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The Beatle Who Got Away

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Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#51

Post by LanceH »

the-dude wrote: post #33
amyjess wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power The thing about the Beatles is that even after they stopped filling stadiums, they turned to experimental and innovative musical techniques that changed the face of popular music forever. Their best and most beloved work all came after Beatlemania ended... any attractive boy band with a catchy beat could've fulfilled y…

> any attractive boy band with a catchy beat No need to beat around the bush : surely you mean the Stones.

Really he means the 1000 other bands that weren't the Stones or the Beatles. Those two have large catalogs that are played today and will be played 100 years from now.

Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#52

Post by JKCalhoun »

JohnBooty wrote: post #46
quxbar wrote: post #4

I tend to think of The Beatles as a fantastic world-spanning pachinko game. Once Ww2 ended and a mass boom of young people with disposable income crossed with new mass media markets and advances in recording distribution technology, it was inevitable that some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power. Heck, even the stadiums were a modern combination of improved bui…

it was inevitable that some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power. This is a profound misunderstanding of how weird and unlikely the Beatles phenomenon was. Post-WWII acts with catchy tunes and star power were already abundant before the Beatles. They were not special in that regard. What was unique about the cosmic accident that was the Beatles? 1. Happened to b…

> 3. Somehow this popularity crossed over into the US

Death of a young president and a country in mourning. Another unlikely event in history that happened exactly at the right time.

Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#53

Post by simiones »

Retric wrote: post #50
beaconstudios wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's possible that it might be deterministic, but there is not currently any basis for certainty other than the fact that so many things we've seen turned out to be deterministic That's how empirical proof works though - you can't "prove" something conclusively based on evidence, you can only disprove it or continue to add examples of the model matching reality. That's falsifiability. > Currently the most widely co…

You can disprove theories based on hidden information. Locality or determinism pick one.

I'm assuming you're referring to Bell's inequality, but that has little to do with determinism. Bell's inequality says "locality or hidden variables, pick one".

In fact, "superdeterminism" can actually render Bell's inequality moot. That is, you can have locality + hidden variables + superdeterminism. You can't have locality + hidden variables + [statistical independence between the measurement settings and the state you are trying to measure].

The existence of hidden variables is also sometimes called "realism" or "counterfactual definiteness" - since if there are no hidden variables, it means that the question "what would another measurement have shown" or, equivalently, "what state were the particles in before the measurement" doesn't make sense. Indeed, in the Copenhagen Interpretation, particles don't have any meaningful classical "state" before a measurement. For example, if you chose to measure their position, they will have a position, but can have any spin; if instead you measure their spin, they will have a spin, but no definite position. You can't then ask "but what spin would they have had if I had measured their spin instead of their position" - there is no answer to that question according to CI (or, there is an infinity of answers according to MWI).

Note that superdeterminism simply means "the measurement settings on the apparatus depend on the real state of the particles". That is, the particle actually has a property lambda such that if, say, lambda=0, when the particle hits the apparatus and the apparatus is set to measure position, it will show a definite position; whereas is the the particle hits the apparatus when it is set to measure spin it will have a spin. For a different lambda, a different pair of will be expected.

Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#54

Post by JKCalhoun »

amyjess wrote: post #27
quxbar wrote: post #4

I tend to think of The Beatles as a fantastic world-spanning pachinko game. Once Ww2 ended and a mass boom of young people with disposable income crossed with new mass media markets and advances in recording distribution technology, it was inevitable that some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power. Heck, even the stadiums were a modern combination of improved bui…

> some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power The thing about the Beatles is that even after they stopped filling stadiums, they turned to experimental and innovative musical techniques that changed the face of popular music forever. Their best and most beloved work all came after Beatlemania ended... any attractive boy band with a catchy beat could've fulfilled y…

And we owe a lot to Dylan's influence (both musically and chemically).

Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#55

Post by JKCalhoun »

babyshake wrote: post #13
quxbar wrote: post #4

I tend to think of The Beatles as a fantastic world-spanning pachinko game. Once Ww2 ended and a mass boom of young people with disposable income crossed with new mass media markets and advances in recording distribution technology, it was inevitable that some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power. Heck, even the stadiums were a modern combination of improved bui…

The thing that amazes me about the Beatles is that they were led by a musical genius. And then a second member of the band achieved the same level of musical genius (some would say an even greater level of genius). And then within a few years, a third member of the band that was just the rhythm guitarist demonstrated that he also achieved an astonishing level of musical genius. Especially for that time, this was incr…

Paul was already a musical genius — and the two, Lennon and McCartney, needed each other to feed off of. One pushed the other, completed the other's "middle eight", encouraged, made jealous. John and Paul were, each of them, 90% of an amazing band. It's a beautiful thing they found each other.

Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#56

Post by microtonal »

JohnBooty wrote: post #46
quxbar wrote: post #4

I tend to think of The Beatles as a fantastic world-spanning pachinko game. Once Ww2 ended and a mass boom of young people with disposable income crossed with new mass media markets and advances in recording distribution technology, it was inevitable that some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power. Heck, even the stadiums were a modern combination of improved bui…

it was inevitable that some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power. This is a profound misunderstanding of how weird and unlikely the Beatles phenomenon was. Post-WWII acts with catchy tunes and star power were already abundant before the Beatles. They were not special in that regard. What was unique about the cosmic accident that was the Beatles? 1. Happened to b…

8. Having three world-class songwriters in one group that started out as a cover band is a very low-probability event. The number of excellent, instantly recognizable, songs that they wrote over a period of 7 years (1963-1970) is insane.

Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#57

Post by JKCalhoun »

subpixel wrote: post #44
wirrbel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. Especially surprising for a long time to me, given that their early songs seem really simple (She loves you...). And while that may be true, what one must realise is that the Beatles kind of started out as a cover band, as a "live juke box" really playing in clubs. So even before they published the first album they had a routine of hundreds of songs from memory. I think this cannot be underestimated as a…

A big difference is the source material. The Beatles didn’t have a very wide exposure to music, but they had a very deep one. They grew up in an era when American R&B was literally revolutionizing the musical culture of Britain. And in crossing the pond and being selected by disc jockeys with rabid audiences, there was a distillation that took place. So the Beatles in their youth were not just exposed to some America…

Agree, but let's not forget that American kids were beginning to also get served some R&B tailings served up to them by the likes of Elvis and Buddy Holly, etc.

Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#58

Post by microtonal »

oska wrote: post #49
JohnBooty wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was inevitable that some act or another would be the first-to-market with catchy tunes and stadium-filling star power. This is a profound misunderstanding of how weird and unlikely the Beatles phenomenon was. Post-WWII acts with catchy tunes and star power were already abundant before the Beatles. They were not special in that regard. What was unique about the cosmic accident that was the Beatles? 1. Happened to b…

This was a really good answer but I also don't think it invalidates the GP's point. There was a particular set-up at a particular time that meant that pop music was going to go very big and that explains more of The Beatles phenomenal success than your very interesting points do. Your answer explains some of how The Beatles became more than the average pop group but they still ("She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah") start…

She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah

It's She loves _you_, yeah, yeah. Little quirks like that (using second person) set the early Beatles records apart from contemporary boy bands and were a forebode of that they were more than just a boy band.

There was a particular set-up at a particular time that meant that pop music was going to go very big and that explains more of The Beatles phenomenal success than your very interesting points do.

Pop was already big, see Elvis. If The Beatles were not as exceptional as they were, they would have maybe two or three hits and disappear, like most bands of the time. They were exceptional songwriters, who stood relevant for almost a decade, because they infused new ideas (e.g. from avant garde) into pop music. In contrast to e.g. Frank Zappa, they were able to convey these ideas to a large audience.

Around 1969-1970 they started to loose their edge. After a wildly experimental period (~Revolver to Magical Mystery tour) they slowly returned to more conventional Rock & Roll (see e.g. the album Let It Be). If they hadn't broken up in 1970, they would've probably become less relevant after then. E.g. even though McCartney's songwriting was still good in the 70ies, the world had moved on (disco, punk, etc.), with the ex-Beatles becoming less and less relevant. Except perhaps Lennon, who would work with more contemporary artists like Bowie.

Re: The Beatle Who Got Away

#60

Post by simiones »

beaconstudios wrote: post #48
scratcheee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that it might be deterministic, but there is not currently any basis for certainty other than the fact that so many things we've seen turned out to be deterministic that it feels like everything "should" be. >there is a single phenomenon in physics that has any chance of being non-deterministic In other words, we've managed to prove pretty much all of physics is built atop this one single phenomenon. Yo…

> It's possible that it might be deterministic, but there is not currently any basis for certainty other than the fact that so many things we've seen turned out to be deterministic That's how empirical proof works though - you can't "prove" something conclusively based on evidence, you can only disprove it or continue to add examples of the model matching reality. That's falsifiability. > Currently the most widely co…

To be fair, going by pure empiricism, it makes more sense to say that the world is non-deterministic. QM only matches observations iff we assume that the measurement process is truly non-deterministic. The Schrodinger equation can only be used, in practice, to measure probabilities, we don't know of any way to use to predict exact results.

However, philosophically speaking, this is unsatisfactory, since the behavior of the macroscopic world must somehow be reducible to the behavior of its constituents. If Schrodinger's equation were non-deterministic itself, we wouldn't have a problem - we could simply say "the world is nondeterministic, as far as we can see". If it at least was non-linear, with a possibility of chaotic effects, we could say "the world is probably deterministic, but it's impossible to measure it accurately enough to predict any definite outcomes" - but this is not the case.

So, we are stuck with this weird dichotomy between philosophy&logic on one hand and empirical observations on the other. MWI does give an out, but it has extra assumptions that are not directly justified any more than the Born rule (an observer only observes one world), and, more importantly, while it reproduces the Born rule in concept, it neither can derive it quantitatively.

Even worse, MWI can't explain how the classical world, where certain specific quantities are definite for all objects, arises out of the quantum world - the preferred basis problem. For example, a world where we observed some balls having a definite position, but others having a definite spin but not definite position, would be consistent with QM and the Born rule - and this indeed can happen in an experiment with particles. And yet we observe the same observables for all classical objects in our day to day lives.

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