• Solving the metaphysical dilemma proposed by Quantum Mechanics
    143 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Lenni;28685074]By types of quantum state evolution I assume you mean the states of having wave-properties versus having particle-properties. We understand each type of state evolution. We understand when each type of state evolution relevant. We can predict the behaviour of both wave and particle states perfectly well. The rest is just packaging, which does have its own merit, but has nothing to do with science per say.[/QUOTE] 1.) I never said this had to do with science and 2.) It has everything to do with science, because we don't understand WHY the wave packet is collapsing. I mean, the Copenhagen Interpretation says that it's our observing it that causes it to collapse into one point. [editline]19th March 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Lenni;28685074]We can predict the behaviour of both wave and particle states perfectly well. [/QUOTE] We can predict the behavior of the waves, but not once they collapse, we have no idea where it's going to end up. That's the point. We CAN predict the probability, but nothing with certainty.
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[QUOTE=Meader;28685097]1.) I never said this had to do with science and 2.) It has everything to do with science, because we don't understand WHY the wave packet is collapsing. I mean, the Copenhagen Interpretation says that it's our observing it that causes it to collapse into one point.[/QUOTE] Ok, let's start with one simple premise: all scientific theories are falsifiable BY DEFINITION. Is any given answer to the question, "why do wave packets collapse," falsifiable? Not necessarily. Is the multiverse-answer falsifiable? Well, not really. You would have to show that the packet collapse is deterministic, but even if you did that, introducing a multiverse on that background would be inductive and thus illegal, as per Occam's Razor. The Copenhagen Interpretation, however, [i]is[/i] falsifiable, since we can see that observing (depending on how you define it) causes a collapse. It doesn't induce any new metaphysical concepts or realities. I don't know if it excludes the possibility of a packet collapse being deterministic, but that would still be falsifiable, and it's entirely possible to begin testing a new hypothesis saying "packet collapses into a single point occur at observation according to X equation(s)." The multiverse theory is still entirely unnecessary. [editline]19th March 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Meader;28685097]We can predict the behavior of the waves, but not once they collapse, we have no idea where it's going to end up. That's the point. We CAN predict the probability, but nothing with certainty.[/QUOTE] I said we could predict it's behaviour, not the exact point of collapse. We're not in disagreement.
Anything other than the Copenhagen Interpretation is basically spiritual. [editline]19th March 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Meader;28685097]1.) I never said this had to do with science and 2.) It has everything to do with science, because we don't understand WHY the wave packet is collapsing. I mean, the Copenhagen Interpretation says that it's our observing it that causes it to collapse into one point.[/QUOTE] That's totally not what the Copenhagen Interpretation says. The Copenhagen Interpretation says that QM is purely a mathematical system of theories based on the fact that observing inherently makes you a part of a system and no system is truly isolated. The Copenhagen Interpretation, more than anything, refutes that QM has a basis in actual, physical reality.
I like the copenhagen one the most so far seeing as its the only one I can understand.
How dare you misspell Copenhagen so grossly!
yeap
Sorry leni, I shall beat myself for my incompitence.
[QUOTE=Lenni;28684981]But I didn't just disagree, you were wrong. Like, lmgtfy-wrong. Not worth arguing about.[/QUOTE] It's hilarious how you're both arrogant and wrong. Almost the whole of physics theory is interpretation of data and drawing conclusions from it. [QUOTE=Lenni;28684981]So essentially the supposed purpose of the entire multiverse theory can be abbreviated into the hypothesis "quantum mechanics are deterministic". You don't need any metaphysical concept for that. <insert link to wikipedia article on Occam's Razor>[/QUOTE] No. Are you asking me for a full explanation of the multiverse theory? You just asked me how the multiverse existing would affect physical reality at all and I answered, so you changed the question.
[QUOTE=Lenni;28685265] The multiverse theory is still entirely unnecessary. [/QUOTE] and yet it's one of the top believed theories. And it CAN be proven wrong by any other theory being proven right. The point shouldn't be to completely tear my ideas apart and say they're useless. [editline]19th March 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Barblunder;28685311]That's totally not what the Copenhagen Interpretation says. The Copenhagen Interpretation says that QM is purely a mathematical system of theories based on the fact that observing inherently makes you a part of a system and no system is truly isolated. The Copenhagen Interpretation, more than anything, refutes that QM has a basis in actual, physical reality.[/QUOTE] The Copenhagen Interpretation does not say that at all, because it can't. It asks exactly WHAT is a part of the system and who counts as an observer vs just another part of the evolving quantum system (thus Schrodinger's Cat). \It says observables are sharp-valued only when measured.
Schrodinger's Cat isn't actually how the Copenhagen Interpretation believes reality to operate. It simply states that measuring a system requires you to be a part of it and sets limits on the maximum possible accuracy of measurements. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The quantum mechanical formalism does not provide physicists with a &#8216;pictorial&#8217; representation: the &#968;-function does not, as Schrödinger had hoped, represent a new kind of reality. Instead, as Born suggested, the square of the absolute value of the &#968;-function expresses a probability amplitude for the outcome of a measurement. Due to the fact that the wave equation involves an imaginary quantity this equation can have only a symbolic character, but the formalism may be used to predict the outcome of a measurement that establishes the conditions under which concepts like position, momentum, time and energy apply to the phenomena.
[QUOTE=Lenni;28685074]By types of quantum state evolution I assume you mean the states of having wave-properties versus having particle-properties. We understand each type of state evolution. We understand when each type of state evolution is relevant. We can predict the behaviour of both wave and particle states perfectly well. The rest is just packaging, which does have its own merit, but has nothing to do with science per say, and no matter how we choose to explain it, the physical manifestations will remain the same.[/QUOTE] No, the physical manifestations do NOT remain the same because if the universe is probabilistic our understanding stops where it is, whereas if it's deterministic there are further principles guiding it that we can discover and use to describe systems with greater accuracy. I have been saying this in some form or another since we started arguing and you've just ignored it. Regardless, you seem to assume that the multiverse is not a falsifiable idea but the theory is still in its infancy and so far there is no law out there that explicitly prohibits observing alternate universes. It's not just some spiritual concept or way of thinking about things, it's been posited that that's how the world actually works so its study is of scientific and not just philosophical importance. [editline]19th March 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Barblunder;28691014]Schrodinger's Cat isn't actually how the Copenhagen Interpretation believes reality to operate. It simply states that measuring a system requires you to be a part of it and sets limits on the maximum possible accuracy of measurements.[/QUOTE] No, it is how it believes reality operates but it's referring to a different part of the interpretation, namely that an unobserved system exists in a superposition of its possible states.
[QUOTE=Barblunder;28691014]Schrodinger's Cat isn't actually how the Copenhagen Interpretation believes reality to operate. It simply states that measuring a system requires you to be a part of it and sets limits on the maximum possible accuracy of measurements.[/QUOTE] Schrodinger's Cat is EXACTLY how the Copenhagen is believed. It then asks the question "If mental agency stops the regress, does mental agency play some essential role in the world being sharp-valued? Thus my addition to the multiverse theory is in fact valid.
Taking a non-instrumentalist view of QM, believing it describes reality rather than a symbolic view used for predictions, seems quasi religious. Most are inherently unfalsifiable. [editline]19th March 2011[/editline] Niels Bohr never actually believed that a superposition of states literally, physically existed - just that they were a mathematical necessity under certain conditions.
[QUOTE=Barblunder;28691326]Taking a non-instrumentalist view of QM, believing it describes reality rather than a symbolic view used for predictions, seems quasi religious. Most are inherently unfalsifiable.[/QUOTE] We know it's a view used for predictions. We HAVE no way of describing reality other than a symbolic view. [editline]19th March 2011[/editline] What if the particles aren't moving, but rather the space the particles exist in is what's moving. [editline]19th March 2011[/editline] [quote]Science, Bohm believed, is sure to evolve in totally unexpected ways. He expressed the hope, for example, that future scientists wdl be less dependent on mathematics for modelling reality and will draw on new sources of metaphor and analogy. "We have an assumption now thaes getting stronger and stronger that mathematics is the only way to deal with reality," Bohm said. "Because it's worked so weLl for a while we've assumed that it has to be that way." Indeed, like some other scientific visionaries, Bohm expected that science and art would someday merge. "This division of art and science is temporary," he said. "It didn't exist in the past, and there's no reason why it should go on in the future." Just as art consists not simply of works of art but of an "attitude, the artistic spirit", so does science consist not in the accumulation of knowledge but in the creation of fresh modes of perception. 'The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained."[/quote] Source: [url]http://www.dhushara.com/book/quantcos/bohm/bohm.htm[/url]
So we can't observe a particle without disrupting it,because in order to see it a photon has to bounce off of it and by the time it reaches our eye, it's not really there anymore. That's really obvious, I mean we all realize that we're on a slight time delay from "reality", what with the travel time of the photon from ANYTHING to our eyes, the time delay in processing what's being seen, the transferring that data into something usable (a thought), ect. I imagine a photon traveling happening something like a water bucket relay (called Bucket Brigade by my elementary school physed teacher)[B][/B]. A particle traveling can't leave the fixed spot it's in, because it's surrounded by particles on all other sides, but it has to send some information which it has no way of remembering. So it sends it to the particle next to it along with the coordinates of where it belongs, which keeps sending it down the line particle by particle until it reaches it's final spot. Thus the LOOK of it traveling, and yet nothing is moving except the data. Kind of like a computer. Pixels don't move, they just LOOK like they're moving.
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;28683181]Inertia is [b]the[/b] property of matter.[/QUOTE] Fixed.
You see the particle in that spot when you observe it because it WAS in that spot for that infinitely small amount of time. It was also in all the other spots for the same amount of time, but you can only capture that TINY bit of time that it was in that one spot because it's always moving, but it still looks like it's stopped and that's where it ended up. How do you know the particle you started examining is the same one you observe at the end of the experiment?
"The Copenhagen interpretation is not a homogenous view. This is still not generally recognized. Both James Cushing (1994) and Mara Beller (1999) take for granted the existence of a unitary Copenhagen interpretation in their social and institutional explanation of the once total dominance of the Copenhagen orthodoxy; a view they personally find unconvincing and outdated partly because they read Bohr's view on quantum mechanics through Heisenberg's exposition. But historians and philosophers of science have gradually realized that Bohr's and Heisenberg's pictures of complementarity on the surface may appear similar but beneath the surface diverge significantly. Don Howard (2004, p. 680) goes as far as concluding that "until Heisenberg coined the term in 1955, there was no unitary Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics." The term apparently occurs for the first time in Heisenberg (1955). In addition, Howard also argues that it was Heisenberg's exposition of complementarity, and not Bohr's, with its emphasis on a privileged role for the observer and observer-induced wave packet collapse that became identical with that interpretation. Says he: "Whatever Heisenberg's motivation, his invention of a unitary Copenhagen view on interpretation, at the center of which was his own, distinctively subjectivist view of the role of the observer, quickly found an audience." (p. 677) This audience included people like Bohm, Feyerabend, Hanson, and Popper who used Heisenberg's presentation of complementarity as the target for their criticism of the ortodox view."
[Two Slit Experiment Thoughts] The act of seeing (or maybe knowing...) must take away a variable. Let's say that the particle DOES fragment, that means that the fragments don't appear when the instrument is watching. Does it cause them to not appear at all, or does the device suck them in so quickly it doesn't appear? Maybe it has to do with gravity at such a small scale. Does the instrument have a gravitational pull on the particle?
[QUOTE=Meader;28714914]Does the instrument have a gravitational pull on the particle?[/QUOTE] I don't have the answer to that specific question, but anything with mass has a gravitational pull, it's just that the force is usually very small. In the case of a black hole: it is very large, but on earth the general mass of objects is so small that it is almost always nonexistent.
[QUOTE=Pepin;28715494]I don't have the answer to that specific question, but anything with mass has a gravitational pull, it's just that the force is usually very small. In the case of a black hole: it is very large, but on earth the general mass of objects is so small that it is almost always nonexistent.[/QUOTE] Right, but we're talking about the gravitational pull on a particle, which is so small it's almost nonexistant.
You'd assume that there would be more of a bias towards one side if gravity did affect it.
[QUOTE=Pepin;28715942]You'd assume that there would be more of a bias towards one side if gravity did affect it.[/QUOTE] Unless the gravity was working just as a force in general and was simply strong enough to collapse the wave packet. Think of a light film of water spanning a small gap of about two centimeters in, say, a piece of plastic. It can be over the whole hole as one being. But when a force is applied to that film it collapses into a single drop. It could work the same way.
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