Quantum science (Introduction)

by David Turell @, Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 02:01 (5407 days ago)

More observations on entanglement and general comments on 'spookiness'. Is there another level of reality out there? Seems to be. - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124147752556985009.html

Quantum science

by xeno6696 @, Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 20:07 (5407 days ago) @ David Turell

More observations on entanglement and general comments on 'spookiness'. Is there another level of reality out there? Seems to be.
> 
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124147752556985009.html - I know you probably hope that I could find something to say here, but I'm a ways yet from being able to study quantum mechanics. Though I have studied some quantum cryptography in my networking class this summer. Mindbending stuff... essentially to crack a cipher with a quantum computer, the universe just "knows" the factorization of all numbers (due to entanglement) and will report the correct key. They've demonstrated this for primes under the size of 15. (EDITED) - Of more interest is the quantum property of entanglement. Using that you can actually tell if someone tried to break your code... because the message would be destroyed. That in itself is a problem. (EDITED out bad phrase.) - As for another level of reality I doubt it. Quantum effects are doing their work in our reality, not in an outside reality. - Of more interest to you should be this: - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090706113702.htm - If string theory starts to produce more results such as this--and multidimensional properties actually emerge as plausible, THEN you have a case.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"

Quantum science

by David Turell @, Saturday, August 08, 2009, 14:31 (5382 days ago) @ David Turell

A satirical science article asks 13 questions: the first five apply to this website. George, especially, should review question 1. It is the answer to Vic Stenger's proposal of something for nothing, my opint all along: - 
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/08/the-big-questions-of-the-unive.html

Quantum science

by George Jelliss ⌂ @, Crewe, Saturday, August 08, 2009, 19:17 (5382 days ago) @ David Turell

I didn't find anything new there, but I don't have a subscription so can't read the links. - Thinking mathematically I would point out that Nothing is just a special case of Something, where the amount of the Something is zero. As a "Nihilist" I'm now inclined to believe that there is in fact Nothing, if you add it all up (both the positive and the negative). - Looking at some of my old essays I came across this link to an article by Victor J Stenger on Quantum Quackery. I'm not sure if I've posted it here before, but it is relevant to a lot of the recent comments. - http://www.csicop.org/si/9701/quantum-quackery.html - At the end it offers an explanation of entanglement in terms of quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. - As to people believing what they want to believe for aesthetic or emotional reasons, or, as one of the sections of the New Scientist article suggests, because it makes a good story, I've nothing against this. In fact I do it myself. Problems only arise when people state these beliefs as totally established facts that we must all bow down to.

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GPJ

Quantum science

by David Turell @, Sunday, August 09, 2009, 14:49 (5381 days ago) @ George Jelliss

I came across this link to an article by Victor J Stenger on Quantum Quackery. I'm not sure if I've posted it here before, but it is relevant to a lot of the recent comments.
> 
> http://www.csicop.org/si/9701/quantum-quackery.html
> 
> At the end it offers an explanation of entanglement in terms of quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. - I appreciate seeing this article by Stenger. Nowhere have I read an explanation like this. Does any other scientific group support it? All the stuff I've seen accept the fact that there is entanglement and 'spooky action at a distance'.
> 
> In fact I do it myself. Problems only arise when people state these beliefs as totally established facts that we must all bow down to. - I feel just as you do, and am willing to change a view as evidence changes.

Quantum science

by George Jelliss ⌂ @, Crewe, Wednesday, September 09, 2009, 18:22 (5350 days ago) @ David Turell

Just this week I obtained two more books by Victor J. Stenger that I ordered. One is The Comprehensible Cosmos (2006) which is rather like Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality in that it is half mathematics, but has the mathematics in Supplements in the second half instead of at the beginning, and of course it's only 340 pages in large type as compared to 1094 in small type. -On page 135 he has: "... maximum entropy is estimated to be 10^122 for the visible Universe." and "Roger Penrose has argued that the total entropy of the Universe should be dominated by the sum of the entropies of all the black holes within, which he estimates at 10^100. Based on this estimate, currently we have at least 22 orders of magnitude of room available for order to form." [I've substituted ^ in place of raised power notation.]-The other is a new book Quantum Gods (Subtitled Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness). This sets out to argue against what he calls "Quantum spirituality" and "Quantum theology". It is non-mathematical and goes quite deeply into the history of how various people, like Fritjof Capra, Deepak Chopra, John Hagelin, F. A. Wolf and the Maharishi, have exploited quantum theory for mystical purposes, and others like John Polkinghorne have used it in theology. He mentions NDEs and OBEs briefly but doesn't go into any detail. Also I notice there is no mention of Sheldrake.-I may mention some more when I've read them more thoroughly.

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GPJ

Quantum science

by xeno6696 @, Sonoran Desert, Thursday, September 10, 2009, 22:56 (5349 days ago) @ George Jelliss

Just this week I obtained two more books by Victor J. Stenger that I ordered. One is The Comprehensible Cosmos (2006) which is rather like Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality in that it is half mathematics, but has the mathematics in Supplements in the second half instead of at the beginning, and of course it's only 340 pages in large type as compared to 1094 in small type. 
> 
> On page 135 he has: "... maximum entropy is estimated to be 10^122 for the visible Universe." and "Roger Penrose has argued that the total entropy of the Universe should be dominated by the sum of the entropies of all the black holes within, which he estimates at 10^100. Based on this estimate, currently we have at least 22 orders of magnitude of room available for order to form." [I've substituted ^ in place of raised power notation.]
> 
> The other is a new book Quantum Gods (Subtitled Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness). This sets out to argue against what he calls "Quantum spirituality" and "Quantum theology". It is non-mathematical and goes quite deeply into the history of how various people, like Fritjof Capra, Deepak Chopra, John Hagelin, F. A. Wolf and the Maharishi, have exploited quantum theory for mystical purposes, and others like John Polkinghorne have used it in theology. He mentions NDEs and OBEs briefly but doesn't go into any detail. Also I notice there is no mention of Sheldrake.
> 
> I may mention some more when I've read them more thoroughly.-I spent some time this summer with "The Comprehensible Cosmos," though in my case I haven't really read the main text but read a huge chunk of the mathematical supplement. I think you pounced on me earlier for making a claim about needing a good level of math to understand physics, this supplement does a great job of explaining why I make that claim. Quite a bit of precision is lost in laymen's translations of some of the more esoteric equations such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Some physicists claim you don't need the fancy math, but I don't know how you can understand some of the mathematical descriptions outside of the language of math. Otherwise I'm looking forward to your comments.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"

Quantum science

by George Jelliss ⌂ @, Crewe, Sunday, September 13, 2009, 11:14 (5346 days ago) @ xeno6696

Quantum Gods (QG) seems to be aimed at the American market more than the British, since it begins with a chapter on "Belief and Nonbelief in America" which harks back to the Deist views of the founding fathers, and looks at the statistical results of the 2008 Pew survey of beliefs. Chapter 2 is a response to the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know" which was popular over there but has made no waves over here that I've noticed. In the next two chapters he goes back to Fritjof Capra's 1975 "The Tao of Physics", and the Maharishi's 1967 "Transcendental Meditation" movement. Then he gets down to some physics.-The Comprehensible Cosmos (CC) is purely about physics in broad terms (the subtitle is "Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?"). His answer is that a lot of the laws follow from "point-of-view invariance". For instance the laws of conservation of energy, and of linear and angular momentum follow from the assumption that the laws are invariant to changes in time, distance, and angle of the observer's frame of reference. This was proved by Emmy Noether in 1915. Since experiment shows these to be true, then the assumption is justified.-What interests me most are his views about the nature of time and the way this affects our understanding of quantum physics. Some extracts: -CC p35: "Folowing Einstein we define time simply as what is measured on a clock. Whatever its construction, a clock will provide a series of ticks and a counter of those ticks. Note that in our operational view, time is fundamentally discrete." 
CC p37: "Since 1983, distance in science is no longer treated as a quantity that is independent of time. In fact, distance is now officially defined in terms of time ///: the time it takes light to travel between two points in a vacuum. -CC p100; Most physicists prefer to adopt a specific time direction, even when none is called for by theory or experiment. In that case, they must introduce antiparticles. However, a more parsimonious view, which is experimentally indistinguishable from the conventional one, is to interpret antiparticles as particles moving backwards in time, that is, opposite the conventional direction."-CC p101 and QG p.205: He gives the example of a "Feynman space-time zigzag" in which one electron moves forward in time scatters off a photon, moves backward in time, scatters off another photon, and moves forward in time again. The conventional interpretation of this requires three particles (two different electrons and a positron); in the initial position a positron-second electron pair appears from the vacuum, and later the positron-first electron pair annihilate each other. -As a devout Ockhamist the economy of this interpretation appeals to me strongly.-CC p119: "The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of an isolated system must stay the same or increase with time. But how do we define the direction of time? All the equations of physics, except for the second law, work in either time direction. /// increasing entropy can in fact be regarded as defining /// the arrow of time. Thus we have another "law" of physics that turns out to be nothing more than a definition. However /// the second law is a statistical statement that is meaningful only when the number of particles is large. This implies that the arrow of time only applies in that context. In systems with few particles, the entropy will fluctuate substantially from its equilibrium value and an arrow of time becomes impossible to define." -CC. p 120: "In a previous book Timeless Reality ... I discussed in detail the implications of the apparent time-reflection symmetry of the fundamental laws of physics. In particular I showed that many, if not all, of the so-called paradoxes of quantum mechanics can be understood as a consequence of forcing the familiar time direction of ordinary experience on the description of quantum events."-CC. p186; "The usual objection that is raised against motion backward in conventional time is the so-called grandfather paradox. If one could travel back in time, he could kill his own grandfather. However, it can be shown that this paradox does not hold at the quantum level, where all grandfathers are indistinguishable." (!!) -CC p120: In Timeless Reality I showed that time reversal makes it possible to reify many of the features of modern quantum and particle physics. For example the multiple particle paths in the Feynman path integral formulation of quantum mechanics can be pictured as actually occurring in a single event /// as the particle zigzags in space-time." -I find this more appealing to my Ockhamist instinct than the Multiple Universes version. It seems I need to buy another Stenger book!

--
GPJ

Quantum science

by David Turell @, Monday, September 14, 2009, 02:09 (5345 days ago) @ George Jelliss

Quantum Gods (QG) seems to be aimed at the American market more than the British, since it begins with a chapter on "Belief and Nonbelief in America" which harks back to the Deist views of the founding fathers, and looks at the statistical results of the 2008 Pew survey of beliefs. Chapter 2 is a response to the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know" which was popular over there but has made no waves over here that I've noticed.-I believe Vic Stenger is American. He was on a website I followed about 10 years ago until 2004 by an organizationn called MetaNexus, bassed in Philadelphia.-> I find this more appealing to my Ockhamist instinct than the Multiple Universes version. It seems I need to buy another Stenger book!-Does anyone else agree with his theories?

Quantum science

by David Turell @, Tuesday, January 25, 2011, 01:25 (4847 days ago) @ xeno6696

This article is a nice review of the current status of quantum theory and reality:-http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927960.200-quantum-reality-the-many-meanings-of-life.html?page=3

Quantum science: new maths needed

by David Turell @, Friday, March 31, 2017, 19:05 (2590 days ago) @ David Turell

An article on current quantum maths and the new maths needed:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170330-how-quantum-theory-is-inspiring-new-math/?utm_s...

"The bizarre world of quantum theory — where things can seem to be in two places at the same time and are subject to the laws of probability — not only represents a more fundamental description of nature than what preceded it, it also provides a rich context for modern mathematics. Could the logical structure of quantum theory, once fully understood and absorbed, inspire a new realm of mathematics that might be called “quantum mathematics”?

***

'Ideas that originate in particle physics have an uncanny tendency to appear in the most diverse mathematical fields. This is especially true for string theory. Its stimulating influence in mathematics will have a lasting and rewarding impact, whatever its final role in fundamental physics turns out to be. The number of disciplines that it touches is dizzying: analysis, geometry, algebra, topology, representation theory, combinatorics, probability — the list goes on and on. One starts to feel sorry for the poor students who have to learn all this!

"What could be the underlying reason for this unreasonable effectiveness of quantum theory? In my view, it is closely connected to the fact that in the quantum world everything that can happen does happen.

***

"A striking example of the magic of quantum theory is mirror symmetry — a truly astonishing equivalence of spaces that has revolutionized geometry. The story starts in enumerative geometry, a well-established, but not very exciting branch of algebraic geometry that counts objects. For example, researchers might want to count the number of curves on Calabi-Yau spaces — six-dimensional solutions of Einstein’s equations of gravity that are of particular interest in string theory, where they are used to curl up extra space dimensions.

***

"But a second ingredient was necessary to find the actual solution: an equivalent formulation of the physics using a so-called “mirror” Calabi–Yau space. The term “mirror” is deceptively simple. In contrast to the way an ordinary mirror reflects an image, here the original space and its mirror are of very different shapes; they do not even have the same topology. But in the realm of quantum theory, they share many properties. In particular, the string propagation in both spaces turns out to be identical. The difficult computation on the original manifold translates into a much simpler expression on the mirror manifold, where it can be computed by a single integral.

"Mirror symmetry illustrates a powerful property of quantum theory called duality: Two classical models can become equivalent when considered as quantum systems, as if a magic wand is waved and all the differences suddenly disappear. Dualities point to deep but often mysterious symmetries of the underlying quantum theory. In general, they are poorly understood and an indication that our understanding of quantum theory is incomplete at best.

***

"Take E = mc2, without a doubt the most famous equation in history. In all its understated elegance, it connects the physical concepts of mass and energy that were seen as totally distinct before the advent of relativity. Through Einstein’s equation we learn that mass can be transformed into energy, and vice versa. The equation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, although less catchy and well-known, links the worlds of geometry and matter in an equally surprising and beautiful manner. A succinct way to summarize that theory is that mass tells space how to curve, and space tells mass how to move.

"Mirror symmetry is another perfect example of the power of the equal sign. It is capable of connecting two different mathematical worlds. One is the realm of symplectic geometry, the branch of mathematics that underlies much of mechanics. On the other side is the realm of algebraic geometry, the world of complex numbers. Quantum physics allows ideas to flow freely from one field to the other and provides an unexpected “grand unification” of these two mathematical disciplines.

***

"Niels Bohr was very fond of the notion of complementarity. The concept emerged from the fact that, as Werner Heisenberg proved with his uncertainty principle, in quantum mechanics one can measure either the momentum p of a particle or its position q, but not both at the same time. Wolfgang Pauli wittily summarized this duality in a letter to Heisenberg dated October 19, 1926, just a few weeks after the discovery: “One can see the world with the p-eye, and one can see it with the q-eye, but if one opens both eyes, then one becomes crazy.'”

Comment: It seems there may be a maths role to fully understanding quantum mechanics. I think it is a view into the workings of God's consciousness.

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