Quantum Theory

[Ismael]

The idea that anything of a particulate nature exists at the most fundamental level of existence is false and has been said to be false for thousands of years,

Everything that exists AND is not fundamental must be made out of fundamental parts.

The nature of the ‘house’ exists only in the house in itself. The house is composed of bricks, but single bricks are not an house.

yet if the bricks are real, than the house is also real and has a real nature.

“Only spirit is true. Physical/material existence is an illusion.” That is a true statement and provably so with Accurate Logic and Science doesn’t disagree (matter is merely a form of energy).

It’s a false statement and the argument contraddicts itself. If energy is real… matter is also real.

If matter is just a form of energy and energy exists, than matter must exists as well (like if water exists, then solidified water, ie ice, also exists).

The idea that matter is an “aberration” is just an assumption without any decent physical or metaphysical argument to back it up.

Energy is something PHYSICAL, that acts on the physical world, not spiritual.

Of course now there are a lot of crackpot writers (who do not know anything about physics) that mix metaphysical explainations with physical ones… making a big mess.

 

[Ismael]

Thats interesting. So a photon is in some place only in the way that perhaps a flipped coin is both heads and tails until it lands ‘and is destroyed’ and becomes either heads or tails?

Yes… exactly.

Like Shrodinger Cat:

-the cat is in a box and you CANNOT see him
-some random process can activate something that kills the cat (es. an isotope decaying and activating the release of poison and Shrodinger himself stated I think)

You simply do not know if the cat is alive or dead. It can be both. So the cat in the box is both alive and dead at the same time.

Only if you open the box (ie you measure the system) you can see if the cat is alive or dead. In that case you ‘force’ the system to take a statement: the cat IS dead or the cat IS NOT dead.

The wavefunction describes the position (and other properties) of a particle in this way. A particle can be everywhere it is allowed to be with different probabilities for each position.
Only by measuring you force the particle (eg the photon) to be somewhere.

This is called the ‘orthodox’ position of Quantum Mechanics, the one most physicists follow.

There is also the ‘realist position’: “the particle was always there byt we did not know that”, meaning that the wavefunction is an incomplete desctiption and has some ‘hidden variable’.
Finally the ‘agnostic’ position: we cannot really tell… basically a refusal of answering aout the position of the particle.

Basically most physicists try to argue for the ‘orthodox’ explaination, but if pressed they might fall back to the ‘agnostic’ one.

 

[Ismael]

Here is a video description of reality by quantum theory. It is based on the basic idea that truth does not actually exist until we believe it.

I do not think String Theory (if it’s correct at all… that’s still very muchg under debate) states that at all.

String Theory tells us that we PERCIEVE only 4 dimensions(3 spatials + 1 Temporal) of the 10 dimensions ( “10” in some string theories… some theories even go as far as 20…).

It does certainly do not state that we create reality by believing it. That is just mnisinterpretation of science.

 

[James_S_Saint]

You simply do not know if the cat is alive or dead. It can be both. So the cat in the box is both alive and dead at the same time.

That is the fatal flaw and deception of the “Devil”. It cannot be “both”. It can only be one OR the other.

The temptation of some is to accept that both “possibilities” (due to ignorance) are real as factual entities in themselves and it is only by observing the situation that one of the possibilities becomes a part of the observer’s existence while leaving the other possibility in “another possible world”.

The idea is that “if I do not know that something is false, then it is true”. Logic doesn’t work that way, nor sanity. Logic does not conclude truth value based on ignorance.

1. The cat is alive or dead, I cannot know which is true or false
2. If I do not know which is false, then both are true
3. Therefore the cat is both alive and dead.

This type of irrationalism was growing from those promoting counter-reasoning persuasion as a bedevilment of the Western world and Science.

The “Copenhagen meeting” in Demark where Heisenberg, Einstein, Schrodinger, and many others discussed the future of scientific thought addressed these theories. In that meeting it was brought out that statistical concepts were being conflated with actual entities. A “wave” graph displaying the probability distribution of an event became conflated with an actual physical wave.

From that meeting, the “many possible worlds theory”, “quantum mechanics”, and many lesser known theories of reality were discussed.

At the root of it all is merely the confusion that a possibility is an existence in itself rather than merely a thought. This is the same as saying that a dream is an actual existence other than merely a mental projection.

But from the meeting interpretations were derived as formal answers to these theories such as, regarding Schrodinger’s cat;

The Copenhagen Interpretation:
“The wave function reflects our knowledge of the system. The wave function (|dead> + |alive>)/^2 simply means that there is a 50-50 chance that the cat is alive or dead.”

The Copenhagen interpretation refuses the notion that BOTH states are real. But the Quantum Magi take advantage of men’s limited focus and conflate words so as to cause belief in fantasies. It is no more than a political mind game where arguments arise concerning reality that really only involved possibilities.

Einstein and most physicists and scientists are generally poor philosophers, easily lost in the trickery of mental manipulations even though very skilled at mathematics. The result was that the Quantum Magi were not entirely destroyed and thus grow by the desire of people to believe in fantasies and disavow reality and anything absolute, such as God.

 

[James_S_Saint]

I do not think String Theory (if it’s correct at all… that’s still very muchg under debate) states that at all.

String Theory tells us that we PERCIEVE only 4 dimensions(3 spatials + 1 Temporal) of the 10 dimensions ( “10” in some string theories… some theories even go as far as 20…).

It does certainly do not state that we create reality by believing it. That is just mnisinterpretation of science.

Note that the “dimensions” are first of spatial, then time, then POSSIBILITIES. This leads to the concept that Reality is actually formed of possibilities as actual entities.

The theory says nothing about perception other than perception CAUSES reality to become what it is. “You are God, because you create reality in your mind.”

The Reality is that you only created a “Truth model” in your mind that you use to deal with reality. The Truth model is not the reality itself. The “map is not the landscape”.

 

[Ismael]

That is the fatal flaw and deception of the “Devil”. It cannot be “both”. It can only be one OR the other.

The temptation of some is to accept that both “possibilities” (due to ignorance) are real as factual entities in themselves and it is only by observing the situation that one of the possibilities becomes a part of the observer’s existence while leaving the other possibility in “another possible world”.

The idea is that “if I do not know that something is false, then it is true”. Logic doesn’t work that way, nor sanity. Logic does not conclude truth value based on ignorance.

1. The cat is alive or dead, I cannot know which is true or false
2. If I do not know which is false, then both are true
3. Therefore the cat is both alive and dead.

This type of irrationalism was growing from those promoting counter-reasoning persuasion as a bedevilment of the Western world and Science.

The “Copenhagen meeting” in Demark where Heisenberg, Einstein, Schrodinger, and many others discussed the future of scientific thought addressed these theories. In that meeting it was brought out that statistical concepts were being conflated with actual entities. A “wave” graph displaying the probability distribution of an event became conflated with an actual physical wave.

From that meeting, the “many possible worlds theory”, “quantum mechanics”, and many lesser known theories of reality were discussed.

At the root of it all is merely the confusion that a possibility is an existence in itself rather than merely a thought. This is the same as saying that a dream is an actual existence other than merely a mental projection.

But from the meeting interpretations were derived as formal answers to these theories such as, regarding Schrodinger’s cat;

The Copenhagen Interpretation:
“The wave function reflects our knowledge of the system. The wave function (|dead> + |alive>)/^2 simply means that there is a 50-50 chance that the cat is alive or dead.”

The Copenhagen interpretation refuses the notion that BOTH states are real. But the Quantum Magi take advantage of men’s limited focus and conflate words so as to cause belief in fantasies. It is no more than a political mind game where arguments arise concerning reality that really only involved possibilities.

Einstein and most physicists and scientists are generally poor philosophers, easily lost in the trickery of mental manipulations even though very skilled at mathematics. The result was that the Quantum Magi were not entirely destroyed and thus grow by the desire of people to believe in fantasies and disavow reality and anything absolute, such as God.

The devil has nothing to do with it. QM is a mathematical tool… not a devilish one.

I think you should pick up a good introductory text about Q.M. such as this one:
amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-Griffiths/dp/0131244051 which is quite decent.
(I think you can even find PDF online of it)

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(continues)

 

[Ismael]

(contin’d )
Of course at a certain point of time the cat is either dead or alive.

The real point is: you do not know which before measuring.

The WAVEFUNCTION that describes the particle is a ‘sum of all possible states’, hence the wavefunction that describes the cat is a sum of ‘1/2cat dead + 1/2cat alive’, 1/2 being the probability coefficient of the state.

Basically the Copenhagen interpretation of the ‘cat wavefunction’ means that there is a 50-50 chance that the cat is either alive or dead.

The Copenhagen Interpretation:
“The wave function reflects our knowledge of the system. The wave function (|dead> + |alive>)/^2 simply means that there is a 50-50 chance that the cat is alive or dead.”

The Copenhagen interpretation refuses the notion that BOTH states are real. But the Quantum Magi take advantage of men’s limited focus and conflate words so as to cause belief in fantasies. It is no more than a political mind game where arguments arise concerning reality that really only involved possibilities.

The “Quantum Magi” do not do this.

As I explained above it does not mean that the position of the particle (of state of the cat) are not real… It simply imply we do not know, before measuring, WHICH state is real.

Basically the principles of the Copenhagen Interpratation are:

1.A system is completely described by a wave function, which represents an observer’s knowledge of the system.

2 The description of nature is essentially probabilistic. The square of the wavefunction represents the probability function

3 matter exhibits a wave-particle duality

4 it is not possible to know the values of all of the properties of the system at the same time (Heisenberg Principle)

5.Measuring devices are essentially classical devices, and measure classical properties such as position and momentum

6 the quantum mechanical description of large systems should closely approximate the classical description.

–

So:

#1 tells us thata according to the point of view of the scientist who measures reality, BEFORE measuring the cat is BOTH dead and alive and Only by measuring we can find if the cat is dead or alive.

#2 Tells us that the description we have of nature is probabilistic. Wavefunctions give us probabilities and from that we can extract the data we need.

#3 & #6 tells us that the nature of things in the Quantum realm are different than in the Classical realm, but that the ‘Classical properties’ of the world are the ‘large scale’ limito of the Quantum properties

#4 and #5 tell us that measuring is the only way of knowing, that we cannot know all things at the same time by measuring and that we can only measure ‘classical quantities’ such as position or momentum

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How a single scientist then understands a ‘wavefunction’ depends much on the scientist’s view.

The agreement is strong among scientists on the 6 points stated above, but not on what the wavefunction essentially means.

For some is a real thing (like the function that traces the trajectory of a classical ball), for others it’s just a mathematical tool that can give us information about reality but not more that that.

Even is the wavefunction itself is NOT real it does describe something that IS real. Thus the reality of the system (the cat or the electron) are not denied.

Einstein and most physicists and scientists are generally poor philosophers, easily lost in the trickery of mental manipulations even though very skilled at mathematics. The result was that the Quantum Magi were not entirely destroyed and thus grow by the desire of people to believe in fantasies and disavow reality and anything absolute, such as God

I agree that most scientists are poor philosophers… and most philosophers know little about physical science.

The main point of QM is not the reality itself but the reality as measured

I really do NOT see where quantum mechanics as we understand it now deny something absolute (such as God).

 

[Ismael]

Note that the “dimensions” are first of spatial, then time, then POSSIBILITIES. This leads to the concept that Reality is actually formed of possibilities as actual entities.

The theory says nothing about perception other than perception CAUSES reality to become what it is. “You are God, because you create reality in your mind.”

The Reality is that you only created a “Truth model” in your mind that you use to deal with reality. The Truth model is not the reality itself. The “map is not the landscape”.

No.

The different 9 or more spatial dimentions are real.

There are two ways to make this compatible with the 3+1-dimensional world we have:

1- Compact dimensions: the extra dimensions are so small as to be undetectable by present day experiments.

A trivial example is a thin wire (e.g. a fishing line). We see only ONE dimension: lenght. A small being, like a bacteria, sees TWO dimensions, lenght and width.
2- The Brane scenario

The 3+1-world we live in is a “subspace” of the full universe.

It’s like we are 2-dimentional beings living on the surface of a sphere and sensing only those 2 dimensions and unable (for now) to see the 3rd dimension.

This is actually very similar to ‘Flatland’ a nice mathematical novel by Edwin Abbott Abbott .
Most scientists belive that reality is probably a combination of the two ideas above.

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More than that:

String theory, unlike QM, has NOT been proven.

String theory is born because it tries to unify gravity and QM.

String theory is not a ‘theory’ but a scientific hypotesis, which offers wildly different solutions and which might be utterly fals.

 

[James_S_Saint]

I completely agree wiht the position that you express, but you seem to not understand the effects that have come about due to those misunderstandings.

The “real scientists” understand that it is merely about what *might *be the real situation. But the average student does NOT know this and thus becomes the generation that teaches the statistical wave as a physical entity as shown in that video explaining QM.

Some argue that the concept of collapse of a “real” wave function was introduced by John Von Neumann in 1932 and was not part of the original formulation of the Copenhagen Interpretation.

What you and I know and what “real scientists” know is irrelevant to what the mean or average student believes. THEY determine the future confusions of society, not us.

But this is not an unknown and un-utilized concept. This concept has been used for thousands of years to effect societies and destroy them entirely. It is not merely an accident of many people becoming confused and rejecting religion. The adversary (the “Devil”) has real devotees who fully intend to create confusion and lust for the power it brings them.

Once you confuse 300,000,000 people, unscrambling that egg is a serious miracle, but guess what; “in some possible world”, it happens.

 

[Ismael]

But this is not an unknown and un-utilized concept. This concept has been used for thousands of years to effect societies and destroy them entirely. It is not merely an accident of many people becoming confused and rejecting religion. The adversary (the “Devil”) has real devotees who fully intend to create confusion and lust for the power it brings them.

Once you confuse 300,000,000 people, unscrambling that egg is a serious miracle, but guess what; “in some possible world”, it happens.

You can abuse a scientific theory to confuse people, that is certainly true.

Some scientists who strongly advocate atheism do this: they write popular books and, while not telling lies about science, they give ‘twisted’ opinions to support their philosophycal beliefs.

This is also done by non-scientists, who take scientific news and twist it around to back their ideas.

This is not science, however. QM never made me doubt the world is real or that God does not exist.

But the average student does NOT know this and thus becomes the generation that teaches the statistical wave as a physical entity as shown in that video explaining QM.

The average person does not know that the ‘facts’ stated in the ‘Da Vinci Code’ are total nonsense…

Unfortunately we cannot prevent people from writing and promote things that are false or misleading.

Some scientists who published some very popular books recently for example use bogus phillosophy to argue that God is not real. No one with some basic knowledge of philosophy takes such arguments seriously and clearly see the fallacies.
People who have no knowledge of philosophy might believe such arguments.

Others, although ignorant of the subject, might be smart enough to inform themselves.

 

[James_S_Saint]

Watch the threads on many sites and you can see just how often this treachery is effective. Many threads here have been involved. From an Atheist forum;

Our visible universe is coming to be more defined as just a small aspect seemingly attached to a membrane floating within a higher-dimensional space.

Physicists may soon be able to detect and verify the existence of reality’s extra dimensions, which could extend over distances as large as a millimetre.

All the matter and forces we know of—with the sole exception of gravity—are stuck to a “wall” in the space of the extra dimensions. Electrons, protons, photons and all the other particles in the Standard Model cannot move in the extra dimensions; electric and magnetic field lines cannot spread into higher-dimensional space. The wall has only three dimensions, and so far as these particles are concerned, the universe might as well be three-dimensional. Only gravitational field lines can extend into the higher dimensional space, and only the particle that transmits gravity, the graviton, can travel freely into the extra dimensions. The presence of the extra dimensions can be felt only through gravity.

Particles such as electrons and photons are like tiny lengths of string that each have two end points that must be stuck to a D-brane, Gravitons, on the other hand, are tiny closed loops of string that can wander into all the dimensions because they have no end points anchoring them to a D-brane.

The membranes of other three-dimensional universes could lie parallel to our own, only a millimeter removed from us in the extra dimensions. Similarly, although all the particles in the Standard Model must stick to our own membrane universe, other particles beyond the Standard Model might propagate through the extra dimensions. Far from being empty, the extra dimensions could have a multitude of interesting structures.

Our entire three-dimensional universe is looking more likely at being just a thin membrane in the full space of dimensions.

Creating delusional fantasy from misunderstandings of proposed theories.

The much greater Mass of EVERY gathering lives in MISunderstanding of their devotional objective. I am not aware of any exceptions and am highly skeptical that one has ever existed on Earth (yet).

 

[Nyarlathotep]

Watch the threads on many sites and you can see just how often this treachery is effective. Many threads here have been involved. From an Atheist forum;

Creating delusional fantasy from misunderstandings of proposed theories.

The much greater Mass of EVERY gathering lives in MISunderstanding of their devotional objective. I am not aware of any exceptions and am highly skeptical that one has ever existed on Earth (yet).

It’s no fantasy, dude, check it out:

theonion.com/content/node/29433

 

[James_S_Saint]

It’s no fantasy, dude, check it out:

theonion.com/content/node/29433

You mean this article??

PALO ALTO, CA—Gathering for what members of the international science community are calling “potentially the most totally out-to-lunch freaky head trip since Einstein postulated that space and time were, like, curved and ****,” a consortium of the world’s top physicists descended upon Stanford University Monday to discuss some of the difficult questions facing the cutting edge of theoretical thinking.

Cal Tech physicist Dr. Jonathan Friedrich postulates a bunch of freaky **** that makes his colleagues’ heads spin right the hell off.

Among the revolutionary ideas expected to be raised at the historic week-long summit is the possibility that, like, our whole friggin’ universe might be just one big atom in, say, some super-duper huge thing out there somewhere, or something.

“Whoa, man,” Dr. Jacob “The Boz” Bozeman of MIT told reporters. “The implications of this deceptively simple hypothesis are, like, completely blowing my mind. Like, we could all be nothing more than this little dot in the fingernail of some huge-*** giant dude. Or maybe a seed in the mustard of, like, some really big sandwich, or even a germ on the back of a flea that’s, like, sitting on a hair on some giant dog’s ***. Truly, it boggles the freakin’ mind, man. It freaks me the **** right out.”

The universe-as-possible-giant-atom theory originated in May with a team of Cal Tech particle physicists, who developed the theory late one night while sitting around on a couch in the Physics Department’s cyclotron and foosball facility, “just shooting the ****.” The theory, which was reportedly conceived after the group became highly engrossed in ceiling-tile patterns for several minutes while waiting for a pizza to arrive, is said to be so advanced that only a few scientists in the world even have their heads together enough to really, you know, deal. Yet even among this elite group, many are said to be “seriously thrown for a loop” by its implications.

“I’m like, ‘Whoa there, man, slow down,’” said Dr. Dieter Gerhardt, a low-temperature physicist at Cornell University. Pausing for a moment to collect himself, the renowned scientist then placed his hands on his forehead before extending them outward in a sweeping gesture and making a buzzing “space-noise” sound effect with his lips, non-verbally indicating the degree to which his mind was blown by the whole freaky deal.

Among other topics to be explored at the Stanford conference, according to Bozeman: the concept of parallel, or “alternate,” Earths; the theory of multi-dimensional “superstrings” that fold backward and forward throughout the fabric of the universe; and “a whole bunch of other **** I totally can’t even handle thinking about right now.”

On Monday, the most high-profile conference attendee, Cambridge’s Dr. Stephen Hawking, discussed his recent research exploring the possible existence of “sideways,” or lateral, time, a concept most scientists in attendance described as “way out there.”

“I don’t want to **** with anybody’s head here,” Hawking told the assembled scientists via his voice-simulation device, “but if time goes sideways as well as forward, there might be, like, other versions of this reality, where, say, the Roman Empire is still in charge and stuff.”

“By the way,” Hawking added, “ever think about what’d happen if you, say, went back in time and accidentally killed your own younger self? Man, that **** would be so ****ed up.” …

 

[hecd2]

Here is a video description of reality by quantum theory. It is based on the basic idea that truth does not actually exist until we believe it.

This is a video by a guy called Rob Bryanton. I hadn’t heard of him before so I looked him up. It took me one minute to find out that he is a musician who has written a loony vanity-published book called “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” on which this video is based. Not only is it nothing to do with quantum mechanics, it has nothing to do with any form of science whatsoever. By putting it forward as a criticism of quantum theory, you’ve confirmed that you are quite unable to distinguish pseudoscience from science - but we already knew that.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[James_S_Saint]

“What do these amazing experimental results really mean?” The insight that quantum mechanics does not yield an objective description of microscopic reality but that measurement plays an ineradicable role is probably the most telling characteristic of the Copenhagen interpretation.

QM is not about reality, but probability guessing. It’s “objects” are not physical objects, but statistical objects (which is why an object can be in 2 places at the same time). Its “dimensions” are not physical dimensions, but mathematical arrays for possibilities. It isn’t about physics, but your mind (hence a religion).

That video explained it accurately.

 

[James_S_Saint]

Myths are created by taking concepts and talking about them as though they are real objects and then through time, anthropomorphizing. ALL of the gods of Rome, the Hindus, the Pagans, and so forth were created in this way.

The God of the Hebrews, on the other hand, is a concept that necessarily is manifest in all things and thus is real. This is why Moses stated that the Hebrew God was the only real God. You have to actually understand that concept in order to realize that fact or merely have faith in it. Without understanding of the concept, you couldn’t tell the Hebrew God from any mythical God, and thus the prolific Atheism.

QM does this very thing. It creates objects from statistical concepts and speaks of them as though they were real objects, thus the prolific confusion about things actually existing in 2 places at once. It uses a maze of mathematics to gain respect and disguise what it really is about.

The High God of QM is the Great God “Randomness” above the entire show creating and governing all things in the universe. But the problem is that randomness has NO physical reality at all. Randomness is merely a concept with no physical existence, a false god that is logically impossible to exist in any physical universe.

QM creates entities such as the “strong and weak forces” so as to fill gaps in actual understanding, then uses predictability to proclaim a proof of their real existence. It *defends *that it is talking about real entities, it doesn’t just accidentally cause misunderstandings.

The QM claim is that, “if I can use QM to predict, then obviously I am right”. The problem is that even though 2 wrongs might not make a right, 3 wrongs very well might. Turn left 3 times and what direction have you gone?

QM is the very definition of a religion - an effort to “retain a legion” by defending belief. There is nothing wrong with that, but the problem is that it is making false gods by bemusing with statistical mathematics for credibility. It just hasn’t got around to anthropomorphizing - yet.

 

[catholicsuffer]

Quantum physics

arensb@cvl.umd.edu (Andrew Arensburger)
(original, funny)
(This just materialized on my desk one day. It’s in my handwriting, so I must have written it, though I’ll deny it if I’m indicted. -AA)

The topic for today is quantum physics. Quantum physics was developed in the 1930’s, as a result of a bet between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, to see who could come up with the most ridiculous theory and still have it published. Most people agree that Bohr won hands down, although Einstein did very well in the swimsuit competition.

One of the most important researchers in quantum physics is Werner Heisenberg, a man with a wonderful sense of humor, who was always cracking one-liners, like “delta-p times delta-x is less than h!” Ha! ha! What a card! This is known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which is closely related to Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which says that some things are true, but you can’t prove them, like when my wife and I argue over whether it’s her turn to take out the garbage or not.

What Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says is that if something is small enough, you can’t say anything about it. Anyone with the I.Q. of baking powder immediately understood that this means that if you look at something so small that you can’t even see it, like my dog, Oscar Wilde’s, brain, then you obviously can’t tell, say, what color it is.

But some people didn’t get the joke, and decided to investigate this principle further. They would gather and sit around all day, drinking beer and performing “Gedankesexperimenten,” or “Thank God we’re theoretical physicists so we don’t have to get our hands dirty with particle accelerators and other heavy machinery.” The most famous of these is Schroedinger’s Cat, where several physicists kidnap Erwin Schroedinger’s cat Fluffy and lock it up in a box, along with a radioactive source such as Cheez Doodles. Then they walk around with concerned expressions on their faces, commenting about how they don’t know what’s going on inside the box. This goes on until the cleaning lady discovers the box, opens it and tells the physicists whether the cat is dead, or whether it has mutated into a man-eating flea the size of Norway.

The point of this experiment is to show that uncertainty at the quantum level can be detected in the macroscopic world and produce widespread anxiety and paranoia. It also explains why paper clips just lie there while you look at them, but as soon as you turn your back, they run away, giggling wildly, and transform themselves into coat hangers.

Another famous researcher is Richard Feynman, who invented Feynman diagrams, which are bunches of squiggly lines with greek letters next to them. The way they were discovered was, one day, Hans Bethe came in to Feynman’s office to say that some of the guys down in particle research were having a jam session down by the cyclotron, and would Richard like to come over and bring his bongos? Feynman was out, at the time, cracking a safe or something, so Bethe tried to leave him a note. On the desk, he found one of Feynman’s daughter’s kindergarten drawings. Bethe couldn’t make head or tail of it, and figured that if even he couldn’t understand it, then it must be something Terribly Clever, and promptly called it a Feynman diagram.

This was a major scientific breakthrough, and ever since, proud parents have been hanging their children’s Feynman diagrams on refrigerators with little muon-shaped magnets, confident that their Little Darlings are developing important scientific theories every day, because they are, after all, Gifted Children.

 

[James_S_Saint]

What Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says is that if something is small enough, you can’t say anything about it. Anyone with the I.Q. of baking powder immediately understood that this means that if you look at something so small that you can’t even see it, like my dog, Oscar Wilde’s, brain, then you obviously can’t tell, say, what color it is.

 

[Ismael]

It’s no fantasy, dude, check it out:

theonion.com/content/node/29433

Very nice but it’s mainly speculation. Scientists like to use their fantasy too… and speculate.

What Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says is that if something is small enough, you can’t say anything about it.

No this is false. Heisenber uncertaint principle means that in the quantum world (the world at nanometric scale and lower) you cannot know with arbitrary precision two “commutative properties” of a syste (like position and momentum for example).

This mean that the more precisely you know one property the less precisely you know the other.

The famous formula DxDp>h/2, represents this where Dx and Dp are the uncertainties of the value of the properties and h is here the ‘Dirac constant’ (the Planck const. divided by 2pi)

This means that if Dx approaces zero Dp must become larger and lager and viceversa.

Quantum physics was developed in the 1930’s, as a result of a bet between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, to see who could come up with the most ridiculous theory and still have it published. Most people agree that Bohr won hands down, although Einstein did very well in the swimsuit competition.

LOL

Anyway the real history went like this.

QM started in 1900 when Planck tried to solve some problems in physics (such as the ‘UV-catastrophy’ of balck body radiation, look it up…) and theorized that energy was quantized and not continues (hence QUANTUM mechanics). Planck originally though of it as a mere mathematical device, not something physical

In 1905 however, Einstein confirmed that energy was quantized with the photo-electric effect, which got him the Nobel Prize (that’s right he got it for the Photo-electric effect, not relativity!)

The idea of QM rose in the 1910’s and made a big leap into mathematrical formality especially in the 1920’s especially by contributors such as Schrodinger (after whom the famous equation is named after), DeBroglie, etc…

Schrodinger, basing himself on the idea of particle-wave duality of DeBroglie, though of an Hamiltonian* that could describe a particle. The Hamiltonian, however was similar to the Hamiltonians used in classical physics to describe Waves, not particles.
Hence the name ‘wavefunction’.

(*The Hamiltonian, named after the XIX century scientist Hamilton, is a differential equation that is used to describe a mechanical system)

In the 30’s the theory continued to be investigated and tested and in the 40’s it was refined in what we know now as ‘quantum field theory’.

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Basically QM started as a ‘mathematical artefact’ to describe some puzzles in physics and ended up opening a whole new world, ending the era of ‘classical physics’ (The theory of relativity, both the special and general one are still ‘classical’)

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QM is not about reality, but probability guessing. It’s “objects” are not physical objects, but statistical objects (which is why an object can be in 2 places at the same time). Its “dimensions” are not physical dimensions, but mathematical arrays for possibilities. It isn’t about physics, but your mind (hence a religion).

That video explained it accurately.

No.

1- Usually QM is done in 4 dimensions (3 for space, 1 for time) or moresometimes in just 2 or 3 (1 -2 dimensions of space and 1 for time…), this is done with some approximation, where it applies at least to save computing power.
Here the dimentions are very real!

2- The 10 dimension story does not involve QM but STRING THEORY.

3- There is a HUGE problem in physics. While we can quantize three of the four forces of nature (Electromagnetic, weak and strong force) we cannot quantize gravity. A 5th dimentions in relativity came out in the 80’s in trying to solve this (the dimension is a “compact” one, real but invisibile to us)

4- While we have now a standar model that can reunite all in one three forces (well at least the weak force and the electromagnetic force… on the strong force there is still some work to be done) in no way gravity is compatible to the with the current QM theories

5- So different quantum-gravity theories arose, such as “loop quantum gravity” and “String Theory”. String Theory needs10 dimensions or more to work. These are REAL dimensions (but perhaps different that the 3 spacial dimensions we are used to)

6- No model of quantum gravity is now satisfactory (hence cannot be properly called a “theory”) as a model (eg there are many ‘string theories’ but they cannot be all correct!) nor are we capable of testing such models.

7- Many quantum gravity models, like string theory, assume that General Relativity is correct (among other assumptions). Although GR seems to be correct according to the experiments, if someone would prove that GR is false (there are several other gravitation theories that work also quite well!) then string theory would be worthless.

 

[James_S_Saint]

Basically QM started as a ‘mathematical artefact’ to describe some puzzles in physics and ended up opening a whole new world, ending the era of ‘classical physics’ (The theory of relativity, both the special and general one are still ‘classical’)

And it is STILL only a statistical artifact. That never changed.

There is a HUGE problem in physics. While we can quantize three of the four forces of nature (Electromagnetic, weak and strong force) we cannot quantize gravity. A 5th dimentions in relativity came out in the 80’s in trying to solve this (the dimension is a “compact” one, real but invisibile to us)

I ran into this one before. How do you come up with a “compact” or “short” dimension and still believe you are talking about actual physical existence?

Do you also not see that this is all about statistical artifacts that are being viewed as though they were real objects, starting all the way back from Heisenberg.

According to quantum theory, the particles do not possess definite positions during the periods between measurements. Instead, they are governed by wavefunctions that give the probability of finding a particle at each position. As time passes, the wavefunctions tend to spread out and overlap. Once this happens, it becomes impossible to determine, in a subsequent measurement, which of the particle positions correspond to those measured earlier.

QM has NEVER been about REAL things. It has always been only about the ability to measure things using STATISTICAL methods. Its “objects” are merely mathematical artifacts that have no real existence at all, much like “the average person”.

Dimensions, imagined forces, and distortions are all be invented to justify measurement problems that are largely based on statistical concerns and presumed statistical entities that never actually applied to the real world to begin with.

They are inventing what reality is made of in order to allow poor measurement ability to be acceptable. It is like not being able to know what your wife is thinking so you redefine what “thinking” is and redefine what a “wife” is and then declare that reality has a principle that forbids anyone from ever knowing what thinking is and also knowing what a wife is at the same time (“The Heisenberg Identity Paradox”). You then name it the “Husband Uncertainty Principle” of “Physics”.

They *really *should never have allowed mathematicians to have drugs.