I feel someone else may have said that, but simply said, what if the phenomenon is a wave, and its observable effect a particle? Isn't it the fact that the wave hits matter that makes it observable / measurable. Doesn't seem incompatible, even with the monitors, with the double slits experiment
Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
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Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#92There have been several books recently that describe the saga of twentieth century quantum physics, culminating in the realisation that entangelement is a real thing that has consequences. My favourite is "The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn" by Louisa Gilder. It's a fun book.
The history is fascinating. I'm waiting for a book that describes the deeper sociological aspect. A book with attitude. For instance, several of the founders of quantum physics had mystico-philosophical things to say about the quantum. But all of this was thrown out the window with the advent of the second world war. Physics became overrun by calculations. It took quite a while for people to get around to thinking about entanglement again. John Bell struggled for decades to get people to notice his work on this. Even the guy that invented the laser was met with stern disbelief when he presented his results to the "elders". Partly this is science just doing its thing, but there also does seem to be a history of science being dragged, kicking and screaming. Especially with quantum physics.
Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#93All human models of reality are flawed. It is improbable that our small minds will ever comprehend the nature of the universe in it's entirety. Each answer uncovers more questions, more paradoxes. That is not to say we should not continue to try to understand the world around us. Only that logic dictates that we proceed with humility.
> All human models of reality are flawed.
Definitely. I wholeheartedly subscribe to this view (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong). The thinking mind will always be confined to models. The way I see it, the questions posed here are an expected wall one will eventually hit when the mind attempts to explain something that is fundamentally inexplicable - i.e the nature of existence.
My current intuition is that the hard philosophical questions posed by probing deep into what matter essentially is are deeply linked to the hard problem of consciousness.
I'll make an even bolder claim, which is that both of these questions arise from a misunderstanding of what consciousness actually is and that no less than a Copernican revolution in understanding its role is what's needed to put them to rest.
Of course, that won't be the end of physics, as the mystery is endless - but it might be the start of a deeper humility and appreciation of that mystery.
Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#94Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#95Essentially because of Feynman’s teaching that quantum mechanics works accurately to predict the results of experiments, that that is EVERYTHING, and that “paradoxes” and “intuition” are suspect.
And we can actually listen here Feynman's answer to "what is the meaning of..." and "why" questions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
Note, despite the title of somebody presenting this segment of his talk, he definitely doesn't talk just about "magnets" but really about "the meaning" and "why" questions (the youtube poster got it). About the needed "expected framework" to avoid "perpetual why questions" etc. Even the things that we take for granted, e.g. using electricity in our day to day life, or the eventual "why" we don't fall through the floor can't be properly explained using just our "common" intuition.
In another direction, it works, we are "used" to see some effects of the electrical forces all the time, so that's what is "intuitive" to us because we're familiar with it.
So back to the original title of the article submission here: "why ... shrugged off the paradoxes..." it can be easily seen that once one is getting an answer inside of the expected framework, one doesn't "shrug it off," one is actually satisfied with the answer.
Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a nice explanation but doesn't it give the impression that if we could find a better way to do that experiment, we could find a way around the problem, when instead it's a fundamental limit on what we can know about a quantum system?
But isn't the reason why it is a fundamental problem, that fundamentally there is nothing smaller to throw?
The problem is that fundamentally, there is a fixed amount of information that there is, that has to be distributed over two dimensions. Particles that are constrained to a small area (e.g. photons going through a slit, electrons bound to an atom) simply do not have a well-defined momentum. In fact the effect is something that you can experience with a sharp enough camera lens: as you close the aperture (therefore forcing the light going through it to be in a specific place) you slowly lose resolving power as the light stops behaving nicely and diffracts around/through the aperture.
Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#97> Bohr postulated a distinction between the quantum world and the world of everyday objects. A “classical” object is an object of everyday experience. It has, for example, a definite position and momentum, whether observed or not. A “quantum” object, such as an electron, has a different status; it’s an abstraction. Some properties, such as electrical charge, belong to the electron abstraction intrinsically, but other…
> This is a common error. Macroscopic "everyday" objects don't have a definite position and momentum. Macroscopic objects are quantum objects. But when the mass is big enough, the position and momentum can be defined simultaneously with an error that is so small that you can just ignore the uncertainty and approximate them as classical objects. To put this into simpler terms: Whenever we measure something, we need to…
I don’t think this analogy holds up. Consider the double slit experiment: throw a bunch of basketballs at a wall and see what pattern of hits they leave by looking at where they hit the wall. If the wall is being looked at (observed), we see one pattern. If we look away, conduct the experiment, then check it, we find another.
To me that suggests the act of “observance” effects the probability distribution of likely states. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, then it doesn’t really fall, it just has a probability of having fallen that is not resolved until someone goes to check. How does your analogy account for those effects? For me, it looks like quantum collapse is causing the states of these objects to become “resolved” where at first they were “unresolved” and this suggests we live in a universe that knows how to save on memory and is fundamentally probabilistic.
Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#98because it's really hard, and they need to publish :) -- phd in physics
What, you don't want to be a 10th year grad student then post-doc till your mid-to-late 30's?
Also, to be honest, those problems are kind of boring.
:)
-- phd in physics.
Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> with an error that is so small that you can just ignore the uncertainty and approximate them as classical objects. I’d say that’s the gist of it, that we cannot “just ignore” the uncertainty because it’s too small, because if you do that then your model and the real world are indeed different. Also, at the end of it all what does “too small” mean? “Too small” compared to what? To a galaxy? To a super-nova? To a pla…
[For a technical answer, it's interesting to read the comment by AnimalMuppet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19700979 ] What??? Every Physicist believes that the uncertainty principle apply to any object from galaxies to elementary particles. So if you try to not apply the uncertainly principle in a particle collision in the CERN, they will think that you are crazy. But if you try to add the uncertainty princip…
Maybe "the physical world" is a leaky abstraction!
Re: Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a nice explanation but doesn't it give the impression that if we could find a better way to do that experiment, we could find a way around the problem, when instead it's a fundamental limit on what we can know about a quantum system?
But isn't the reason why it is a fundamental problem, that fundamentally there is nothing smaller to throw?
No, under most interpretations of QM, things literally behave differently at that scale. Under Copenhagen, the wave literally collapses into a fixed position/momentum. The pre measurement wave isn't a statement of our ignorance of the system but rather a description of reality. The many worlds is even more serious in its quantum literalism. Far from pushing around the subject of your experiment with a too-big measuring device, you're actually branching worlds where all predictions of the wave function occur.