Quantum Physics / Quantum Mechanics

[KendallJ]

I have a cat who will sit in any box you set out. Anything square in fact. Set a piece of paper on the floor and she'll walk over and sit prettily on it for hours. I regularly find her in boxes.

Do you think she used to belong to Shroedinger? Which woudl make sense because she's there and really not all there at the same time.

Edited June 28, 2007 by KendallJ

[mrocktor]

I have a cat who will sit in any box you set out.

Ah! There is that... as with water, try to put the cat in and it will maul you - leave it to its own devices and it will go right in

[KendallJ]

Ah! There is that... as with water, try to put the cat in and it will maul you - leave it to its own devices and it will go right in

I can't claim to understand or like cat psychology. It's why I prefer dogs.

[Drew1776]

Anything faster than light is going back in time.

Such arbitrary statements are the result of "scientists" who would rather daydream and make up mathematical equations than actually do research.

It seem we need the universe and the universe needs us.

More non-sensicle gibberish. The universe doesn't "need" anything

What really got the wheels turning in my brain was when I heard:

"If I die, nothing exists."

Completely false. Nothing exists to you but the world continues. I fail to see how such a statement "got the wheels turning in your brain"

Don't trust common sense in the quantum world. It will serve you no purpose there. This is also why people are so skeptical of the quantum world, is because of common sense.

Yes Brass Dragon! Do not trust your senses (or your reason) in fact don't think for your self. Trust the physicists and their equations!

GOD I hate crazy Physicists!

[/rant]

[Fukr]

GOD I hate crazy Physicists!

[/rant]

You need to able to open your mind a little more. Do you think Quantum is a dominating theory in particle physics because lazy scientists dreamed up some spurious excuse for an answer so they wouldn't have to do their jobs? This "non-sensical" theory is the foundation for more scientific research than ever before. Merely suggesting that scientists (who've chosen and worked hard to get to their positions, mind you) are a bunch of mentally lethargic phonies is preposterous.

Just because something is hard to believe, doesn't mean it's not true.

Edited June 29, 2007 by Fukr

[DavidOdden]

Do you think Quantum is a dominating theory in particle physics because lazy scientists dreamed up some spurious excuse for an answer so they wouldn't have to do their jobs?...

Merely suggesting that scientists (who've chosen and worked hard to get to their positions, mind you) are a bunch of mentally lethargic phonies is preposterous.

I take it that English isn't your native language and you don't know the difference between "crazy" and "lazy".

[MarkH]

See Alfred Landé’s critiques and recommendations in:

From Dualism to Unity in Quantum Physic (1960)

New Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1965)

Quantum Mechanics in a New Key (1973)

And a series of articles he wrote in the American Journal of Physics.

Then a book by Carver Mead (which is not consistent with Landé):

Collective Electrodynamics (2002)

An Objectivist who has written about Quantum Mechanics on various Internet forums is Travis Norsen. (There are others but I don't recall them offhand.)

Edited June 29, 2007 by MarkH

[Moebius]

Such arbitrary statements are the result of "scientists" who would rather daydream and make up mathematical equations than actually do research.

More non-sensicle gibberish. The universe doesn't "need" anything

Completely false. Nothing exists to you but the world continues. I fail to see how such a statement "got the wheels turning in your brain"

Yes Brass Dragon! Do not trust your senses (or your reason) in fact don't think for your self. Trust the physicists and their equations!

GOD I hate crazy Physicists![/rant]

It occurred to me that these were probably the same type of reactions that Newton got when he proposed gravity, and then that Einstein got when he proposed Relativity.

Look, I don't pretend to be a physicist, or to understand quantum physics. It simply has never interested me enough. Subatomic particles can travel faster than light? Great! They can't? Oh well. But how can you refute something that you don't even understand what it is that the others are saying in the first place? Or perhaps you do understand, and can provide a better argument against it than ZOMG THIS IS TOTAL GIBBERISH.

I'm not saying to take everything a physicist say for granted and never use your mind to determine things for yourself. But don't dismiss things out of ignorance.

[Fukr]

I take it that English isn't your native language and you don't know the difference between "crazy" and "lazy".

These are not singular quack scientists with ludacris ideas about the universe, these studies are accepted in the scientific community and are widley regarded as the foundation of our universe. To disparage such arguments can be of validity, but perhaps should be accompanied by valid arguments rather than to say respected researchers and theorists are just "crazy".

The quip was rather good, though. Commendations to you.

Edited June 30, 2007 by Fukr

[RationalBiker]

these studies are accepted in the scientific community and are widley regarded as the foundation of our universe. To disparage such arguments can be of validity, but perhaps should be accompanied by valid arguments rather than to say respected researchers and theorists are just "crazy".

You do realize that the highlighted part of your statement also does not constitute valid argumentation, right? Consensus doesn't make things correct either. In fact, consensus doesn't even keep things from being wildly irrational.

[DavidOdden]

These are not singular quack scientists with ludacris ideas about the universe, these studies are accepted in the scientific community and are widley regarded as the foundation of our universe.

This is Ludacris, fyi. We've got a number of separate questions here, such as what the specific ideas are, who believes them, and whether they are ludicrous, simply wrong, or having some merit. I take it that you think there is some version of quantum physics which you think is correct. Perhaps you can describe it briefly, and say what facts constitute proof of its correctness. Something that is ludicrous is extrapolating from a mathematical model to an ontological interpretation that lacks empirical support, as is any model which countenances A&^A. Skip the sociological arguments and concentrate on the experimental proof.

[John McVey]

Skip the sociological arguments and concentrate on the experimental proof.

This reminds me of a thought I once had. It is said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. I totally disagree, and I have never accepted that assertion. Any claim, extraordinary or otherwise, needs only such proofs as required to demonstrate their validity. Extraordinariness is irrelevant. A search for more proof than the facts indicate is actually required is really just an exercise in looking for things to club people over the head with to beat them into submission. That is not science, and people who demand such treatment are not good scientists.

It's the same principle in all general problem solving. Sometimes you can spend great amounts of time and money investigating a problem and then discover that the solution is actually a dirt cheap two-minute job to explain and fix. Similarly, you can take a quick glance at a problem and state that the solution will be costly and time-consuming to specify and implement. Either way, so be it. What is, is. Explaining yourself to the holder of the chequebook is easy when the holder recognises this, but can degenerate into the worst form of mere office politics when the holder does not, hence material for Dilbert cartoons.

Anyway, as to QM, here's an old question: if wave functions do not collapse until observed, how did anything ever arise in the first place before there was any conscious life at all? Run with that thought and you definitely get consciousness independent and controlling of existence, ie mysticism. I recall QM being mocked by a science journalist in an article somewhere, that QM meant that Pluto did not and could not actually exist until Clyde Tombaugh created it with his observation, and that religionists reacted to this conclusion with glee. He was right to make that mockery, as were the religionists right to suspect easy prey. When a theory or an interpretation of that theory by its nature leads to that kind of dead end and in total defiance of the real axioms of existence then you know very well that, yes, it has to be responded to with "OMG THAT IS TOTAL GIBBERISH" even when you're not a physicist.

One Dr Hans Schantz wrote an article called "Philosophical Premises of Quantum Mechanics", which showed the heavy influence of fashionable upper-class mysticism upon physicists in the late 19th century (you'll also see this depicted in period drama etc where the rich conduct seances at the drop of a hat), and another called "Aristotle, Plato, and Electromagnetism" whose details I don't recall (I think they are also different to Dr Norsen's work, even if there is some overlap). I can't find the articles online, and it looks as though the email address I found during my searches is also nonfunctional. If anyone has these or knows someone who might have them then it would be interesting to read them again.

JJM

[Tenure]

The universe 'needs' us to collapse wave-functions? So... before we existed, it must have kind of sucked to be the universe, eh? I've got a crazy, pretty wild theory here - but what if the reason we percieve such spurious stuff in the Quantum level is because our minds aren't evolved to deal with the quantum laws?

Ok, I'll admit it's not mine (Dawkin's actually) but the idea is not that we could never understand the quantum level, but that Reason requires things that we've learnt to be familiar with - an example would be that we see a rock as a solid object, rather than billions of atoms with tons of space between them. I'd argue that yes, scientists are being lazy if they assume magical rules that go beyond what is logically possible.

We didn't assume human hands have some special ability to 'collapse' atoms together so we could hold a rock; why should we believe that the quantum level is any more special?

[Moebius]

Something that is ludicrous is extrapolating from a mathematical model to an ontological interpretation that lacks empirical support, as is any model which countenances A&^A.

I don't think it's necessarily ludicrous. Unproven or incomplete perhaps, but not ludicrous.

Relativity for example wasn't really testable at the time of its inception. But I don't think it was any more ludicrous then than it is now that we're capable of shooting subatomic particles out of electromagnets at extreme velocities.

[DavidOdden]

It is said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. I totally disagree, and I have never accepted that assertion. Any claim, extraordinary or otherwise, needs only such proofs as required to demonstrate their validity. Extraordinariness is irrelevant.

Yeah, this is a commonly spewed slogan that we hear often as a statement encapsulating the demand for responsible conduct of science, and yet it really is the epitome of the application of philosophical evil to the conduct of science. The implication is that if your claim is "similar" to other scientific claims, then you don't need to apply a very high standard of proof to the claim. So if it is socially agreed that such-and-such is the case, then an "ordinary" claim is one that is like others, so its respectability and truth is derived second-hand from the fact of it being like other claims that are accepted.

I find this tendency to socialization of science to be on the rise, to the point that people can't cite the actual experimental details that establish some new claim, they only know that it is a "well supported claim", as determined by citation indices and the flurry of supporting references mentioned in a paper.

Anyway, as to QM, here's an old question: if wave functions do not collapse until observed, how did anything ever arise in the first place before there was any conscious life at all? Run with that thought and you definitely get consciousness independent and controlling of existence, i.e mysticism.

Well, the thing is that isn't what they really mean, I don't think. But that's an example of the other "words don't mean anything" problem. From what I can tell, "observed" doesn't really mean "observed", it means "interacts with something". The underlying mysticism is latently there, via the idea that the universe is "observing" a particle/wave.

I don't think it's necessarily ludicrous. Unproven or incomplete perhaps, but not ludicrous.

Look again at how I said it. I'm saying that an unsupported extrapolation is ludicrous. I'm not even considering the content of the claim, I'm saying that we should not give any consideration to the claim until it has been given the necessary experimental testing, and to seriously entertain the idea in advance of evidence is ludicrous. Evidence first, conclusion second.

[Tenure]

Ah, found the link to the lecture I was talking about (where Dawkin's gives his hypothesis:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/98

I don't know if you guys have heard of the TED conference, but if you go to the above link, you can also visit all the other videos of previous speakers. There's a lot of really intelligent people speaking about really good stuff. There might be some subjectivist stuff, maybe a bit of pseudo-science creeping in, but the whole conference is a celebration of the human mind and our capability to achieve, so it's pretty rare I think. I hope I can one day give a lecture on Theatre there one day.

Edit: Just reading the description of the video - it reads a bit like he's saying, "the human mind will never understand quantum mechanics, and anything could happen". That's not the conclusion he comes to, just saying in advance.

Edited July 1, 2007 by Tenure

[John McVey]

Well, the thing is that isn't what they really mean, I don't think. ... From what I can tell, "observed" doesn't really mean "observed", it means "interacts with something". The underlying mysticism is latently there, via the idea that the universe is "observing" a particle/wave.

If memory serves me, CI actually states that consciousness is needed, which is what Schrodinger mocked, yes? In any case, even take away consciousness and the question still stands. How can any wave function collapse, thereby generating a something, if all that exists to begin with is a big pile of uncollapsed wave functions incapable of interacting with anything? Is the formation of the universe the result of the Fat Man eating That Leaf?

JJM

[Robert J. Kolker]

I'd like to reffer you to the theory of elementary waves by Lewis E Little which succesfully resolves all contradictions of Ouantum Phenomena. Check on www.yankee.us.com/TEW/TEW96paper.html.

Albert Einstein said "You believe in a dice-playing God and I in perfect laws in the world of thing existing as real objects"

Maybe not.

See http://www.objectivescience.com/articles/t...still_fails.htm

The author Travis Norsen is a physicist who is also an Objectivist.

See also: http://www.objectivescience.com/articles/dh_tew.htm

Bob Kolker

[Atlas51184]

Can somebody please explain to me why it is an invalid argumentation of physicists to say that some sub-molecular laws of physics violate against the law of identity?

Indeterminism and quantum weirdness isn't thrust on us by facts or experiment, as too many physicists insist. You can read about a completely causal non-weird interpretation of QM here.

Here is a link to an archive of Norsen's papers.

And I'd agree too with Norsen, Harriman, and Bob Kolker; TEW is crank science.

Two good books on this stuff, btw, are Quantum non-Locality and Relativity by Tim Maudlin, and Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics by J.S. Bell.

[punk]

I've been recently looking into the papers of people trying to show that quantum mechanics is nothing more than a probabilistic approximation over some chaotic dynamical theory.

The idea is roughly this:

When we look at a coin flip we are watching a deterministic process, we just pretend it is probabilistic because the system is sufficiently complex (i.e. chaotic in the technical sense) that for practical purposes we aren't really able to know enough about the system to predict the outcome.

The idea then is quantum theory is like probability theory for the coin flip, except that the underlying dynamics are substantially more chaotic than those for the coin, so the higher order of magnitude of the "chaos" is such that instead of it looking like a standard probability theory it looks like quantum mechanics.

It is all still very rough and in an early stage, but you can show that chaotic systems exhibit a natural "quantization" in that if you have a system with multiple attractors you can think of orbits around an attractor as representing the "quantum state" associated with the attractor.

They have other arguments for similar structures of the above sort, that is just the one I remember.

The point though is that a chaotic system is deterministic in the conventional sense and obeys conventional notions of logic while at the same time being (for practical purposes) probabilistic.

[Capitalism Forever]

*** Mod's note: Merged with earlier topic. - sN ***

a complete theory of atoms (which was not given until after quantum physics was discovered).

To be more precise: ... which has not been given to this day. Quantum physics is not a meaningful theory.

Edited August 18, 2009 by softwareNerd
Merged topics

[Robert J. Kolker]

To be more precise: ... which has not been given to this day. Quantum physics is not a meaningful theory.

The Standard Model has correctly predicted all non-gravitational physical phenomena to correct to twelve decimal places. This is meaningless? There has never been a better physical theory every proposed. It predicts right on the mark.

Bob Kolker

Edited October 20, 2007 by Robert J. Kolker

[Capitalism Forever]

The Standard Model has correctly predicted all non-gravitational physical phenomena to correct to twelve decimal places.

Okay, I'll give your quantum physicist a hydrogen atom and if he predicts where exactly he'll find the electron, I'll give him ten thousand dollars.

Quantum theory does not even pretend to be complete. And to be meaningful, a theory needs to make statements that are consistent with the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness.

[Adrian Hester]

Okay, I'll give your quantum physicist a hydrogen atom and if he predicts where exactly he'll find the electron, I'll give him ten thousand dollars.

Quantum theory does not even pretend to be complete. And to be meaningful, a theory needs to make statements that are consistent with the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness.

Okay, I agree it's incomplete. I also agree that the standard interpretation (and quite a few of the non-standard ones) disagrees with the axioms. This does not make the physical theory itself meaningless, however--when it does make predictions, they've been borne out spectacularly by experiment. Calling it "meaningless" is an exaggeration; incomplete and philosophically unfounded, yes, but meaningless, no.

[Robert J. Kolker]

Okay, I'll give your quantum physicist a hydrogen atom and if he predicts where exactly he'll find the electron, I'll give him ten thousand dollars.

Quantum theory does not even pretend to be complete. And to be meaningful, a theory needs to make statements that are consistent with the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness.

It does not have to be -complete-. No physical theory is complete to this date. But it has to be -right-. The quantum Standard Model predicts the behavior (in the statistical sense) of all states of matter (not involving gravitation) to 12 decimal points of accuracy. The transistor cannot be modeled or designed without quantum physics. The computer you are using now is possible only because of the underlying quantum theory. It took two quantum physicists and an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Lab to produce the first working field effect transistor in 1947. Without quantum physics we would only have vacuum tubes.

By the way classical electrodynamics predicts that atoms will collapse. The electrons will radiate their energy in a fraction of a second and collapse on the nucleus. So quantum physics is the only theory that explains why atoms are stable. In addition the Pauli Exclusion Principle based on the four quantum numbers pertaining to bound electrons and their orbitals explains why the periodic table of the elements works. This principle calculates all the possible orbitals.

One cannot predict exactly where an electron will be and what its momentum is simultaneously. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which is supported empirically.

The quantum theory of spin will predict correctly how an array of electrons put through a Stern-Gerlach magnet will spit into two beams, corresponding to the two spin states. Classical electrodynamics predicts the electrons will be scattered symmetrically in all directions, which is incorrect.

Quantum theory correct predicts and explains the light spectra from atoms. Classical theory does. Quantum theory explains how to invert quantum states to get coherent emissions of photons from a gas or solid. It is known as a laser. Classical physics can make no such prediction or explanation. No quantum physics, no lasers. Meaningless?

Shall I go on and tell you how this "meaningless theory" is so successful. Or do you have a better explanation?

Bob Kolker