"Quantum Entanglement" isn't that hard a concept...

The concept isn't that hard but applying it in any useful way is. Misusing it in movies is quite easy however. :)
 
It has yet to rear its sweet little head in "psychic workshops" and "crystal energy sharing groups".

Give it time. (or has it ? Entangled relationships? Quantum separations perhaps?)
 
There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
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Feynman said that. My guess, after running through the equations and some of the aspects - such as violations of Bell's Inequality - is that it is still true.
 
iceaura said:
Feynman said that. My guess, after running through the equations and some of the aspects - such as violations of Bell's Inequality - is that it is still true.
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Is it possible that our mental processes are innately unable to understand it and that it is only the logic of successful model testing that has brought us to a point we will forever be a stranger to?

Or do we eventually understand everything once we have had time to internalise it?
 
If we understood QM we wouldn't still be discovering "new" properties of quantum systems, we would have predicted them and looked for them experimentally.
The only real thing we can predict is there are more surprising quantum effects waiting to be discovered. We will encounter them as materials science proceeds apace--I mean, who predicted the quantum Hall effect, or superconducting ceramics?

However GR is a predictive theory and its predictions have been confirmed repeatedly. This is if you will, the big quantum information gap between GR and QM.
 
arfa brane said:
If we understood QM we wouldn't still be discovering "new" properties of quantum systems, we would have predicted them and looked for them experimentally.
The only real thing we can predict is there are more surprising quantum effects waiting to be discovered. We will encounter them as materials science proceeds apace--I mean, who predicted the quantum Hall effect, or superconducting ceramics?

However GR is a predictive theory and its predictions have been confirmed repeatedly. This is if you will, the big quantum information gap between GR and QM.
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My understanding is that QM is highly predictive. I'm guessing you mean that you wish that it was more deterministic and less random?

Regarding people not understanding it. I think people do understand how it works. They just don't understand why it works as it does. It's makes the accurate predictions, we just don't understand the "why" in many cases.

Isn't one of the "interpretations" "just shut up and calculate"?
 
arfa brane said:
If we understood QM we wouldn't still be discovering "new" properties of quantum systems, we would have predicted them and looked for them experimentally.
The only real thing we can predict is there are more surprising quantum effects waiting to be discovered. We will encounter them as materials science proceeds apace--I mean, who predicted the quantum Hall effect, or superconducting ceramics?

However GR is a predictive theory and its predictions have been confirmed repeatedly. This is if you will, the big quantum information gap between GR and QM.
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So to an extent,if a theory is incomplete then we are fooling ourselves(or easily satisfied) if we think we have it sussed?

.....whereas GR may have come to the end of its road and no comparable surprises are to be expected (not that I am qualified to poncificate ;-) )
 
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Seattle said:
My understanding is that QM is highly predictive.
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Then can you explain why the QHE was not predicted, or why perovskite superconductors weren't? Can you explain why research labs are finding unexpected results every year, many of which are hailed as being useful in designing and building quantum computers?
 
arfa brane said:
Then can you explain why the QHE was not predicted, or why perovskite superconductors weren't? Can you explain why research labs are finding unexpected results every year, many of which are hailed as being useful in designing and building quantum computers?
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Even well understood theories have failed to predict many of their consequences, failed to suggest significant phenomena they successfully explained later. Biologists are quite familiar with this.
 
Once we've discovered some quantum effect, explaining it isn't that hard (finding a Hamiltonian that fits, say). QM explains observations but doesn't predict them. And that's a bit hard to understand I suppose.

Again, evolution is not a theory that predicts what will evolve or what form it will have, it really only says that lifeforms will evolve whenever a resource is available to exploit. We can't predict what humans will look like in the far future, but we can predict there's a good chance there won't be any, because unless we diversify we will stop evolving and go extinct like any species.

geordief said:
. . . whereas GR may have come to the end of its road and no comparable surprises are to be expected
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Well, that depends on what you look at. One surprise, I guess, was that string theory can formulate GR.
We still aren't sure about the overall shape of the universe, lots of people are busy trying to restrict the kinds of topological structures that correspond to our observations and so on, I'd say the theory is far from being at the end of its useful life. Nobody knows how many solutions the field equations have, for instance, but anyone can check if a given solution is correct.
 
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