lose any chance of retrieving entangled information), the "participants" of the quantum experiment enter the classical macro world. IOW, (IM[n]vhO) it doesn't require an observer, consciousness, to collapse the superposition, the quantum state interacting with the physical world causes decoherence, the loss of the quantum state. This has been known since the early '90's. I have some quote showing this, but this post has been long and I need a break. Maybe later today. (The main point of the article/link [above] is that quantum physics is oblivious to time and space, pointed out by ZD).
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jun 28, 2017 13:38:16 GMT -5
Following are the quotes to support the view of the last paragraph of the last post, that decoherence assures us there is presently an external world, not just quantum "soup".
"How does the foggy world of atoms become the rock-solid reality of ordinary life? IOW, what is the connection between quantum physics and classical physics? Oddly enough, nowadays many physicists believe that this question has an answer. ...At the heart of this new understanding is a process called decoherence. From the decoherence viewpoint, the various possible realities described by quantum theory all really do exist, but only very briefly. Only one reality lasts long enough to be noticed. The rest die, like unfit species that go extinct.
The secret of this "selection" of realities is information processing, of course. Information about a system is recorded by the environment, and in that process one reality emerges. The principle of selection...(is) consistency. The reality that becomes concrete has to be consistent with all the previous realities selected from the quantum fog; that is, reality must be consistent with all the information about the past that is recorded in the environment. This "information" is stored in the environment in the form of the movements of atoms or light waves or other particles that encounter the object in question. Decoherence is the technical name for this disappearance of the multiple additional possibilities. Ordinary existence as we perceive it, therefore, arises from quantum decoherence.
....the modern enthusiasm for this approach accelerated only after a 1985 paper by Erich Joos and H Dieter Zeh showing that a single distinct location of an object emerges naturall from interaction with the environment. ...During the 1990's Zurek and others published a series of reports further analyzing the mathematics of the process, showing that monitoring by the environment singles out only one of the quantum possibilities, or states, to be accessible to our senses. Pgs 183,184
Consider, for example, the position of the moon. A quantum description suggests that the moon, like an electron, could be in many places at once. But light from the sun interacts with the moon. Roland Omnes of the University of Paris has calculated that the sunlight interaction freezes the moon's specific locationfrom among the various possibllities in ten-trillions of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. So everybody sees the moon in the same place. Pg 185
Many of us over the last thirty-five years have been developing the modern interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the role of the observer is not so great. ....It's not wrong, but the Copenhagen interpretation is extremely special. Murray Gell-Mann, quoted in the same book. Pg 187 The Bit and the Pendulum, From quantum computing to M Theory-The new physics of Information, by Tom Siegfried, 2000
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Post by zendancer on Jun 28, 2017 16:27:46 GMT -5
Good post ZD, a few comments. But present scientific abstractions, specifically QM, allow scientists and inventors and then manufacturers to manipulate the world. In the '50's the transistor became inventable because of QM, IOW, no QM, no transistors. I read recently that 25% of products we use today have come-from QM in some way or another, TV's, computers and smart phones for example. IOW, the world we live in today, another example, smart houses, comes about from these abstractions, figuring out to the extent possible, how reality works. Agreed. I have no problem with QM because the math works. My only stumbling block was the idea of thingness. Despite the math, we don't really know what a photon is beyond an abstract idea. Trying to visualize it as if it were a wave, particle, or something else, is a visualization exercise rather than a non-conceptual knowing of whatever it's isness is. Unlike the macro-world we see and feel, everything about the composition of the micro-world must be inferred, and all we really see are patterns on the screens of our test equipment or trails in a cloud chamber. Particle/wave/field/woo-woo weirdness. We simply know that if we do such and such, our test equipment responds by doing such and such. What we call "energy" and "matter" are more like states of something energetic that manifests in QM experiments as spooky stuff--even spooky stuff at a distance (non-locality). Our math simulates reality, so the meta-reality of math can be used to predict unknown things about reality, itself. Einstein's e=mc2 made scientists realize that the right kind of matter could be converted to an enormous amount of energy, and Hiroshima was a concrete result. Einstein was a visualizer, and I understand why he had a problem with QM because I'm also a visualizer. I wanted to understand what a photon looks like at the level of a photon, so that I could intellectually grasp it, but it can't be done. Any attempt to imagine it as a sparkler, a ray, sequential quantized flashes, a particle, a wave, etc. is doomed to failure. If my physics professor had understood what I was asking, he would have said, "Bob, a photon is just a useful concept; it's not a discrete thing in any ordinary sense, so don't try to picture it in any strongly-defined or bounded way. All we can know is that if light strikes a photo-electric cell, our voltmeter will register that an electric current has been generated." Physicists first imagined that an atom was like a group of small spherical balls (protons and neutrons) stuck together by a strong force with tiny balls (electrons) flying around them at a distance. They called it "the planetary model," and everyone could picture that like planets orbiting a star. Later, electrons became imagined more like a cloud of probability, surrounding a somewhat diffuse energetic core, but even this idea finally collapsed, and only the math continued. These days I have no idea how physicists try to imagine an atom, but I suspect that it's more like a field of probability. What I know is that the ordinary world we sense is, fundamentally, beyond human comprehension, and our ideas ABOUT it are like simplistic cartoons compared to the ineffable complexity of the living truth.
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