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/sci/ - Science & Math

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3557022 No.3557022 [Reply] [Original]

anyone get that nagging feeling that quantum mechanics is way more simple than we make it out to be.

>> No.3557025

No.

>> No.3557028

yes and no

>> No.3557031

I think we're just way more stupid than we should be.

>> No.3557030

non relativistic? yes, that is alot simpler than people make it seem. field theory, no. that shits hard.

>> No.3557035

>nagging feeling

This is not how science operates.

>> No.3557033

like if there is a reasonable explanation for wave particle duality.

>> No.3557036

>>3557033
Well, first off we have to abandon the hope that either the wave or particle models are Truth, because they're obviously not.

>> No.3557045

>>3557036
well what if there is a 3rd model that better explaines it that isnt a wave or a particle

>> No.3557054

In the future when humans have it worked out they'll look back on our time and think 'man they were dumb', like we do when looking back to when people thought the world was flat etc. When it's figured out and becomes common knowledge it won't seem so complex but until we know it, it'll seem like a clusterfuck.

>> No.3557057

>>3557022
yeah, it's simpler to say god did it.

>> No.3557059

>>3557045
There is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory

>> No.3557064

but wave functions show that property of wave particle duality perfectly, its just our interpretation and need to try to picture everything in terms of things we are used to that is a problem.

>> No.3557071

>>3557064
but why does the wave function colapse when observed

>> No.3557073

>anyone get that nagging feeling that quantum mechanics is way more simple than we make it out to be.
If you ignore it's physical non-intuitiveness and all that other shit your inner ape tells you ought to be real, it really isn't all that hard.
It's just a nice form of maths that solves problem. A Hilbert-Space, some Wavefunctions and a bunch of Operators and you're done.
The "problem" people have is that they can't seem to get over the fact that the microscopic world works very different that the macroscopic work, and that the things we assume to be so strange, like particles being at several places at once, is just the fundamental way reality works, and not some strange fact that we someone are unable to reconcile how the world "really" ought to be (ie, how it is at the large scales)

>> No.3557079

It's just probability theory with negative probabilities.

>> No.3557081

>>3557054
This myth again? No one in any point in history thought the world was flat.

>> No.3557088

>>3557081
wat, yes they did. there were turtils underit and everything.

>> No.3557093

>>3557071
>but why does the wave function colapse when observed
See, this is one of those things. The math is decisively easy on that.
You've got a superposition of Eigenfunctions, and if you apply your Operator, you get each Eigenstate with a certain probability. Since the Superposition of Eigenfunctions is itself not an Eigenfunction, the Operator transforms your wave function into an Eigenfunction, which is incidentally the Eigenfunction corresponding to the Eigenstate you measured.
There's no strange black magic happening here, but simple vector math.
Only when you see a need to reconcile that with the way the world works around you is when you get into problems.

>> No.3557096

>>3557081
>Most ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD) and China until the 17th century. It was also typically held in the aboriginal cultures of the Americas, and a flat Earth domed by the firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl is common in pre-scientific societies.

>> No.3557104

>>3557022
If you accept MWI, it's simple, otherwise, no.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/q7/if_manyworlds_had_come_first/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/r6/an_intuitive_explanation_of_quantum_mechanics/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r8/and_the_winner_is_manyworlds/

On the other hand, quantum gravity is... not trivial for us.

>> No.3557105

>>3557081

I did

what now bitch

what now

>> No.3557131

>>3557105
Report to Reprocessing for reprocessing.

>> No.3557140

>>3557104
many-worlds is stupid, too.
Copenhagen is the simplest, anyway.
Assuming the wavefunction is just a useful tool in describing reality absolves you of all the stupid, stupid, stupid results that necessarily come from some real wave floating through space

>> No.3557147

op: absolutely. we shouldn't have to keep dreaming up new particles to explain phenomena of physics- occam's razor tells us that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one. i think we're busying ourselves with our eyes an inch from the ground, wondering about grains of sand, when in fact we're standing on a beach.

>> No.3557154

>>3557140
Copenhagen is a non-interpretation (it cannot say anything about what exists underneath) and is aphysical. It's only saying that you don't care about what's underneath and don't even want to ask that question.
When you ask the question you get a bunch of real interpretations, and then you can assign likelyhood of them being real or not depending on what they say. After considering most interpretations, I assign MWI the highest probability among them.
The fact that the world must exist in some well-defined form is important, but most people seem to forget this.

>> No.3557161

>>>>3557081
my great grandfather died believing it was flat. Pictures from space confirmed this for him because it looked flat. I miss that old fucker sometimes

>> No.3557171

>The fact that the world must exist in some well-defined form is important, but most people seem to forget this.
Why, exactly, "must" it?
>Copenhagen is a non-interpretation
No, it says that the wavefunction is not a real entity, but rather a "sum" of all of a particles(or waves or anything) properties.
If you draw some force diagrams, do you assume somewhere, invisible to us, there are some actual arrows pointing out of your objects? No?
That literally solves all our problems, instantly.

>> No.3557174

>>3557154
> continued
Also, if you consider collapse interpretations further, they have these issues:

From http://lesswrong.com/lw/q6/collapse_postulates/ :

Well, first: Does any collapse theory have any experimental support? No.

With that out of the way...

If collapse actually worked the way its adherents say it does, it would be:
The only non-linear evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
The only non-unitary evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
The only non-differentiable (in fact, discontinuous) phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics.
The only phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics that is non-local in the configuration space.
The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates CPT symmetry.
The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates Liouville's Theorem (has a many-to-one mapping from initial conditions to outcomes).
The only phenomenon in all of physics that is acausal / non-deterministic / inherently random.
The only phenomenon in all of physics that is non-local in spacetime and propagates an influence faster than light.

WHAT DOES THE GOD-DAMNED COLLAPSE POSTULATE HAVE TO DO FOR PHYSICISTS TO REJECT IT? KILL A GOD-DAMNED PUPPY?

>> No.3557181

>>3557171
> Why, exactly, "must" it?
Physical existence implies mathematical consistency. ( Philosophy of physics assumes this! You may not consider it when doing SCIENCE, but it's important. )
While you can just use Copenhagen for all practical work ("shut up and calculate"), you need to actually ask what's underneath if you want to move to an actual physical theory.

>> No.3557183

>>3557174
Again, there's no wavefunction there to collapse in the first place. The math part is pretty easy as seen here:>>3557093

>> No.3557190

>>3557181
that didnt answer why is must be so.

>> No.3557203

>>3557181
>Physical existence implies mathematical consistency.
No, it doesn't
>Philosophy of physics assumes this!
See the word "assume"?

There's literally no reason reality can't be inherently probabilistic

>you need to actually ask what's underneath if you want to move to an actual physical theory
There's nothing "actually" underneath it.
We cannot ascribe "truth" to anything that ha no supporting evidence and Many-worlds has none and will never have because it isn't actually measurable, and therefore will not bring any "actual" physics theories.

>> No.3557214

>>3557183
CI assumes the observer is special and it causes the collapse:
> According to their interpretation, the act of measurement causes the calculated set of probabilities to "collapse" to the value defined by the measurement.

Mathematically CI and MWI have the same result, the only difference is that CI assumes some strange aphysical stuff and MWI just assumes more states/"worlds" where each possibility is instantiated (thus no collapse).

>> No.3557244

>>3557214
Do you see the apostrophes at "collapse"?
That's because since, again,there's no wave, the collapse is entirely probabilistic.
The "wave is real"-guys have the problem that the wave is a physical entity, which changes during measurement, that is the actual reason you need many worlds, because the wave function changing makes no sense.
Copenhagen has no real wave, so the wave isn't actually collapsing.
You just make a measurement and notice "oh, it's that particle". The end.

>> No.3557250

>>3557244
tl;dr: In CI, the wavefunction collapses, but it isn't real, so nobody cares.

>> No.3557253

>>3557203
It kind of tires me to explain this, but an inconsistent structure cannot exist (inconsistence = contradiction), thus a mathematical structure that we know to physically exist must be consistent. It is implied in philosophy of science and it usually means `realism'. However, even from a subjective viewpoint (where you reject or ignore realism), you still end up with something very similar to MWI ( http://www.hpcoders.com.au/nothing.html discusses this argument in more detail).
I can understand your position where you say that you should reject MWI because it brings no new falsifiable hypothesis (except maybe for quantum suicide experiments, but that is testable, not falsifiable; bayesian probability theory or solomonoff induction very well point to MWI being true, but pure popperian falsifiable science has nothing to say about this (this may very well be considered a problem with science, for example, if you had an unification of GR and QM (for example, some finished string theory or LQG theory), you should prefer one of those to either GR and QM, but as long as they offer no new predictions, popperian science tends to follow the tradition that it should not be accepted, despite being simpler and superior to what preceded it).

>> No.3557259

>>3557253
>It kind of tires me to explain this, but an inconsistent structure cannot exist

[citation needed]

>> No.3557267

>>3557259
Do you understand what mathematical consistency means?

>> No.3557277

Gentlemen,

To understand what QM means, we must first understand what it says. If you are in this thread trying to argue for this or that without having at least a basic level of QM understanding, then it is hopeless and a waste of time. I refer the interested reader to an accessible introductory text that assumes basic calculus and linear algebra: David Griffith's Introduction to QM. Its a good starter text, which does include some discussion of the meaning (or interpretation) of QM.

To the topic at hand, QM is no more simple or difficult than any other body of scientific thought. The mathematics is very clear, and its predictions have been confirmed to extremely high accuracy. Regardless of how one interprets the theory, the usefulness of QM cannot be questioned.

Thanks for reading.

>> No.3557279

>>3557267
Vaguely.

>> No.3557285

implying that mathematical imposibility = physical imposibility

>> No.3557294

>It kind of tires me to explain this, but an inconsistent structure cannot exist (inconsistence = contradiction), thus a mathematical structure that we know to physically exist must be consistent.
See, this is the ape talking. You think reality must be discrete, consistent, somewhat logical, because that is what you see all around you, that is what makes sense, what seems logical.
But again, the world doesn't have to be in a well-defined form, just because the macroscopic world is in a (seemingly) well-defined form

>> No.3557291

>>3557279
You're basically saying that a structure which is shown to not exist mathematically can exist physically. In such an object you could very well ascribe truth and falsehood to any sentence. It basically is a structure in which no statement holds (if you were to finish some inference chains).

A physical object exists and thus has some concrete mathematical existence (and thus consistency).

>> No.3557304

>>3557267
>>3557259
With regards to this topic, I paraphrase Hilbert here,
'Mathematics is the study of all non-contradictory objects.'

Now, if something exists physically, does that imply it exists mathematically? Or in other words, can every physical object/phenomenon be written down/explained mathematically? We must answer this question first before we can answer yours.

>> No.3557306

>>3557291
>You're basically saying that a structure which is shown to not exist mathematically can exist physically.

No, I didn't say it had to be physical.

>> No.3557342

>>3557294
No, I merely mean anything that can possibly exist.
Here, I'll copy paste my response to this question from another thread:
>>3554868
Reposted:
What would an inconsistent universe be? Inconsistency means contradiction, thus something containing contradiction would not exist/cannot exist.
Merely by existing, we have some sort of consistency.
Put this another way, take all the states of the universe. All the information (finite or infinite in form) of a state could then be expressed in some way and thus there would be a function (whose definition's size may very well be finite or even infinite) which describes the entire universe. It would be the worst possible definition someone could come up, but it would be mathematically consistent.

I cannot even fathom what a mathematically inconsistent universe would be.

I've seen a few arguments why someone would consider MUH to be wrong, but they are all religious arguments that argue for a single possible world made by some single possible deity, but those are arguments from faith and have no substance to them. Another argument that one could go is the empirical one which only acknowledges that which one can see, but that severly limits one's ability to build models and is merely a way to avoid asking the question.

>> No.3557356

>>3557342
>Inconsistency means contradiction, thus something containing contradiction would not exist/cannot exist.

That "thus" doesn't make the second statement follow logically from the first.

>> No.3557362

>>3557342
you better start believing in inconsistant universes. you're in one.

>> No.3557380

>>3557362
What does that mean? If you assume something is inconsistent, it may very well be consistent within some logics. There is zero evidence that our universe is not a mathematical universe. All arguments for one are those from popular religion (or not asking the question).
I already explained how even an universe with fairies and pixies would be consistent. If you can observe something, it already means it's consistent.

I think we have different understanding of the word consistency, for me it's contradiction and thus impossibility.

>> No.3557385

>>3557380
>There is zero evidence that our universe is not a mathematical universe.

If you assess evidence mathematically, what do you expect? There's no physical evidence that the universe is not simply physical, either. Big surprise.

>> No.3557403

>>3557380
you seem to have diluted the meaning of consistancy so much that it is so liberal to the point of pointlessless. what im saying it that the same rules dont always applyto things and there is no clear distinctions on what rules any object will obey at a given timw and place.

>> No.3557408

>>3557385
> physical
That word doesn't really mean much. If you were a brain-in-a-wat and your senses were directly connected to some simulated world that looked completly identical to the current one (ignore the computational infeasability of this), would you consider that world 'physical'? What you see in your mind is just what your mind constructs from the signals it gets. There is no reason to assume physically means anything more than mathematical existence. Some religious people assume physicality comes with special properties though (such as being the ONLY existing mathematical object or having consciousness-giving properties and whatnot).

I think we have very different epistemologies and philosphical worldviews.

>> No.3557416

>>3557403
My definition is mathematical. Your definition seems to be that you think the universe's definition is high in complexity (I think it's low, but that has nothing to do with consistency).

>> No.3557437

>>3557408
>I think we have very different epistemologies and philosphical worldviews.

And then some :)

But the point holds. How can you tell if there is any evidence for non-mathematical/physical consistency if your assessment tools are mathematics and physics?

>> No.3557435

>>3557416
if you allow infinately many exeptions and dont specify what the exepiong are in a finate amount of criteria then your universe is not mathematicly consistant

>> No.3557443

>>3557435
That's the difference between MUH (mathematical universe hypothesis) and CUH (computable universe hypothesis). I have to go away for a bit, so I probably won't have time to explain why it is so, but here's the papers:
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9704009
http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0011122

>> No.3557458

>>3557443
shits too advanced for me. i'm a sophmore in high school.

>> No.3557465

>>3557437
I hold that anything that can be observed can be described mathematically, and the mere act of observation is also a mathematical process (so are all physical ones).

Either way, I've been trying for months to think of what it would a non-mathematical ontology be like, and I cannot imagine it - any one that I can come up, I can translate into one which only measures mathematical/informational content. It seems any ontology I can think of inevitably reduces to a mathematical one. Maybe you can show me what one would be like, but most of that form seem to mystic ones that just refuse to ask questions.

>> No.3557477

>>3557465
your logic:

everything that i observe is mathematical, i know this because everything that i observe is mathematical.

>> No.3557491

>>3557465
Honestly I don't know how to translate my perspective into a communicable idea to give you. I'm not even sure I understand yours, which is why I keep asking about how you came to the inconsistent=nonexistent conclusion.

>> No.3557532

>>3557477
I would add to that that if something is unobservable, it makes no difference and thus we shouldn't care about it, thus anything that we observe has some underlying mathematical model (which also means it's consistent = free from contradiction). Even if somehow you could have non-mathematically describable properties, it would matter, however WHAT would those properties be?
>>3557491
Inconsistent in mathematics means that you cannot make true/false statements about any proposition in some mathematical system (because of contradictions), thus inconsistent object cannot actually describe anything physical.
If you want a better idea about what I mean, I suggest you read the 3 papers I linked before, they explore the idea in a lot more detial.

Actually, I'll link all the relevant papers/books to this worldview here as I have to go soon:

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9704009
http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0011122
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510188
http://www.hpcoders.com.au/nothing.html
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Mathematical_Monism

http://lesswrong.com/lw/uk/beyond_the_reach_of_god/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1zt/the_mathematical_universe_the_map_that_is_the/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/qr/timeless_causality/
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html

>> No.3557546

>>3557532
link to all the papers and essays you can that doesn't change the fact that they're WRONG

>> No.3557554

>>3557546
You will have to give an actual reason why they are wrong.

>> No.3557566

>>3557532
No, I get that consistent and physical goes hand in hand, but it doesn't mean that consistent and physical are the only things that exist.

>I would add to that that if something is unobservable

It may only be unobservable to you because you observe everything mathematically. IE *what* you can observe is a function of *how* you observe.

>> No.3557582

>>3557566
I could give our consciousness/mind that property if you want (despite it not containing extra information that what is being passed through our brain and sensory pathways).
However, I did see a very elegant way of closing this ontology if one wants to assume this sort of dualism (which ends up turning into a monism, yet again): consciousness is what mathematical existence feels from the inside.

>> No.3557587

>>3557582
* forgot to mention that this is the view of Bruno Marchal ( http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ ), however if I assume that consciousness exists at all, it would very well be one that I'm inclined to consider.

>> No.3557589

>>3557582
I get that consciousness is the subjective aspect of reality, I just don;t get why reality is necessarily mathematical.

>> No.3557596
File: 40 KB, 285x285, bob-window.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3557596

QM is SIMPEL. Just listen to this wise sage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZtw1yt8Kc

Robert anton wilson.

>> No.3557605

>>3557093
>You've got a superposition of Eigenfunctions, and if you apply your Operator, you get each Eigenstate with a certain probability.

blox

I'm not sure if you misunderstand or are just writing badly.

You get a random eigenstate when you measure the physical observable that the operator represents in real life. You do not get a random eigenstate when you merely apply an operator to a state vector on paper.

>> No.3557609

>>3557589
Try describing reality in some "baggage-free way" (see Tegmark's definition in his paper). Mathematics is just a language which describes such structures. You may find other ways to describe reality (let's say relational or whatever), but you'll see that such ways are isomorphic to a mathematical description. One way to go against this would be to posit physical reality as having some magical properties (such as: "consistent mathematical structure which exist physically (only thing that exists physically)" or "matter is the only thing that leads to consciousness"), however I don't see any reason for such axioms, and even assuming them makes the whole more complex (and thus less likely according to Occam's razor and its more rigurous mathematical/probabilitistic formulations).
It's not that mathematics is something special, it's just a language that talks about structures (including our physical reality).

>> No.3557616

>>3557609
Right, but what you've been saying is that everything your structurelanguage talks about is the only stuff that exists, and anything that your structurelanguage can't talk about doesn't exist. You're basically saying that the territory can only ever be the map.

>> No.3557625

>>3557554
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/10/991005114024.htm

>> No.3557641

>>3557616
The structurelanguage's limitation is basically consistency - there is no other limitation. I would argue that the language is too UNLIMITED, there are probably many things in there which don't exist physically (transfinities, and various infinite objects) - this is discussed in the papers as the difference between MUH and CUH. Math isn't a static language, you can extend it as much as you want, as long as you stay baggage-free.
Inconsistency would be when a structure is basically invalid and cannot be talked about (sort of like a program which fails to compile due to errors, if you want a simple analogy). Maybe by changing the logic/metasystem that describes the structure, you could end up with a consistent 'whole' structure, in which case, even some inconsistencies can be made consistent, however the whole will always be consistent, otherwise it's not something that describes anything at all.
Hence the MUH can be said in a more general form: our universe is some such structure which can be described completly (mathematically, the description may even be infinite, but we don't assume this, and actually you should not favor infinite descriptions according to Occam's razor, and you should favor simple definitions, also current knowledge of physics suggests that our universe may very well be simple/not complex in its description). Now when you see this, you ask the question "why this structure?", there is absolutely no reason to assume only this structure exists, and thus the hypothesis assumes the simpler hypothesis: all mathematically consistent structures exist.

>> No.3557654

>>3557625
That's not really an argument.
Also, http://lesswrong.com/lw/hr/universal_law/
Just because you don't know the true local theory of everything, does not mean one doesn't exist. You can even assume the worst possible "uncompressed" description which gives the exact state of the universe (such description could very well be infinite). Although a good thing to assume is that the description is simple - that is a conjecture, not the consistency of the universe.

>> No.3557663

>>3557641
Yeah, but
>consistent
>complete
choose one.

>> No.3557687

>>3557663
I never claimed completeness.
I don't even call the notion of the whole 'consistent'.
"Is the whole Ultimate Ensemble (all consistent mathematical structures) consistent or not?" leads to a lovely paradox.

In a way, I prefer to only consider the CUH/UD hypothesis as it's more than enough for me. However, I do not assign a null probability to the full MUH or wether MUH/CUH difference is not a null set (along with the question of wether hypercomputation is possible, if it is, it belongs to unverses in MUH/CUH ( / stands for set difference).

>> No.3557696

" i think its fair to say that no one understands quantum mechanics"

richard feynman

paraphrase out of memory

>> No.3557700
File: 86 KB, 225x289, problem economists.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3557700

>>3557663

>> No.3557710

>>3557687
>I never claimed completeness.

Well, ok, but that was my objection. For since that which is consistent must be incomplete, it makes no sense to me to say that things which are inconsistent do not exist. The inconsistent is what when complement to the consistent makes up the complete. (Likewise physical/metaphysical)

>> No.3557727
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3557727

>>3557710
...or to put it another way
<---

>> No.3557732

>>3557710
Some people think that having a model would be a better criteria for existence.
Personally, I stick with the non-controversial solution and only consider the computable universes(Universal Dovetailer), much less troublesome than assuming a full mathematical plentitude, I think that is Tegmark's current position as well. It's also somewhat falsifiable - if we find hypercomputation, it means |MUH/CUH| > 0.

>> No.3557735

math is simpler then you think..... lets say you want to know how to make a number for elite-ness and some pie.... well.... 13.37 * pie = 42(rounded for the pie)..... nice and subtle isn't it....

>> No.3557743

>>3557732
>Some people think that having a model would be a better criteria for existence.

Yeah, I find that weird.

>> No.3557749

im guessing the main problem is we cant see it?

come on faggots

>> No.3557756

>>3557054
I don't look back and think past humans were dumb. Look at the pyramids or any large ancient architecture. Look at the Mayan calendar. We don't give past humans the credit they deserve sometimes.