That clip needs to come with a warning, as the movie "What the bleep?!" devolves into pseudo-scientific nonsense after a short while.
Quantum Physics
- Thread starter SteveJ
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First the boring science stuff:
The probabilities he's talking about are tiny to the kajillionth degree. But current data seems to indicate that Dark Energy is in a 'high' energy state, which in theory makes it more 'susceptible' to quantum tunneling. (There's a theory that the 'Big Bang' was triggered by the quantum tunneling that jojojo mentioned in an earlier post) So in theory it's more sensitive to people 'looking' at it.
So he's bringing it to the attention of the public, sort of like 'It's possible that an asteroid could hit us, we should at least be aware of that.'
It does, in an insane amount of ways. In particular as a starting point I think you're touching on the "consciousness causes wavefunction collapse" theory. So you're basically being a Quantum Physicist. No joke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann–Wigner_interpretation
Basically positing that sensory awareness is literally no different from running your fingers through the 'water' of the universe, causing wavefunctions to collapse and interact with each other in a sea of incalculable cascade reactions and produce phenomena that we then observe. So our reality derives from our shared genetic equipment - eyes that see only between certain wavelengths, ears that hear only between certain frequencies, etc. - naturally give rise to reasonably shared/agreed-upon sensory experience. Which raises the question, what if certain people really are born with different equipment? After all, Einstein was. So can we really just poo-pooh 'silly fictions'? Science itself, at least according to this theory, says it's not a good idea at all.
One of the more accessible ways to test this is simply to close your eyes. Then imagine a whole species that is just as blind from birth, except you alone retain your memories of a sighted world. Now can you create a pink, polka-dotted elephant with green plumage and then reasonably accurately convey that to the next person? Most likely not. Informational integrity 'breaks down'.
The tricky thing here is that it's not saying that consciousness causes 'reality' to exist in the first place, just like it isn't your fingers that make the water exist. Again, it's just saying that our presumably completely arbitrary consciousness machinery might specifically dictate the way the wavefunctions collapse - on a scientific level it's warning that all our experiments, all our math, and all the observations we derive from them, is potentially as ridiculously arbitrary as "red light means stop", "green light means go."
This is not some meta philosophizing. It's a very real issue.
The 'emergent time' thing that rboocp posted has much to do with the line of thought in your OP. I'll post if you're interested.
As a sidenote, the famous many-worlds ("parallel universes") theory goes in the opposite direction, saying there is no wavefunction collapse, that all the universes are folded up alongside each other, so that existence 'vertically spans' their collective thickness, like parallel lines (universes) drawn across a circle (existence), with spacetime events 'bleeding' across universe-lines and gravity holding everything together and acting across the universes, and that we only see 'our' part of the wavefunction at any given time.
Long story short, if you're just talking the entangled system, then the person on the 'receiving' end has no way to know if their 'receiving' the message is what caused the message to be sent.
But what's got you wondering is probably something along the lines of the following scenario:
Say you're commander of a ship in a space war and you have to fight in a place a million light-years away. You leave your base with the agreement that sometime after you arrive, someone back at home will observe an entangled system. When you see your side of the system collapse, that's your signal to attack: instant communication over one million light years. The issue in this case is simply that there's been no real information transfer. The information "Attack now" actually traveled with you inside your brain to where you're currently at. If that sounds not quite right and you might think 'But the signal to attack now did travel instantaneously'. The information to 'attack now' was created when you made that pre-arrangement, stayed with you during the trip.
Actually, this might clear it right up for you: Information is just energy. It's easy to see that at no point during the 'message' did any energy transfer between the two systems travel faster than light. The entangled particles simply acted as an encryption/decryption key. That's the current understanding as of now. No one knows if maybe it'll turn out that we indeed can send new information somehow through entangled systems. It's highly unlikely, but who knows!
Hope that helped a bit.
Excellent, interesting & helpful post. Thank you very much. 
Nicely done hungrywing, that gives a good chunk to think about.
On the topic of not knowing whether it was a random happening or a deliberate message, could this be overcome by say having a whole bunch of entangled particles to give a bit of redundancy? I.e, if it's just one changing then you know it's not deliberate. On the subject of information, that was also my understanding of it, but I'd always envisaged a sort of morse code, that you'd know the language of the code before moving out and then the changes in the particles can then be reinterpreted through your knowledge of the code. Is that still a no-no?
*Goes back to reading Asimov*
On the topic of not knowing whether it was a random happening or a deliberate message, could this be overcome by say having a whole bunch of entangled particles to give a bit of redundancy? I.e, if it's just one changing then you know it's not deliberate. On the subject of information, that was also my understanding of it, but I'd always envisaged a sort of morse code, that you'd know the language of the code before moving out and then the changes in the particles can then be reinterpreted through your knowledge of the code. Is that still a no-no?
Yeeeah, not like I think about that much already...
*Goes back to reading Asimov*In just that aspect regarding deliberate/random, kind of. But it would only involve message authentication and not information transfer. There's research going on right now trying to see if they can eventually build a particular type of what you're getting at. What they're aiming for is quantum encryption/decryption 'nodes' at the end of classical pipelines, so that if a particular pattern emerges, you can be certain the message that follows is from who it says it's from (since entanglement is unique) But again, per above, that's not actual information transfer.
As for the rest of the question, unfortunately the answer is no. Entanglement is performed regarding very specific attributes of the system in question and requires that your detection mechanism also be specifically set up to look for those attributes. That's how fragile the collapse mechanism is. You're entangling a very specific property of a huge probability function. It's not the collapse itself you're detecting. It's that one particular thing that you've entangled and that your system is set up to detect during the collapse that you're detecting.
Say you and a friend put a playing card face down on a table. You tear it in two and without looking you each take one half and go into separate rooms. You look at your half and immediately 'know' what the other person's card is. Likewise if you look at your electron spin and see it pointing up, then you know your friend's is down. But that's the extent of what you can know. So home base performs the measurement, your detector says "Spin down! Launch missiles!" Except that detector functions just like you looking at it! You have absolutely no way of knowing whether it was your detector that caused the collapse. The only thing you can 'know' is exactly what the other person was looking at at the moment of collapse. So you can see how it doesn't matter how many systems you entangle and take with you, and a lot of aliens are quite possibly about to die for no reason at all.
Kick-ass idea, and if you're looking to use that in a book or something, I'd say just go for it. But in general, entanglement is destroyed once you collapse it. So you can't set up one entangled system and tap away at it like a telegraph key if that's what you were driving at. (Kind of depends on what you've entangled and what you measure later on, but in general any one-sided measurement disrupts the entanglement to the point where its impossible to know whether certain properties of the system are still entangled afterwards. A both-sides simultaneous measurement can apparently preserve some types of entanglement, which is part of the experiment that rboocp posted.)On the subject of information, that was also my understanding of it, but I'd always envisaged a sort of morse code, that you'd know the language of the code before moving out and then the changes in the particles can then be reinterpreted through your knowledge of the code. Is that still a no-no?
Yeeeah, not like I think about that much already...
I recommend Brian Greene's " The fabric of the cosmos" for anyone interested in learning about relativity, quantum physics and string theory in a language more or less comprehensible regardless of your educational background.
Fascinating stuff - a newly discovered quasi-particle that behaves as liquid. Sounds eerily similar to particles behaving as waves.
Meet the Dropleton—a “Quantum Droplet” That Acts Like a Liquid
Physicists have created a new composite "quasiparticle" that could help probe the quantum mechanics of many particles working together
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dropleton-quantum-droplet-quasiparticle/
Part particle, part liquid, a newly discovered "quasiparticle" has been dubbed a quantum droplet, or a dropleton. The dropleton is a collection of electrons and "holes" (places where electrons are missing) inside a semiconductor, and it has handy properties for studying quantum mechanics.
The new entity is termed a quasiparticle because it is not an elementary particle, like the quarks and electrons that make up atoms. Rather, it is a composite. Like other quasiparticles, the dropleton—the first quasiparticle found to behave like a liquid—can exist only inside solid materials. "It's a particle inside matter, and it is an entity whose properties are determined by its environment," says Mackillo Kira of Philipps University Marburg in Germany, one of the co-discoverers. Quasiparticles can form in semiconductors because semiconductors' atoms are organized into a lattice by the bonding of their valence (outer shell) electrons. This arrangement allows a conglomeration of electrons and holes to effectively travel though the material as a coherent entity. Thinking about these conglomerations as quasiparticles is a way to simplify the math describing the complex quantum mechanics of many particles within a solid.
The dropleton was not predicted in advance, so its creation during the experiment came as a surprise, Kira says. It arose when researchers sent energy pulses from a superfast laser at a gallium arsenide
semiconductor. The pulses created excitons—pairs of holes—in the material. When the density of excitons reached a certain threshold, the pairs dissolved and the electrons and holes arranged themselves in new formations. Inside the particle the electrons and holes flow around one another like particles in a liquid confined within a small droplet. "It's like a quantum form of a typical liquid," Kira says. He and his colleagues reported their discovery in the February 27 issue of Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).
The unexpected quasiparticle got its name when the researchers realized, "It has to be a new particle, it has a small size, it has liquid properties," Kira recalls. "Okay, let's call it a dropleton."
"This is new physics, not just a small detail of well-established physics," says Glenn Solomon of the Joint Quantum Institute in Gaithersburg, Md., who was not involved in the research. "Hopefully, it will spark a variety of experiments." In particular, the discovery could help physicists understand the quantum mechanics of "many-body systems" in which large numbers of particles interact. "The results show that interesting effects can appear in many-body systems," says Manfred Bayer of the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany, who is also unaffiliated with the research team.
In experiments the particles ranged in size but required at least four electron-hole pairs as ingredients to be stable. This characteristic puts them in a new class of quasiparticle. The research "brings quantitative support and also fundamental insight into the nature of this correlated state of few (greater than four) but not many (less than 100) electrons and holes," says Alfred Leitenstorfer of the University of Konstanz in Germany, who was not involved in the study.
Dropletons last for only about 25 picoseconds (trillionths of a second), but that makes them relatively long-lived for complex quasiparticles. They are stable enough, for example, to allow scientists to experiment on them. Such experiments, because of dropletons' size, could provide an intriguing probe into the quantum interactions of light and matter. At around 200 nanometers wide, they are more than 10 times larger than single exciton pairs and about as big as some of the smallest bacteria. The laser light used to excite the material in the experiment had a wavelength of 800 nanometers, which is not too much larger than the quasiparticles themselves. "Classical optics can detect only objects that are larger than their wavelengths, and we are approaching that limit," Kira says. "It would be really neat to not only detect spectroscopic information about the dropleton, but to really see the dropleton."
Meet the Dropleton—a “Quantum Droplet” That Acts Like a Liquid
Physicists have created a new composite "quasiparticle" that could help probe the quantum mechanics of many particles working together
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dropleton-quantum-droplet-quasiparticle/
Part particle, part liquid, a newly discovered "quasiparticle" has been dubbed a quantum droplet, or a dropleton. The dropleton is a collection of electrons and "holes" (places where electrons are missing) inside a semiconductor, and it has handy properties for studying quantum mechanics.
The new entity is termed a quasiparticle because it is not an elementary particle, like the quarks and electrons that make up atoms. Rather, it is a composite. Like other quasiparticles, the dropleton—the first quasiparticle found to behave like a liquid—can exist only inside solid materials. "It's a particle inside matter, and it is an entity whose properties are determined by its environment," says Mackillo Kira of Philipps University Marburg in Germany, one of the co-discoverers. Quasiparticles can form in semiconductors because semiconductors' atoms are organized into a lattice by the bonding of their valence (outer shell) electrons. This arrangement allows a conglomeration of electrons and holes to effectively travel though the material as a coherent entity. Thinking about these conglomerations as quasiparticles is a way to simplify the math describing the complex quantum mechanics of many particles within a solid.
The dropleton was not predicted in advance, so its creation during the experiment came as a surprise, Kira says. It arose when researchers sent energy pulses from a superfast laser at a gallium arsenide
semiconductor. The pulses created excitons—pairs of holes—in the material. When the density of excitons reached a certain threshold, the pairs dissolved and the electrons and holes arranged themselves in new formations. Inside the particle the electrons and holes flow around one another like particles in a liquid confined within a small droplet. "It's like a quantum form of a typical liquid," Kira says. He and his colleagues reported their discovery in the February 27 issue of Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).
The unexpected quasiparticle got its name when the researchers realized, "It has to be a new particle, it has a small size, it has liquid properties," Kira recalls. "Okay, let's call it a dropleton."
"This is new physics, not just a small detail of well-established physics," says Glenn Solomon of the Joint Quantum Institute in Gaithersburg, Md., who was not involved in the research. "Hopefully, it will spark a variety of experiments." In particular, the discovery could help physicists understand the quantum mechanics of "many-body systems" in which large numbers of particles interact. "The results show that interesting effects can appear in many-body systems," says Manfred Bayer of the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany, who is also unaffiliated with the research team.
In experiments the particles ranged in size but required at least four electron-hole pairs as ingredients to be stable. This characteristic puts them in a new class of quasiparticle. The research "brings quantitative support and also fundamental insight into the nature of this correlated state of few (greater than four) but not many (less than 100) electrons and holes," says Alfred Leitenstorfer of the University of Konstanz in Germany, who was not involved in the study.
Dropletons last for only about 25 picoseconds (trillionths of a second), but that makes them relatively long-lived for complex quasiparticles. They are stable enough, for example, to allow scientists to experiment on them. Such experiments, because of dropletons' size, could provide an intriguing probe into the quantum interactions of light and matter. At around 200 nanometers wide, they are more than 10 times larger than single exciton pairs and about as big as some of the smallest bacteria. The laser light used to excite the material in the experiment had a wavelength of 800 nanometers, which is not too much larger than the quasiparticles themselves. "Classical optics can detect only objects that are larger than their wavelengths, and we are approaching that limit," Kira says. "It would be really neat to not only detect spectroscopic information about the dropleton, but to really see the dropleton."
I'm glad I'm not the only one getting it wrong anyway.It's still a good idea. (Also, if we're going strictly super science mode, then we're obligated to point out there is no such thing as 'wrong' in the universe.)
Also, the quasiparticles thing someone posted earlier: quasiparticles are a phenomenon. They are not a "new particle" as quoted in the article. I just checked the wiki page and it explains the phenomenon well.
Scientific American, like many periodicals these days, is having to resort to more and more sensationalized/watered down articles to try and expand their readership into the average populace. Depending on who you ask, that article's going to range between a regrettable necessity regarding funding to flagrantly irresponsible.
10 Dimensions Explained
I watched it a few years ago, and still have the same question. 'How on Earth did Ed Witten came out with this'? And more importantly, does anyone else think that this is true? I mean, is there any proof bar some conjecture that this might be true? As far as I am aware, even the community of physicists is completely divided if the string theory (and so, M-theory) might be true or not.
Witten seems to have worked things out Mathematically. I suppose one would have to first understand the math to argue with him or Susskind. It literally makes my head hurt attempting to rationalize the ramifications of 11 dimensions, membranes, and the idea that the Big Bang was a result of two branes colliding.
Yep, M-theory is essentially pure maths.
Witten is not only the greatest physicist of our era (if M-Theory turns out to be true, then that would make Witten bigger than Einstein and Newton) but also one of the greatest mathematician of our time. The only physicist who has ever won a Fields Medal in mathematics.
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The scientists behind the theory are setting about proving it by simply refusing to believe any part of the universe exists anymore.
What do you mean ?
Witten actually scares the hell out of me. He sounds like a visiting Alien from the future who has taken the shape of a human to give us all the answers.
So true
In fact, he sounds more like a robot alien from the future. R. Daneel Olivaw or someone like him.
Just watched the video and I think the instrument they used to measure did interfered with the waves probably producing enough energy to change the pattern of the electrons.
Not busy at work so I have more time to surf old threads (actually I though was a new thread until I posted
)https://www.sciencealert.com/light-continues-to-behave-really-weirdly-in-the-large-hadron-collider
Basically, CERN is doing everything but what it needs to do - find something like the graviton to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. I am a strong believer of parallel universes (though I am not sure if string theory is the best explanation for it) and would like to see something on this subject resolved during my lifetime.
Basically, CERN is doing everything but what it needs to do - find something like the graviton to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. I am a strong believer of parallel universes (though I am not sure if string theory is the best explanation for it) and would like to see something on this subject resolved during my lifetime.
What makes you such a strong believer in parallel universes if string theory is taken out of the equation ?
Sounds like something out of The Hitchhiker's Guide
Surely it's either parallel universes or multiverses?
I think he meant multiverse.
Didn't mean it that way. I am a novice with only an interest in the subject, so my wording might have been off. What I meant is, at the moment, we cannot see beyond string and M theory as the only possible validation of parallel universes. My point was that it is quite possible that scientists may find proof that allows for the existence of a multiverse without resorting to string theory. For that, we need to resolve the discrepancy between quantum mechanics and general relativity, of course, which we are not closer to doing.
It doesn't seem like it is even possible to get empirical evidence that strings exist. But the idea of parallel universes, imo, is quite sound. It seems unbelievable that our universe is really the only one in existence. In that vein, I suggested that even if string theory is disproved, it is quite possible that some other explanation may crop up which explains the existence of a multiverse. But for now, finding the existence of a graviton particle seems to be the only hope scientists are clinging on to.
The 'measurement problem' seems illogical on the face of it. As if viewing an electrons path changes meaning it changes from any possible outcome to 1 actual outcome. With the double split electron test logically either a case of either the electron knowing it's being observed or observation meaning you do observe and there can only be 1 outcome as opposed to many potential outcomes. Either that or every outcome always happens and when we measure/view we only see the outcome that we are in fact watching or conscious of. Or possibly electrons move both as waves and as matter at the same time. When you view the matter your reality is that of matter and you view that matter. When you don't view the matter you view the actual wave. Both happen but your reality or vantage point is only one of them.
Probably a stupid question but how about when you leave the room and stop viewing the sport and something unexpected happens. That might not even be a statistical thing and maybe my perception that it happens is wrong as I'm more aware of it when it happens. But if it were right does the full range of probabilties happen when we aren't viewing them.
The whole concept is open to interpretation to whole groups of people. I was thinking 'it's as if the whole universerse is a dream and isn't actually real'. My religious fiance took it to mean 'see there's things scientists can't explain and for me it means there's a creator, almost as if it's a coded message'. To which I replied 'well no they do actually try to explain it using maths, physics and probability to conclude their are infinite universes where every possible reality has occured'. Which in itself seems both logical and impossible.
Probably a stupid question but how about when you leave the room and stop viewing the sport and something unexpected happens. That might not even be a statistical thing and maybe my perception that it happens is wrong as I'm more aware of it when it happens. But if it were right does the full range of probabilties happen when we aren't viewing them.
The whole concept is open to interpretation to whole groups of people. I was thinking 'it's as if the whole universerse is a dream and isn't actually real'. My religious fiance took it to mean 'see there's things scientists can't explain and for me it means there's a creator, almost as if it's a coded message'. To which I replied 'well no they do actually try to explain it using maths, physics and probability to conclude their are infinite universes where every possible reality has occured'. Which in itself seems both logical and impossible.
There would be other viewers/observers though. And the participants are also observers.
that paper is related to the issue and fairly accessable:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.00026
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.00026
You are still observing the sport since there are many other observers who will fill you in on what happened.
Right it's nonsensical unless my observation or perception of the universe is unique to me and everyone elses perception of the universe is unique to themselves. But then again if there are infinite universes perhaps in turn that is a possibility. Are we all within infinite universes?
Just think about conception within quantum physics and multiverses. There's an equal chance (to an extent) of 100 million sperm from an ejactulation of fertilising an egg, although some will be more mobile/potent that others. So in theory every birth has millions of different universes of different individuals entering the world. If you square that by the number of people on earth alone and then factor in every possible permutation throughout, then just that 1 factor is beyond comprehension. And that's only 1 factor out of billions upon billions of factors.
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Quantum Mechanics and Immortality
https://www.damninteresting.com/quantum-mechanics-and-immortality/
I've read about this before. Kind of fecks with my head a bit. Essentially because you are your own observer, and you can't observe death, doesn't that mean, in essence, you will always live? Since there will always be a path where you cling on. Scary thought really.
You have to think what it means to "view an electron's path".
It means that you send light (photons) on the electron. However, the electron is so small that if you send some light on it, you are changing its energy and movement. It's logical.
People try to make all these sound very mysterious and supernatural. They are not.
By any chance did this make you feel interested in including it in a work of your own.
I haven't written anything for some years, mate.
Besides, I don't have the intellect to write Sci-Fi.
Besides, I don't have the intellect to write Sci-Fi.