honorentheos wrote:But isn't the issue here about more than mere belief or coherence? That it's about utility and the predictive power of understanding? And that QM sits in one of those places where it's often misused to make claims about the universe beyond belief to lend an air of scientific support to otherwise unsupportable claims on the grounds it makes sense to someone while propping up some preconception they have about life, the universe and everything? And in that sense what Res said is on point in that most of us lack the need to understand QM to get through an average day even if modern 21st century tech makes use of it. I don't imagine the numbers are impressive when it comes to the percentage of people who could accurately describe the mechanisms involved in making a toilet flush, yet thank goodness that isn't mandatory to making use of one. Yet I'd bet the percentage of people who wrongly think they know how a toilet works is probably shocking highly.
Point being, there seems to be a healthy third option to coherence and incomprehensible madness (or a subset of coherence, perhaps) that includes accepting we should be skeptical of our own explanations. Especially when they are running counter to the direction of expert opinion or the main body of specialists in a given field. Maybe there are a gifted few blessed to naturally carry the tools needed to grasp and synthesize accurate world modeling into their existing thinking but most of us aren't made that way.
Yeah, that's pretty much how I think about it.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
@Lemmie: Thanks for the tips on preventing the search engine from crippling itself. I think the conversation that is taking place now supports both our contentions: it's informed and intelligent, precisely insofar as it avoids replacing the simple but unintuitive math with philosophical fantasies.
I think I agree with both EAllusion and honorentheos. Nobody I know has an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics. Or rather, we all have several different intuitive understandings, and we've gotten used to flipping from one to another, like a sort of mental Rubik's Cube, until we can frame our questions as calculations we can actually do. That's theoretical physics. You have to use your monkey brain as best you can.
On the one hand it's absurd to expect that a brain evolved to keep clear of tigers should understand atoms. On the other hand, tigers are highly evolved predators. The kind of brain power that can evade them successfully can understand an awful lot of things, if you're prepared to be flexible.
For Res Ipsa, about "pilot waves": This actually goes to the crux of what quantum mechanics is really about. I still remember when my intro QM lecture went from one quantum particle to two, and I thought I knew what was coming: now we would normalize the wave function to make the total probability be two instead of one. Wow, was that ever stupid of me, given what I should have known at that point. And holy cow was I shocked when instead the professor wrote a wave function that depended on two variables. (See funny personal footnote below.)
The "pilot wave" theory that was begun by David Bohm does seem to make everything about quantum mechanics make much better sense—as long as you only think about one single particle. With only one particle, fine: the space of its possible states is just the space of three dimensional positions. So you can think of the wave function as a field spread through three-dimensional space, like the electric field or whatever. You can imagine this field exerting force on a point-like electron. The field exists at all 3D points, even though the particle is only present at one point; the 3D points are all there, whether the particle is at them or not. So those 3D points can each have a field living at them, and the field at any one place can push on the particle if it happens to be there. No more weirdness!
But add just one further particle. The space of configurations goes to six dimensions now: three numbers to specify the 3D position of the first particle, another three numbers to give the position of the second. With three particles, we have to go to 9D—and so on without limit. So now you're forced to realize that the quantum wave function is not a field spread through three-dimensional space, like the electric field, but a function defined in the space of all possibilities.
When you're talking about possible states of the whole universe, and not just about possible positions of one particle, then the pilot wave theory is really saying that a set of numbers which are attached to counterfactual alternatives, like ghosts of what could have happened, somehow influence what actually happens. The problem with that is not that it's wrong. It's that it isn't any simpler or more intuitive than any other formulation of quantum mechanics. The math comes out the same, and the way you have to think about it is every bit as weird as anyone else makes it out to be.
So there's just no point in making a fuss about pilot waves. Once they're waves in the space of all possibilities, you've embraced all the weirdness of quantum mechanics. And you can't picture even three-times-two dimensions, let alone 3 times 10 to the 23rd power. So forget it. It's not wrong. It's just pointless.
Funny personal footnote: Ten years later I sat down beside that same professor at a conference. He kindly warned me that the seat I was taking was going to be taken right back by the guy who was speaking and I said that was fine because my own talk would start after his. I was going to be talking about Bose-Einstein condensates in the mean field approximation ... which is where you take exactly my stupid idea of just making the wave function bigger to allow for more particles. Under circumstances so exotic that they awarded a Nobel prize for achieving them, my dumb idea became a good approximation. Other people had figured that out and I deserved no credit at all for it, but it was nicely ironic.
Res Ipsa wrote:I think he’s wrong on the physics. I think you are, too. I don’t think it’s correct that atoms don’t exist until we interact with them.
It certainly seems as if God does not exist until we interact with him. Equally absurd.
"In my dream, I was two cats and I was playing with each other." (search it...) "Then - after that playing... - I was interacted with god/God/g_d/Jehovah/Yahveh/yhwh".
Or was he Allah? Zeus? Jupiter? Wotan?
Maybe the interact was with her, a goddess - not with him?
Was she Freyja? (In Norse mythology, Freyja (/ˈfreɪə/; Old Norse for "the Lady") is a goddess associated with love, sex, beauty ...)
Ishtar? (Inanna (/ɪˈnɑːnə/; Sumerian: Dinanna) was the ancient Sumerian goddess of love, beauty, sex, desire... She was later worshipped by the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians under the name Ishtar (/ˈɪʃtɑːr/; Dištar).)
I know of nothing poorer Under the sun, than you, you Gods! ... Should I honour you? Why?