gio wrote:My friend and I were just discussing Schrodinger's cat yesterday...

The idea being that quantum particles are analogous to a cat in a box that is in an indeterminate state of both (or neither) life and/nor death.

Schrodinger ignores one thing: The cat knows if he's dead or not.

steve wrote:

gio wrote:My friend and I were just discussing Schrodinger's cat yesterday...

The idea being that quantum particles are analogous to a cat in a box that is in an indeterminate state of both (or neither) life and/nor death.

Schrodinger ignores one thing: The cat knows if he's dead or not.

Yeah, that's one of the counter-arguments.

but I imagine, then, you'd have to ascribe conscious agency to subatomic particles, if that argument were to carry over into quantum physics, sans cats.

well, that's what I say. But this guy has thought about it more than I have:

an anonymous, questionable wikipedia source wrote:In quantum mechanics, quantum suicide is a thought experiment which was independently proposed in 1987 by Hans Moravec and in 1988 by Bruno Marchal, and further developed by Max Tegmark in 1998, that attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger's cat experiment. The experiment essentially involves looking at the Schrödinger's cat experiment from the point of view of the cat.

In this experiment, a physicist sits in front of a gun which is triggered or not triggered depending on the decay of some radioactive atom. With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the physicist will die. If the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, then the gun will eventually be triggered and the physicist will die. If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment the physicist will be split into one world in which he lives and another world in which he dies. After many runs of the experiment, there will be many worlds. In the worlds where the physicist dies, he will cease to exist. However, from the point of view of the non-dead physicist, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many-worlds is correct, the physicist will notice that he never seems to die.

Unfortunately, the physicist will be unable to report the results because, from the viewpoint of an outside observer, the probabilities will be the same whether many worlds or Copenhagen is correct.

A variation of this thought experiment suggests a controversial outcome known as quantum immortality, which is the argument that if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct then a conscious observer can never cease to exist.

is this crackpot or what??

It seems like you're talking about the observer effect. It's like observing a trajectory fired from a gun. You can take a photograph of a bullet, and examine the bullet, or you can observe it for its velocity, but you cant do them at the same time. By doing one or the other, you eliminate a new possiblity. Maybe that was what Jon was saying..... thats how I understand it......
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I found this too..........

In quantum mechanics we learn that the behavior of the very smallest objects (like electrons, for example) is very unlike the behavior of everyday things like baseballs. When we throw a baseball at a wall, we can predict where it will be during its flight, where it will hit the wall, how it will bounce, and what it will do afterward.

When we fire an electron at a plate with two closely spaced slits in it, and detect the electron on a screen behind these slits, the behavior of the electron is the same as that of a wave in that it can actually go though both holes at once. This may seem odd, but its true. If we repeat this experiment lots of times with lots of electrons, we see that some positions on the screen will have been hit by many electrons and some will have been hit by none. The observed "interference pattern" for these electrons is evidence of their dual wave-particle nature, and is well described by thinking of each electron as a superposition of two "states", one that goes through one slit, one that goes through the other.

To add to this already mysterious behavior, this interference will only happen if both possible paths that the electron can take are not distinguishable. In other words, if we could somehow tell which slit the electron went through each time, we would no longer get the interference. The act of making a measurement of the electrons path fundamentally changes the outcome of the experiment.

Mats
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It's either in outer space or sub atomic that the real headspinners occur. I'm always agog at how much space there is in the universe...take a look at http://www.troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/ for example, for a to - scale map of the solar system. Fuck knows how long you'ld have to scroll to get to the nearest star.

You can do a similar scaled thing for the inside of the atom. Those 50s models of the atom are way out of scale, there's basically nothing inside them. For a while I'm freaked out and think of the universe as a more "spiritual" place but think of those 17th C guys who just learnt about gravity as being a physical entity. That would have been pretty heavy news (sorry).

Stuff on Earth just seems normal by comparison. A new missing link fossil found? Well just a matter of time. Richard Branson flying people into space for cash? Of course. Human bladder grown from scratch with DNA...hasn't that already been done?

R.F.F. wrote:Scott-

The funny thing about "science" (as if science were a person) is that it can admit when "it" makes mistakes. So "science" gets some pretty complex stuff wrong sometimes. Religion has been wrong for thousands and thousands of years. When is "religion" going to have a mia culpa? I for one demand an apology.

Looking forward to beating you in cards very soon,

Bob

Explain how religion has been wrong for 1000's of years. Or right? Do you mean the results and malpractice of a religion reflecting the religion itself? Where in the bible does it say to invade countries, kill, and impose your religion? That wouldn't be Christianity. Sure, people misinterpret religion or mend the religion to their liking, but that shouldn't reflect the orginal idea behind the religion. Saying religion has been wrong...... is like saying god does or doesn't exist.

The best thing about the electron is the fact that there is a comlimetary particle to signify its absence of a once occupied space, a hole. They quantify the electron's absence. I wish people payed as much attention when I wasn't around. Then again, I can't recombine with my absence and create light.

Jon

Virtual Particles is fun as hell to think about.

Science says it's true! Particles can exist for such a short time that they are able to trick reality into not noticing that they're there, so conservation of mass/energy is alright!

CERN is as real as it gets.

I read that and go "whuh?!?!" Crazy!

scott wrote:I would love to hear other examples of modern, cutting-edge science coming to conclusions that sound totally absurd. Please.

i don't understand Russian, either. it sounds totally absurd to me. so Russian must be totally absurd.

i'll admit to not having read through most of the discussion in this thread, but i think the logic here is fundamentally flawed. just because something doesn't make sense to a certain subjective observer doesn't mean it does not make sense objectively. sorry, that was really cumbersome. follow?

furthermore, we have to observe science based on existing parameters. we need to have a prediction going in, otherwise we won't know if we've found something new or not. thus, the fact that the light functions as a wave sometimes and a particle sometimes and travels in a pattern we don't recognize, it's not because that pattern doesn't make sense (or that it doesn't exist: make no mistake, there IS a pattern), but it's because we just don't understand it yet.

<edit:>

now that i browse through here, what i have to say isn't really relevant, is it? if you wanna talk about wacky science, just ignore what i just said. and read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length

it was sent to me by a friend of mine who doesn't believe infinity is an accurate value. in other words, he doesn't believe in infinity. and he defends this opinion like most people defend things like welfare or abortion. gets angry when debating it. why can't more people be scientifically opinionated?

instant_zen wrote:

scott wrote:I would love to hear other examples of modern, cutting-edge science coming to conclusions that sound totally absurd. Please.

i don't understand Russian, either. it sounds totally absurd to me. so Russian must be totally absurd.

That's kinda stupid, what you just said. I didn't say I don't understand advanced science. To the contrary, I usually find it very easy to *understand*. That doesn't mean it doesn't seem absurd.

Let me splain it to you... If every brilliant scientist did the same experiment, and it proved that your mom is a donut, not a human being, and they showed their methods to be right-on, then it would be like this... "Wow, I understand what they've done, and those results sure seem absurd to me!"

Hopefully that helped you.

instant_zen wrote:<edit:>
now that i browse through here, what i have to say isn't really relevant, is it? if you wanna talk about wacky science, just ignore what i just said. and read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length

it was sent to me by a friend of mine who doesn't believe infinity is an accurate value. in other words, he doesn't believe in infinity. and he defends this opinion like most people defend things like welfare or abortion. gets angry when debating it. why can't more people be scientifically opinionated?

You understand that the stuff we're talking about in this thread isn't crazy bullshit made up by crackpots, right? This is the some of the best that modern science has to offer. This isn't made up garbage. It's almost universally accepted as fact, that this is the nature of reality. Yes, it's "wacky" because it sounds insane and absurd, but it is SCIENTIFIC FACT.

That's the whole point of this thread. You don't seem to spend much time studying particle physics, though, huh?

моя мать попыталась научить мне русскому от рождениа.

я смог никогда не выбрать его вверх однако.

ожидание....