Quantum wonders: Nobody understands

Quantum wonders: Nobody understands

www.newscientist.com

It is tempting, faced with the full-frontal assault of quantum weirdness, to trot out the notorious quote from Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman: "Nobody understands quantum mechanics."

It does have a ring of truth to it, though. The explanations attempted here use the most widely accepted framework for thinking about quantum weirdness, called the Copenhagen interpretation after the city in which Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg thrashed out its ground rules in the early 20th century.

With its uncertainty principles and measurement paradoxes, the Copenhagen interpretation a

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Lev Vaidman of Tel Aviv University, Israel, like many other physicists, touts an alternative explanation. "I don't feel that I don't understand quantum mechanics," he says. But there is a high price to be paid for that understanding - admitting the existence of parallel universes.

In this picture, wave functions do not "collapse" to classical certainty every time you measure them; reality merely splits into as many parallel worlds as there are measurement possibilities. One of these carries you and the reality you live in away with it. "If you don't admit many-worlds, there is no way to have a coherent picture," says Vaidman.

Or, in the words of Feynman again, whether it is the Copenhagen interpretation or many-worlds you accept, "the 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be".

So do all the measuring you want because in the quantum world every measurement will be valid in one or another parallel universe.

In other words if you took your temperature and it was 98.6 F you thought you were completely normal. But in another parallel universe your temperature was 102 F and you were coming down with Swine Flu and your outcome was completely different.

The fact that your temperature was normal and you remained healthy was only the outcome in this universe. In the parallel universe you became sick.

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Great thread! I find it amazing that some scientists are seriously discussing and contemplating the multiverse theory. I have intuitively come to the conclusion that there can be no other explanation for our universes' many paradoxes.

Great find. I was trying to explain quantum mechanics to a friend of mine the other day, but lacked the scientific knowledge to explain what I knew and how I knew it. He couldn't get his head around unceratainty principles etc.

I'll forward this website onto him, maybe he'll "get it" coming from a more comprehensive source, other than my "I don't know why the bloody hell it does that, it just does!" method.

I just finished reading Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible and he quotes that statement by Feynmann in there. It was a remarkable quote. But as I recall, Feynmann was not a believer in parallel worlds, but in fact, postulated that the entire material universe was created by the action of a single electron that moved backwards and forwards through time!

Anyway, the scary thing about this quote is the fact that if scientists don't understand quantum physics, how can they (or a lay person for that matter) accurately judge other scientists assessments of quantum physics ? We have just traded the "mystical" statements of the Dark Ages priests for the "scientific" statements of the new Dark Ages physicists... Both demanded unquestioning acceptance.

This is very dangerous in my opinion.

Before going onto this questionable banter our physicist here has something to say.

"I don't feel that I don't understand quantum mechanics," he says.

Anyone see anything wrong with that sentence?

I think we are starting to delve into some pretty bizarre stuff. So bizarre and misunderstood that scientists can get away with just making stuff up. I do feel like the physics community is starting to reach.

You know data to fit theories instead of theories to fit data.

[edit on 10-5-2010 by DaMod]

reply to post by DaMod


Sorry, I don't see where you're coming from with that. Isn't it just the same as saying, "I do feel like I do understand quantum machanics"?

reply to post by nik1halo


Double negatives do not work the same way as a double positive.

That doesn't really matter anyway.

It's not issue of what the double negative means, it's the fact that he used one in the first place.

That is a no no and could be considered a reflection on this man's intelligence.

Plus the information presented is sketchy at best.

reply to post by plumranch


In a related review Seven Wonders Of The Quantum World Michael Brooks examines seven mind boggling quantum effects.

-Light is both a particle and a wave – and we're starting to prove that everything else is too.

-To be decayed or not decayed, that is the analytically unsolvable question.

-They might not stick around for long, but particles that pop in and out of existence could gum up nano-machines. (the effects of the Casimir Effect)

-You can use quantum trickery to shine light on a light-triggered bomb – and stay safe a guaranteed 25 per cent of the time.

-Reality, free will or the speed of light? One's got to give, because quantum mechanics says you can't have them all.

-You have to think about where an electromagnetic field isn't, as well as where it is, as far as particles are concerned.

-Forget radioactive spider bites and exposure to gamma rays, it's quantum theory that gives you superpowers.

-Paradoxes are only conflicts between reality and your feelings of what reality ought to be.

The confusion and chaos going in the scientific community regarding Quantum Mechanics is a big reason why I'm currently working on going into it.

I feel that Quantum Mechanics is the pill that takes us down the rabbit hole of no return.

Much like how Newtonian Mechanics changed our world in society not only in the sciences but economic theory, political theory, sociology, etc the same will be for Quantum Mechanics. The change is going to be exponentially larger than any change we've seen in human history.

Quantum Mechanics is what will bridge the gaps between science, philosophy and spirituality. Mark my words.

Ever heard the one about the scientists just on the verge of finding the last peice of knowledge to fully compehend creation. Just as they claw themselves to the top of the final mountain, they peer over and to their dismay see two spiritual sages sitting there calmly taking in the view.

The multiverse was explained in some detail over forty years ago by 'Seth' the entity channelled by Jane Roberts in her books 'Seth Speaks' and 'The Nature of Personal Reality'

Science may eventually become the new religion, but only after the scientific theorists understand and accept that the spiritual theorists are just as valid and have much to add to this knowledge quest.

reply to post by triune


Many of the spiritual teachers in our past seemingly understood quantum mechanics rather well. Just take a look at Siddharta Gautama.

reply to post by SpectreDC


From Quantum Wonders:

Or is there really an influence that travels faster than light? Cementing the Swiss reputation for precision timing, in 2008 physicist Nicolas Gisin and his colleagues at the University of Geneva showed that, if reality and free will hold, the speed of transfer of quantum states between entangled photons held in two villages 18 kilometres apart was somewhere above 10 million times the speed of light (Nature, vol 454, p 861).

This holds the possibility of a communications breakthrough eliminating light speed limitation! Someone really needs to do more work here!

Let's do an equation:

Time (T) = Race For The Atom Bomb
Heisenberg (H) = Uncertainty Principle
Bohr (B) = British Agent

B+H@T= Hitler Never Gets The Bomb.

QM was and is smoke and mirrors and obfuscation designed to hide an awful truth. If you want to discover the truth, do the experiments and the math for yourself and stop relying on half-baked math kludges.

reply to post by Chakotay


Care to elaborate on that? I assume you are referring to unified field theory?

I have always held the same understanding in the OP's second post in that everything has happened all around us in the multiverses. We have died, lived again, won the lottery, got poor, got rich, lost everyone we know, regained friends and family again, gone to war, have had peace etc etc the list goes on the key is mindful intent on accessing that reality that we feel benefits us in the present so it can be re-written as our future. Watch YouTube of Bashar who explains it in laymans terms

reply to post by plumranch


quantum mechanics makes me laugh

there is zero proof to back any of their claims

it's all dream work, yet considered science.

No wonder nobody understands it.

reply to post by Chakotay


The Field That Isn't There

HERE'S a nice piece of quantum nonsense. Take a doughnut-shaped magnet and wrap a metal shield round its inside edge so that no magnetic field can leak into the hole. Then fire an electron through the hole. There is no field in the hole, so the electron will act as if there is no field, right? Wrong. The wave associated with the electron's movement suffers a jolt as if there were something there.

Werner Ehrenberg and Raymond Siday were the first to note that this behaviour lurks in the Schrödinger equation (see "Quantum wonders: The Hamlet effect ").

That was in 1949, but their result remained unnoticed. Ten years later Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm, working at the University of Bristol in the UK, rediscovered the effect and for some reason their names stuck.

Go figure!

The effect is verifiable!


[edit on 10/5/10 by plumranch]

Originally posted by Snarf
reply to post by plumranch

 

quantum mechanics makes me laugh

there is zero proof to back any of their claims

it's all dream work, yet considered science.

No wonder nobody understands it.

Quantum mechanics is a set of scientific principles describing the known behavior of energy and matter, I find your statement to be seriously flawed and throw away.

Originally posted by plumranch
reply to post by SpectreDC

 

From Quantum Wonders:

Or is there really an influence that travels faster than light? Cementing the Swiss reputation for precision timing, in 2008 physicist Nicolas Gisin and his colleagues at the University of Geneva showed that, if reality and free will hold, the speed of transfer of quantum states between entangled photons held in two villages 18 kilometres apart was somewhere above 10 million times the speed of light (Nature, vol 454, p 861).

This holds the possibility of a communications breakthrough eliminating light speed limitation! Someone really needs to do more work here!

Ten million times the speed of light.

I wonder if thats getting somewhere
close to the speed of thought.