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Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

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Re: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

#21

Post by acqq »

spacehome wrote: post #18

Yes! But the best theory is not Copenhagen or Pilot Wave. Eliezer Yudkowski has a brilliant treatise on the Many Worlds interpretation here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ that really should be required reading for anyone that wants to talk intelligently on the subject. Edit: seriously, don't even bother reading the article. It (like most science journalism) is garbage. Take the time to work…

So please explain in a few sentences what is that that Yudkowski writes, did he make any new contribution to the standard model or made something else or do you agree that the standard model is the most researched and most usable model up to now, and he just made a lot of posts where he just writes a lot of text?

I see a lot of links in the article you gave, but I don't understand what we're supposed to discover in Yudkowski's writings after trying to follow most of them. There's a lot of free text, not much physics. The standard model is a lot of smart formulas supported by the decades of expensive elaborate measurements (and vice versa), however his texts look more like writings of some philosophy student who knows a little of the math than like a physicist's material. I'd also really welcome opinions of professional physicists.

Edit: Wikipedia entry about him seems to fit my impression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky "Yudkowsky (...) is an American blogger, writer, and advocate for Friendly artificial intelligence (...) Largely self-educated."

Re: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

#22

Post by thedufer »

cabinpark wrote: post #17
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misrepresenting physicists. There have been many many different attempts to talk about quantum theory on an ontological level. Case in point, the widely debated interpretations: copenhagen, many worlds, bohemian etc. However, one reason that physicists don't spend too much time thinking about what quantum theory really means (besides laziness and bad science) is because we know that quantum theory is not the…

I agree and disagree with what you're saying. I agree it is laziness and bad science that physicists stopped caring about the philosophical underpinnings of quantum mechanics but I disagree that it was because quantum mechanics not being the ultimate theory. The reason most physicists don't think about the philosophical underpinnings has more to do with the way quantum mechanics is taught. Many of the founders were i…

My understanding is that the pilot wave theory is a non-local hidden variable theory, which doesn't contradict Bell's theorem at all. Of course, this presents ftl information transfer, presumed to be impossible, which is part of the reason such theories have been unpopular for so long.

Re: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

#23

Post by X4 »

spacehome wrote: post #18

Yes! But the best theory is not Copenhagen or Pilot Wave. Eliezer Yudkowski has a brilliant treatise on the Many Worlds interpretation here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ that really should be required reading for anyone that wants to talk intelligently on the subject. Edit: seriously, don't even bother reading the article. It (like most science journalism) is garbage. Take the time to work…

May I add David Deutsch's (not yet peer-reviewed, but promising) paper on the Contructor Theory of Information?

The Physics arXiv Blog writes about it here: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/deeper-than-quantu...

For the curious, the link to the paper can be found at the end of the article.

I remember being downvoted by circle of HN folks who weren't comfortable with Information transfer using Quantum Teleportation. Depite efforts to refute it, here's a team that suceeded doing exactly this => http://phys.org/news/2014-05-team-accurately-teleported-quan...

Re: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

#25

Post by thedufer »

MichaelAO wrote: post #12

FAQ about Bohmian Mechanics (it's very accessible): http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/fil...

Its certainly accessible, but I'm not sure how much I trust the authors to understand what they're talking about after point 3.

> But very often the conclusion that is drawn from this observation is that our _knowledge_ about the path followed by the electron causes the interference pattern to disappear.

Although we couch the idea in terms of "knowledge", the usual meaning of that word is not what anyone thinks is actually the trigger. What exactly is meant by "knowledge" is not well-agreed upon, but no one thinks it is something particular to humans (or sentient beings, I suppose) that causes the wavefunction to collapse. It has more to do with whether the information exists - if the particle interacts with something in such a way that its position suddenly becomes deducible, then it collapses. Like I said, the specifics of this are a known hole in the Copenhagen theory - but this "knowledge" tangent is a clear strawman.

Re: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

#26

Post by rrss1122 »

mrfusion wrote: post #13

Any ideas on how quantum computing would be explained with this model? If quantum behavior is really classical like I think they're claiming, wouldn't that mean quantum computers wouldn't provide any benefit?

I'm not sure how quantum computing would be explained, but if it is classical then yes, quantum computers really wouldn't provide any benefit. This brings to mind headlines recently on how so-called quantum computers could not outperform optimized classical computers on algorithms specifically designed to cater to a quantum computer's strengths. Of course, then you would have to argue whether there actually are any quantum computers in existence today, or the quantum computers that are claimed to exist are actually classical computers exploiting some quantum effects.

Re: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

#27

Post by colanderman »

mrfusion wrote: post #13

Any ideas on how quantum computing would be explained with this model? If quantum behavior is really classical like I think they're claiming, wouldn't that mean quantum computers wouldn't provide any benefit?

First keep in mind that quantum computers have not been proven to be more powerful than classical computers. Keep also in mind that "quantum computing", like "classical computing", is a mathematical model that exists outside of reality.

That said, I think the answer to your question is that the "test particle" in the pilot-wave model is always reaching its destination at the speed of light. If however you model the pilot wave with Newtonian physics and place a literal test particle in it, well, even if the particle is moving very fast, its meandering route will all but guarantee a much slower (likely asymptotically slower) traversal than the pilot-wave test particle.

But IANAP and welcome corrections.

Re: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

#28

Post by wuliwong »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #11
GregBuchholz wrote: post #4

I've liked: Clearing up Mysteries - The Original Goal http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmystery.pdf " ...we must keep in mind that Einstein's thinking is always on the ontological level; the purpose of the EPR argument was to show that the QM state vector cannot be a representation of the "real physical situation" of a system. Bohr had never claimed that it was, although his strange way of expressing himself often…

You are misrepresenting physicists. There have been many many different attempts to talk about quantum theory on an ontological level. Case in point, the widely debated interpretations: copenhagen, many worlds, bohemian etc. However, one reason that physicists don't spend too much time thinking about what quantum theory really means (besides laziness and bad science) is because we know that quantum theory is not the…

If that was the case, they will be waiting for eternity. There will never be a complete theory of everything, just ask Godel. :)

Re: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

#30

Post by voyou »

ben0x539 wrote: post #19
bitwize wrote: post #15

Interesting. Maybe this will discourage chuckleheads and ne'er-do-wells from citing "quantum physics" as the justifixation for their particular variety of woo? Probably not, but one can hope!

If you can't bullshit your way through criticism with vague-sounding phrases like “As the particles move along, they feel the wave field generated by them in the past and all other particles in the past”, you're not trying hard enough. :v This magical bracelet is powered by the wave field shaping the contours of the superfluid of space time! Carrying you through life on positive pilot waves!

I can imagine supporters of homeopathy would have a great time drawing unfounded conclusions from the bit in that article that talks about fluids exhibiting a "path memory".
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