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Tensorman

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Everything posted by Tensorman

  1. Today no physicist thinks that the cat is really both dead and alive. Schrödinger devised this thought experiment in 1935 to point out a problem with the formalism of QM (the transition from the quantummechanical microworld to the classical macroworld). At the time no solution was known and in fact the problem was ignored, as it was not relevant to a succesful application of QM to microscopic systems, the transition was treated as a black box (the collapse of the wavefunction). Today we know that the phenomenon of decoherence will ensure that the cat cannot be in a superposition of states, so that it is either alive or dead before the box is opened. Superpositions of states of large molecules have been experimentally verified, however.
  2. That is not rubbish, that is a very sensible definition. Example: light rays (photons) coming to us from the stars contain information: we can derive from those light rays the temperature, velocity, chemical composition, size, mass, age, etc. of the stars. By extracting that information from the light rays we create knowledge (about those stars). Knowledge is always something that pertains to a conscious mind, information is not - there was no conscious encoder who encoded the information about the stars for the purpose of representing knowledge; nevertheless the light rays definitely contain information. Whether that information is used by some conscious being is not relevant for the fact that it does exist. Please tell us which words the mathematicians have "corrupted".
  3. I agree with Maarten. The term information may sometimes be used as a synonym for "knowledge", but its general meaning is much wider. In mathematics, computer science, biology and physics the concept information is well-defined and certainly not restricted to what humans may do with information (in the sense of acquiring knowledge about something). Similarly the genetic code is a real code, even if it hasn't been designed by humans.
  4. Well, it is described extensively in Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult (1999), as is The Secret of the League.
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