User talk:Ophion/preguntas
Please leave your thoughts here! Ophion 18:50, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
This is one interpretation, and is wrong. I think it is currently in a state of being considered defunct, and probably will be for a while. This is one interpretation, that sounds crazy to start with. I'm not sure where you are, with quantum physics, but this is how it is. I have The Elegant Universe, but I never read it, it was kind of boring for me because I knew the stuff in it already. Nonfiction books are not as sweet if you already know it. Sorry if that sounds like bragging. Anyway, this is how it is:
- Randomness. In the quantum world, everything is random. That's not quite the whole story.
- It is quite a subtle issue and people are still debating what randomness is. Part of the answer is rather simple: randomness is ignorance. When we assign probabilities to events (that's what a wavefunction is), it is because we don't know them precisely. Randomness is the essential aspect of a signal if you're on the receiving end: you will get one of different possible messages, but you don't know which one. This makes the "signal", before you received it, a "random quantity." Here is the ignorance: the emitter DID know, and for the emitter, the signal is of course NOT random. You can get quite far already with the view that randomness describes ignorance. However, the question remains: is all randomness, simply reducible to ignorance? Are there other forms of randomness in nature? (irreducible randomness). Here, one should make a clear distinction between ubiquitous concepts of determinism, causality, and free will.
- Determinism means that there is some causal structure (each event has its own past and future), and that, given all there is to know about an events past, the laws of nature determine uniquely what happens at said event. In other words, there is no "freedom of any choice" anymore.
- However, there is a difference between determinism and randomness. Determinism has something to do with "predicting the future", while randomness has a priori no link with any causal or temporal flow. Randomness applies as well to the past as to the future. Randomness means "one out of many". You have one corpse, and 6 potential murderers. Who did it, is random, until you find more evidence. The outcome of a football game is random (even if the game is over), until you learn about it (by watching the video or hearing it on the radio or something). This where we find this interpretation of quantum theory to be invalid. Conscious collapse? Dipping into metaphysics, religion, and philosophy, somebody actually started thinking that your mind creates the world around you?
- Going into a bit more detail on what we find that these instances of psuedo-randomidity, can you think of any?
- The assignment of your telephone number or zip code.
- Any computer algothirm made to create random numbers.
- The falling of a sharpened pencil stood up on its point.
- The flipping of a coin.
- Your thoughts.
- When we toss a coin, the outcome is said to be random, with a 50/50 chance of either outcome. This is wrong. The closed environment is a chaotic system; the outcome of the toss is entirley determined by the initial variables that go into the "flick" and that these variables are essentially deterministic, however extremley chaotic. If you wanted to try and predict, you would have to take into account normally negligible variables. Equations like E=mc2 can be so short and simple, because it is an approximation—obviously, not all factors are thrown into the equation. In high school physics, you always ignore drag. Do the answers come out right? According to the teacher and the book, but if you did the same ones in a real environment, with drag, the projectile would not land the same place, depending on the situation, it could be micrometers, or miles away. If you stood a pencil up on its point, and let go, there is no telling where it might go! Actually there is, if you could bring in every single variable into a master equation, you could find out exactly where the pencil would land. You would have to know exactly where your fingers where, how much angular momentum you placed on the object when you released. You would have to create a three-dimensinal map of the table surface. You would have to acquire a four-dimensional map of temperature variation, air pressure, humidity, molecular kinetic energy, etc.. That's why it is called chaos. Chaos can be seen as a spectrum. Near-randomness, meaning a near-infinite amount of variables, is at the top, whereas something with one variable, would be at the bottom. If you wanted to determine of Aristotle was mortal, than all you would need as information would be "all humans are mortal" and "Aristotle was a human." If you didn't know what the hell an Aristotle was, it would be random, because you have no information. If you knew that Aristotle was from Greece, that would mean there is a significantly smaller probability that Aristotle is human, because there much more possibilities of different things being in Greece than there are people in Greece.
- Probability as a way of describing situation where we lack complete information. We may have some, but the best we can do now is to approximate it to having none, because we don't have enough compared to what we need. In the quantum world, we rely on a lack of information to predict and test things.
Relatedly:
| Two heads | Two tails | One of each |
There are three outcomes. What is the probability of producing two heads?
- Pulling from the article on Satyendra Nathan Bose: While at the University of Dhaka, Bose wrote a short article called Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta, describing the photoelectric effect and based on a lecture he had given on the ultraviolet catastrophe. During this lecture, in which he had intended to show his students that theory predicted results not in accordance with experimental results, Bose made an embarrassing statistical error which gave a prediction that agreed with observations, a contradiction.
- What are the possibilities of flipping two coins? Two heads/Two tails/One of each. But aren't the coins distinct? Since the coins are distinct, there are two outcomes which produce a head and a tail. The probability of two heads is one-fourth, not one-third. The error was a simple mistake that would appear obviously wrong to anyone with a basic understanding of statistics, and similar to arguing that flipping two fair coins will produce two heads one-third of the time. However, it produced correct results, and Bose realized it might not be a mistake at all.
| Coin 1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Head | Tail | ||
| Coin 2 | Head | HH | HT |
| Tail | TH | TT | |
Since the coins are distinct, there are two outcomes which produce a head and a tail. The probability of two heads is one-fourth.
- Physics journals refused to publish Bose's paper. It was their contention that he had presented to them a simple mistake, and Bose's findings were ignored. He wrote to Albert Einstein, who immediately agreed with him and loved the idea. Physicists stopped laughing when Einstein sent Zeitschrift für Physik to accompany Bose's, which were both published in 1924.
- Also, one more thing digressing a bit. Richard Feynman, once quite beautifully showed probability to work fine in the macro world. Imagine standing up in your bedroom next to your bed holding a bowling ball. Now drop it. What will it do? In a quantum physical sense, the best we can say is "Uhhh, we don't know." It might not even move, it might disappear and reappear on the moon (quantum tunneling). Maybe it is somehow mysteriously connected to another bowling ball, and does the opposite movements as it's partner (quantum entanglement/quantum teleportation, perhaps the bowling ball doesn't actually exist (holographic theory). What Feynman did, was add up every single possible thing it could do, and show that the most probable outcome was to fall and hit the ground. I think I read that in one of Michio Kaku's books (btw he is the featured person of the week on Portal:Science).
I'm sorry that I forgot where I was going with it somewhere in the middle, but there is a lot of info there, not only about the subject, but about other things, as well as me. Hope I said something relevant. — [Mac Davis] (talk)