181–190 of 191 posts
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Many are terrible.
I think it takes a very narrow understanding of physics discourse to call the particle a terrible metaphor. What's next, entirely discarding the teaching of newtonian physics in high school?
“Particle” isn’t great but it beats “point particle”
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> "magic" is already a fairly well known term in quantum computing literature which is fine, but the point is still valid. who looked at the state of science education in today's world and though that "magic" was a word that belonged anywhere near legitimate discourse? and more importantly WHY?
it's a cool word
"Einstein cast gravity not as a force but as the geometric bending of space and time. In a popular analogy, the fabric of space-time is like the flat expanse of a mattress, and a massive object like a star is like a bowling ball sitting on top. The weight of the bowling ball compresses the mattress, forming a dimple — matter tells space-time how to curve. In this analogy, a planet is like a smaller ball. If it rolls…
I never liked the mattress analogy, because if gravity is the bending of the mattress, what is pulling the ball down the slope?
They use that to explain why you don't feel acceleration when you jump off a building or out of a plane.
They say you DO feel it when you are standing, because the earth is impeding you and pushing you away from the geodesic you naturally want to follow.
So it is counterintuitive. the standing still person is being accelerated/pushed. The freefall person is free.
John wheeler said "Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve". I think it explains the circular nature.
Mass curves spacetime, that changes how mass moves , mass moving to a new position changes the curvature, that changes how the mass will move next. The dimple in the mattress staying with the mass.
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I never liked the mattress analogy, because if gravity is the bending of the mattress, what is pulling the ball down the slope?
I am not an expert at all but I believe the rough idea is that in General Relativity, everything follows a geodesic. The straightest possible path through curved spacetime. They use that to explain why you don't feel acceleration when you jump off a building or out of a plane. They say you DO feel it when you are standing, because the earth is impeding you and pushing you away from the geodesic you naturally want to…
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With QM there’s no pure point particles.
No, but you can talk about changes in perturbations of fields over time in QFT (which has its own representational issues). A particle is a useful metaphor.
The mathematics of this is a bit too complex to reproduce in a comment here, but in, say, the Earth's gravitational field, taking this effect into account (approximating GR as a field of locally varying clocks, then allowing, e.g., an electron's wavefunction to evolve on that spacetime) would reproduce gravitational acceleration / free fall towards the Earth.
Said differently: this is precisely the kind of nuanced scenario where getting sloppy with metaphors gets you into trouble very quickly. Quantum mechanics in curved spacetime is not to be dabbled with lightly.
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An ant traveling at constant speed on a "scrunched up section of a table cloth" will still take the same amount of time following the same path to get from A to B. Any material analogy requires some kind of stretching or compression.
I agree, the table-cloth is rubber.
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Blame Roger Penrose for the microtubule bullshit. Ironically, he's the opposite of new age, dude won a Nobel prize.
Maybe, just maybe, an eminent physicist who won the Nobel Prize knows more than us. At the very least his ideas deserve consideration instead of ridicule and dismissal. Also as far as I know, Penrose’s main argument is that consciousness can not be computational. If you can’t argue against an idea with reason and resort to name calling, you’re not being rational you’re just being dogmatic and censoring ideas.
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Again, if you disagree with Penrose’s idea, just explain your disagreement. We can now simulate every aspect of consciousness except for long-term memory consolidation, to the extent that you can't tell if you're talking to a conscious person or a computer. The existence of LLMs means that no quantum woo is necessary to explain consciousness. Our brains just do the same thing by different means. In short, Penrose's a…
You’re conflating consciousness with intelligence. Consciousness is subjective experience, there’s no way to know if any other people, much less machines, are conscious.