On Mar 5, 2005, at 8:24 AM, Dan Minette wrote:
The important thing to take away from this quote is the size of the BEC,
several millimeters. That is definitely macroscopic, it's a size that you see on a grade student's ruler.
That is compelling, and not something I'd been aware of earlier.
I've not kept up
with the latest experiments, but I have read papers detailing spacelike
correlations over 10 miles, spacelike correlations without inequalities,
and spacelike correlations of molecules. This aspect of QM has been
rigorously verified.
Some of that I've heard of. This is also very compelling, but I'm not sure that it really pulls the plug on my POV.
What I mean is that showing something like connection over space between photons or even large-scale indeterminacy effects is very interesting, and I don't doubt the legitimacy of the finds. It's the conclusions that I have trouble with.
The elimination of the glass wall is striking but the conclusion many are led to -- that observing an experiment is what changes its outcome -- is what I have trouble with. It imputes a power to consciousness that is, at best, quasi-psychic.
To me the more conservative (!) explanation is that there is definitely something going on, but if we think that it's because we're watching, we're guilty of hubris.
Hmm, analogy time -- the EM spectrum. How many centuries was it thought that visible light was it? And now we know better -- radio waves, for instance, are not visible at all, but they're on the EM continuum. Until our technology had advanced enough, we simply couldn't possibly have been aware of their existence.
So what I'm suggesting is that QM is pointing to something we haven't perceived yet, for some reason or other, sort of like Marie Curie and her fogged film. We'll get there, maybe, but the apparent weirdness in QM is not, I think, a full description of the nature of our universe.
Have you had a chance to look into superstring ideas? One thing that goes away with that is the inability to determine a particle's location and motion simultaneously, and it seems superstring theory predicts gravity in a way QM does not. Superstrings could well be a blind alley, but they do seem to more elegantly explain a lot of subatomic interactions.
Either you missed most of what I wrote or I didn't express it correctly. I'm not disputing that the equations in QM seem to show the things they seem to show. What I am suggesting is that the wrong conclusions are being reached, and that it could be because we're missing something fundamental.
I'm think I see where you are coming from. I've been having this
discussion with folks who've made similar comment for years, now. There is
one important feature concerning new theories that is fairly evident to
those of us who've taken 6+ years of classes in physics, and probably is
not apparent to those who haven't had to do that.
:D
Older theories are not
rejected when data requires new theories; they are kept as special limit
value cases of the new theories.
OK, so an analogy there might be special relativity, in contrast to general relativity?
Classical mechanics, as well as classical electrodynamics are still taught
in all graduate schools. They are not false in the sense that the caloric
theory of heat is false, they are just valid to a certain precision and
over certain ranges.
This I understand also.
There isn't a physicist working in QM today who won't say that QM is incomplete.
In other words, we don't yet have the Grand Unified Theory of Everything.
Yeah, that's basically it -- and I sometimes wonder if we're any nearer it than we thought we were 100 years ago. To me the very counterintuitive nature of QM is one sign that, no matter how much it works, there's something underneath that we're missing, some key concept or aspect of reality that we're just overlooking. The hard-nosed rationalist in me balks at the idea of of observation affecting reality, and the qD approach is, to me at least, the latest fanciful expression of a theoretical structure that's getting a bit overtaxed. I mean there are too many conclusions being drawn, too fast, about what QM means when we don't even really fully understand QM. That's not a safe approach to take.
it has no provision for gravity, and there are (last I checked) eleven possible and totally different interpretations of what QM "means" in the universal context.
Well, I know of four main groups: Copenhaguen, MWI, one that involves backwards in time signals, and one that involves FTL signals in some unknown fixed reference frame.
With variants, though I can't list them because my reference materials are (or not! ;) in storage right now. But the "dozen" or so number sticks out to me.
But, that is a comment on the meta-physical position of the physicists.
Since each interpreation, by definition, is a description of the exact same
data, the differences between the interpreations are philosophical, not
scientific.
And yet I think that's significant. To me, claiming that observing the universe sets its "state" for later consciousness to see the same rules is very metaphysical. And there are so many questions in qD -- such as who did the first observing? And what level of consciousness is necessary before change can be rendered in outcomes?
Long before anyone had built a particle accelerator, observations of the universe were being made. Long before humans evolved on Earth, other organisms living right on this planet were observing things. Were the precursors of whales influencing the universe simply by looking at it?
And where does the consciousness bar bottom out? Were cyanobacteria -- which respond to sunlight and chemical gradients in solution -- also applying consciousness to the universe and affecting outcomes? Are they doing it still now?
There are apparent self-contradictions as well. I referred earlier to the slit experiment's being reproduced on the time axis.
I've looked the abstracts for papers on quantum effects with moving detectors, and I don't think that's exactly what was meant. Moving the detectors with a velocity relative to the lab means that the spacetime reference frame for the detector is rotated with respect to the lab.
I was referring to this, actually:
<http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/3/1/1?rss=2.0>
"Now, Gerhard Paulus of Texas A&M
University and co-workers in Berlin, Munich, Sarajevo and Vienna have
observed an interference pattern with electrons that pass through a double
slit in time, not space, as a result of being ejected from an atom at one
of two possible times by a laser pulse."
If there really is such a thing as qD and "state pointers", how can the slit experiment along the time axis work?
The easiest explaination is that, for relativistic quantum mechanics,
causality is given as "spacelike operators must commute." I haven't gone
through the formalism to be sure, but I think that the answer is that, when
you look at both the experimental and theoretical work, you will find that
this requirment is satisfied. One can easily get unnecessary complicatons
and contradictions into QM when one translates from the formalism that
actually describes what is going on into classical metaphors.
That's fair enough. But qD really is suggesting something on that scale, isn't it? That somehow the universe's state and laws were more or less observed into reality by some one or some thing at some time in the past. (Whatever any of those terms mean.)
An incomplete set of equations with multiple interpretations and apparently contradictory outcomes is not a basis on which to judge larger issues about the universe. You seem to think I'm taking a great leap of faith here, but I'm not the one acting on faith, or at least I don't see how I am. Not by pointing out that QM is probably telling us more than we realize about *ourselves* than it ever will about the universe we live in.
Let me restate a point, because you appear to have missed it. When one is
making a distiction between reality as it is apart from from our
observations, and the best understanding we obtain from observations, the
typical nomenclature is to use "realty" for the former, and "the universe"
for the totality of the latter. You earlier mentioned that there are no
things in themselves. I am guessing that you had a non-standard term for
that. In a classical relistic understanding the sun, moon, planets, etc.
are considered things-in-themselves. The earth exists on its own; it
orbits the sun by itself, etc.
I think a better way to express what I meant is that there's nothing that exists without a cause -- I mean, there is nothing anywhere that came into being all on its own. And that there really isn't true isolation (the missing glass wall) -- the moon is definitely there, and it definitely is a thing, but it is interconnected to our planet in ways that are obvious (tides) and possibly somewhat subtle (look at the scarring on its far face -- seems to me it's taken a few asteroid hits that otherwise might have done some damage here).
So form that perspective I don't have a problem with QM and its findings. What I do have trouble with is the suggestion that consciousness is what influences experimental outcomes; consciousness expressed as designing an experiment a given way to detect a particle rather than a wave and vice versa. Or the suggestion that detecting things a given way once will set "pointers" such that those things will more naturally tend that way in the future. Again, it just seems -- to me -- to be placing observation (which to me equals intelligence or consciousness) on a pedestal that it doesn't deserve.
If one were to say that the objects of our perceptions relate to but are
not the things that exist apart from us, then one can easily say QM does
not describe reality. It desribes observation, which is all science is
supposed to do.
That's a pretty good summation of where I think I'm coming from here. I feel that QM is telling us more about how we're perceiving than it is about what we're perceiving.
Thanks for the lengthy comments; I appreciate the time and energy you put into them. Maybe I've done a little better in explaining my own take on things here as well. To me, assigning a meaning to QM's findings on the human scale is a bit like puzzling out the meaning of pi's transcendence. It's interesting -- fascinating, really. But it's just a number, a ratio expressed in decimal that is bottomless in a way it isn't when expressed as a fraction. The number line is infinitely full of such examples. Imputing a universal meaning to transcendental numbers might be, to me, a little like suggesting that QM requires (logically) the presence of qD. It's a leap I'm unprepared to take.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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