Ok, now we can agree on someone.
Is locality an illusion?
- Thread starter Magical Realist
- Start date
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
He's doing Six Wives of Henry VIII and King Arthur. I assume minus the ice capades bit. The tour isn't coming anywhere near Texas so I'll probably have to give it a miss. Although I have been known to schedule a vacation around an interesting show.There's another Wakeman fan out there? I thought I was the only one?
(I confess, I doubt I'd like his concerts. His style has changed dramatically. He went from prog rock to what I can only describe as elevator music sometime in the middle 80's.)
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I used to think that too. But I am assured by people who seem to know that is not the case. The uncertainty is built in. What I don't buy is the popular notion that consciousness is involved.
Эти ваши "осведомлённые" люди могут дать определение сознанию?
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Yes. It is not a measurement problem. It is a property of our physical world. We can't dodge it or measure our way out of it.
If it were merely a measurement problem, we could freeze the particles down to absolute zero, where they would presumably stop moving, and then we could simply measure their position and momentum (zero) at the same time.
But in reality, the particles do not cooperate. Instead of freeing in-place and sitting nice and demurely where we can measure them like little billiard balls, what happens is the particles - yes, even atoms - smear out into a fuzzy poorly-defined soup, called a Bose-Einstein condensate. We can now no longer say, "this atom is here and that atom is there"; we lose the position precision and get "a puddle of this-ish and that-ish".
Hopefully, much less popular now that there'e been a lot of explanation.
Observation is a terrible word. A better word is interaction. All that is required for a system to decohere is for it to interact with its environment.
This why it practically only works on subatomic scales. You'd have a tough time getting an entire cat (10^27 atoms) into a superposed state - and an even harder time preventing it from interacting with any particles in its environment.
For one, it would have to be in a vacuum, and for two, it couldn't have any transfer of EM, such as heat (AKA infrared radiation).
That's the function the box serves. It isn't merely to prevent prevent sight. It must prevent all forms of "communication" between inside and outside. It is impossible to build a real box that does not transfer radiation, such as heat.
Notice there are no humans, with their probing peepers, required to be hovering anywhere nearby.
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TheVat
Valued Senior Member
I note the connection between Rick Wakeman and quantum theory: in Lisztomania, for which RW composed the soundtrack, Liszt and a Countess are stuffed inside a piano and left on train tracks. Until we open the piano, we can't know if they're still alive or not. But THEY know.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Well, technically, only 50% of the time do they know.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Yes, that's a widespread misconception, disseminated by merchants of quantum woo. The confusion seems to be due to the language used in the early days of QM, about "observers". Measurable properties such as momentum or energy were often referred to as "observables", obtained by operating mathematically on the wave function by QM operators. So speaking of "observers" came naturally. Nowadays people tend to speak of "interactions" making manifest the properties of a QM entity. After all, the "observer" invariably interacts with the QM system by means of some inanimate device when he makes his observation.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Here's a key paragraph from that paper I linked:
QUOTE
What is my point here? It is that the quantum mechanical wave function is a theoretical construct that we invented to deal with our observations of physical phenomena. As such, it seems reasonable that we derive our understanding of it according to how we use the concept. Stapp’s (and Bohr’s) pragmatic account of wave functions is intimately tied to state preparation and measurement, both of which are described in terms of operational specifications that lie wholly outside the formalism of quantum mechanics. Prior to the preparation of a system, the wave function is not even defined and after the measurement the wave function ceases to have a referent. To extrapolate this notion of the wave function to being a fundamental building block of nature is an enormous leap that necessitates dropping all references to the operational specifications that gave wave functions their meanings in the first place.
UNQUOTE
What he's getting at is that the wave function is not a real entity, a thing in itself, though we can all too easily come to treat it as if it were. It is a description of an entity, that we construct. This seems to fit in with Rovelli's relational idea. There can be different descriptions from different viewpoints.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
No it’s a “wave function”, not an actual wave. Schrödinger’s equation is actually not a true wave equation but a diffusion equation, because it has only a 1st time derivative not a 2nd derivative. It’s a mathematical representation of the square root of a probability density. As such it has no medium.
Then how do you distinguish a particle from a wave?
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Non sequitur.
What is the illogic?
That you're now posting in English?
So, you lied when you said you couldn't post in English.
Мартин, я учила английский в школе, как и все нормальные российские ученики. Это у вас в штатах среднее образование отсталое, и вы кроме своего испорченного английского ничего больше не знаете. Но мне неудобно писать на английском, потому что раскладка клавиатуры непривычна. Это сильно тормозит и отнимает время.