Quantum Mechanics: OK, someone explain this to me - there is no objectivity and locality?

[Taverner]

So that is, if I do not observe the photon sent from Alpha Centauri (thousands of years ago) - then it doesn't exist????

Or am I missing the point?

[patrice]

1. Yes that's what I've always heard AND, if I do observe it, it does exist, right? nt

[Taverner]

3. So does that also work the other way?

Would we be pockets of sentience in the space time continuum?

So take an event witnessed - if we witness it under filtered circumstances, does that mean it exists as observed? And if we see a video later that changes our opinion of what we saw, is that the space time fabric correcting itself?

Or am I somewhere in left field here?

[patrice]

7. Something I used to say to my AP Psychology classes was that it might be

similar to looking at any object from one and only one point-of-view. Others may share my position and we all can talk about and describe the phenomenon, but the other points of view are real too, some so different from mine that I cannot imagine those views of the object, others require only a shift in the dimensions I currently process and I can experience the phenomenon from a new altered perspective.

A radical shift in perspective and the phenomenon could appear so entirely different from my previous view of it that I no longer recognize it as the same phenomenon.

Everything is all there, just not necessarily accessible, or more precisely, more or less accessible depending upon perspective and perception.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Missing the point of what?

And I don't mean this is a funny way. I mean, what are you responding to? An article? A DU post? I would really like to read this article or post.

[Taverner]

4. Quantum Mechanics. I've been reading a bit about it lately

And every chapter I've read in both Taking the Quantum Leap and The Fabric of the Cosmos makes my head spin when I try to wrap my head around it

[patrice]

5. One thing that sort of helps me is to remember that our senses are only capable

of picking up and processing a small fraction of the spectrum of physical events out there. That and what we do pick up, we do not receive and process in a 1:1 ratio, reality-in:knowledge-out. Everything is subject to our perceptual processes, a lot of it is summarized in various ways, organized, and filtered. AND all of the consensual processes and tools by means of which we extend our own apprehension of reality also limit things in very specific ways.

Maybe this is why it is so difficult to say what quantum mechanics means except with calculus. I do know that it's pretty common place now amongst those who specialize in this stuff to refer to multiple-universes.

[Taverner]

8. Yes but that's Psychology...

One thing that intrigues me is this idea that what we are seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting, hearing is a hologram

That part I don't get either...

[patrice]

10. Psychology seeks to describe the tools by means of which we understand things.

Physics would still be physics and calculus would still be calculus, although we wouldn't know/refer to either of them as such, if we all had the minds of turtles. Our mental processes are part of whatever we understand, certainly not all of it, but also certainly understanding is shaped by the tools that produce it.

[Taverner]

11. Yes - but quantifiable data from Psychology is rare

So much of it is not concrete

[patrice]

12. The biological bases of behavior are about as concrete as it gets.

Where do you think Psychology/human-behavior-and-mental-processes comes from? It comes from bodies. The limitations in our tools may cause at least some of the descriptions to be too conceptual, but that does not mean that the events that produce what we are talking about are abstractions. Those events are (some say, an intrinsic) part of the physical world that we are talking about.

You are saying that the descriptions/Psychology and what those descriptions refer to are the same thing. I'm saying that though the descriptions are affected by the tools that we use to create them, they are not the same thing as that which we describe. They are only part of it. One point-of-view.

[Taverner]

13. But wouldn't that be Neurology?

I'm not trying to nit-pick but maybe I am ...

[patrice]

14. Neurology is the more purely mechanical aspects of it.

Psychology addresses the neurophysiology and other aspects of biology associated with behavior & mental processes, say for instance the sorts of behavior and mental processes associated with different stages of physical development, the biology of altered states of consciousness, or sensation, perception and cognition, all derived from physical organic events.

I taught AP, honors, and on-level Psychology for eight years, in high schools and for nurses in junior college. Human Biology, the nervous and endocrine systems especially are fundamental to the science of Psychology. In good text books, there's always a chapter focusing on these dimensions; that information is referred to throughout all good books, and research is central to the effort to understand human behavior and mental processes. That's what everything is built on. All we know now stands on the shoulders of those who preceded us. Even Freud's is, basically, an organic model, not to mention guys like Pavlov, Skinner, and Watson.

[patrice]

15. Pavlov was, btw, a neurophysiologist. nt

[Peace Patriot]

18. Thanks for the book titles! nt

[Thor_MN]

6. It should be a violation, but

you can be pretty dang sure that is a man makes a comment that is not not observered by any woman, he is still judged to be wrong.

[TheMadMonk]

9. Yes and no.

Theoretically, other processes can be used to infer the existence of that photon even if it makes it all the way to the light horizon without ever interacting with anything ever again. Thus it is always "observed".


And what is true for individual (or perhaps as many as a few million atoms) is patently not true for true macro scale objects.

The cat needs no outside observer, it is ITS OWN observer. The cat knows whether or not it is dead or alive. All we on the ouside can say of events within the box is that WE do not know.

[napoleon_in_rags]

16. Take your brain out of your head and set it on the table.

Now your brain is just a system. If the observation of location creates a lasting state change in that system (your brain) then its collapsed down, its a particle now. Without that LASTING state change, its a wave. (Note the importance of 'lasting'... If you look up the Quantum erasure experiment, you'll see that you can observe the position of a particle, but if you erase that observation before it creates a state change in another system, it will go back to being a wave. )

So forget about observation, observation is a symptom: Its about creating a change in another system that collapses it... It just happens that to observe anything, the thing observed needs to create a lasting change in another system, the cells in your eyes, your nerve cells, your brain. All it says is that things are defined only in relationship to each other. Its kind of like Buddhist thought, really.

[qazplm]

19. I think Einstein was right

the moon is still there even when no one is looking at it. It isn't a smeared out wave of probability, it's there.

I think at the quantum level, Einstein is wrong, the electron is obviously a smeared out wave of probability until we lock down it's position (or velocity).

I think the problem then is accepting that you can have something that is both more or less in one spot at the macro level, and all over the place at the quantum level, all at the same time.

[napoleon_in_rags]

20. I respect that opinion, but mine differs a little.

Even if nobody is looking at the moon, somebody is looking at the sea and ergo the tides. The state of the tides are effected by the moon, so the moon is part of the matrix of observation, you observe the moon by proxy in observing the sea.

The thing is that the moon is very large, so it exerts a lot of influence and that influence is doomed to create state changes in many systems. But the way I see it is the way yoda sees it, the size of the rock isn't important in itself. If the state of a very small thing had a great deal of other states dependent on it (like the butterfly's wings in the butterfly effect) Then they would be very far from being a probability wave. On the other hand, even a very large object existing in isolation and having nothing else dependent on it could act like a wave. e.g. I remember Buckyballs being used in the two slit experiment, and that's a pretty big particle.

So my point is, there is not an innate wall beyond the micro and macro world, its just that larger macro scale objects like the moon tend to exert a lot more influence, so more states depend on them. Really, its kind of like The Matrix: If you look at the universe as a computer simulation, it doesn't bother to compute things which nobody will ever observe, and which won't exert any influence on anything. Things in isolation don't exist to it.

[qazplm]

24. well then let's pick another heavenly body

if no one looks at a moon orbiting a small planet orbiting a red dwarf in an isolated, lifeless system, it still exists.

I think either you think micro rules or you think macro rules or you think they both rule in their own sphere.

I think the last option is the reality. I don't think that quantum reality rules macro-reality because if it did, quantum mechanics would be a theory of everything, it clearly isn't, so why would we think quantum concepts like observation affecting reality, that clearly do apply at the quantum level, necessarily apply at the macro-level? I don't think they do...regardless of the effect or lack thereof of a non-quantum object on the surrounding universe.

[napoleon_in_rags]

25. But do you see the assumption in that?

if no one looks at a moon orbiting a small planet orbiting a red dwarf in an isolated, lifeless system, it still exists.

I'm asking that you realize that is an unprovable conjecture. For in order to prove it exists, you must see it, or see some effect of it. You must produce some evidence. And this means having it interact with an observer, and create a change in that observer, or a system that is later observed by the observer. Its an old philosophical truth that the universe we observe could be created on demand for our perceptions, we can never know because our perceptions are our only means of knowing. In the past we dismissed this with Occam's razor, but the quantum stuff tells us that there may be some merit to this line of thinking.

My point is this: The truth is that big things are only the summation of lots of small things. What a nation does, for instance, is only what the sum of its citizens does. So how we can separate the macro scale from the micro? Isn't that like saying that what happens to America has nothing to do with the behavior of its citizens? Or how the ocean behaves has nothing to do with the properties of water and salt atoms?

[qazplm]

26. I didnt say

if someone never sees, I said if no one looks. Let's assume someone sees it. Ok, we know it's there and we know where it is. Quantum stuff only tells us there is "truth" at the quantum level because that's where it applies, not the macro level. The problem is trying to extend quantum level effects to the macro level. My point is that is the problem, you and others have difficulty with the concept of micro and macro being different.

[napoleon_in_rags]

28. All I have problems with is trying to isolate things at the micro scale.

I mean, physical principles are physical principles, are they not? Its true that insects perform amazing feats because of their small size larger creatures could never do, because physics effects small creatures differently than large. (insects that run on water surface are great example, no large creature could do that) But nevertheless the same governing principles apply: though we can't run on water, water tension still effects our lives in some ways. It makes the drops on our windshield, it makes water run in streams.

I'm just saying you can't cut out some aspect of the universe and isolate to only the micro scale. That element of the universe always exists. Yes, you can't perform the two slit experiment with tennis balls, but that doesn't mean that we can dismiss quantum mechanics as having no relevance in our day to day existences.

[qazplm]

29. why can't you?

What rule prevents a different rule at the quantum scale from the macro scale? Because right now we have different rules!

Scientists don't like that, they THINK there should be one unified rule, but there is nothing as of yet that mandates that to be true.

I didn't say dismiss QM as having "no relevance" to our day to day existence, see e.g. quantum computing, but what i am saying is that a moon on a faraway world does not have to be seen to exist in a discrete manner as oppose to some probability smear.

I'm not sure there is a "Theory of Everything." Even if there is, that theory may at the end of the day mandate different rules at some size breaking point for the really small, and everything else.

[TheMadMonk]

27. There may or may not be a singularity between quantum and classical...

...systems, however it is most definitely a very steep and exponentially rising slope.

In one of those strange "just right" co-inky-dinks that pepper our physical world, that slope appears to become effectively vertical at somewhere around the ABSOLUTE physical limits of unenhanced visual accuity.

Anything big enough to be observed without assistance is also big enough to "observe" itself and keep it's own wave state perpetually collapsed without external observation.


I like the Zen answer to the question of the Anthropomorphic Principle:- The world is as it is, because if it wasn't it would be different. (The question however would remain unchanged.)

Really, just exactly why do we ask questions about how marvelously fine tuned the Universe is for human existence? If the universe differed, so too would we.

[Kablooie]

17. No. You're just dreaming. All this is just A dream. Now go to sleep and forget about it.

[DetlefK]

22. Quote from "Million Dollar Hotel"

Eloise: "I am not real. I'm just a dream. Go away."

[DetlefK]

21. Same answer as Schroedinger's cat:

If you do not observe it, the probabilities are 50% that it does exist, and 50% that it doesn't exist.

If you DO observe it, you get
EITHER 100% probability that it does exist
OR 100% that it does exist.

Before the observation you have a statistical ensemble of all possible outcomes.
After the observation, only one possibility is left. It has gained a probability of 100%, while the rest has been reduced to 0% probability.
From many, down to one. That's why it's said, the wave-function "collapses".

Don't worry: The universe still exists when you close your eyes. The particles are always observing each other.

[Orsino]

23. Right. And no simultaneity, either.

I'm just glad that I appear to be wearing pants.

[struggle4progress]

30. Philosophy may not help you much here. If quantum mechanics interests you,

maybe a good starting place is the early history:

Planck 1900 solution of the ultraviolet catastrophe
Einstein 1905 explanation of photoelectric effect
Millikan 1909 demonstration of discrete electric charge
Bohr 1913 explanation of atomic spectra by discrete electron orbits
de Broglie 1924 hypothesis of wave particle duality ...