Quantum Darwinism spotted in diamond spin

https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-darwinism-spotted-in-diamond-spins/

by jonbaer • 7 years ago

44 21 7 years ago

tabtab• 7 years ago

I'm not clear if they found the mechanism of this alleged evolution, or merely found behavior that suggests evolution is taking place.

Strilanc• 7 years ago

Just another "X1 implies Y, X2 implies Y, X3 implies Y, ..., Xk implies Y; we observed Y; therefore X2" article about quantum interpretations.

improv32• 7 years ago

Is there anyway to assign a reasonable conditional probability to those Xk's and recover some useful science?

gumby• 7 years ago

The use of "darwinism" seems like another way of just saying "thermodynamics". I assume though that physicists are smarter than I, at least when it comes to physics, so can someone explain what else there might be to this than "local minima"?

yters5• 7 years ago

What even is 'Darwinism'? Are diamonds reproducing and competing amongst themselves for scarce resources in a tragic Malthusian drama, leaving only the fit diamonds to survive? Is this how we account for the wide variety of diamond species that we see in the wild? Is this how the favored diamond races are preserved in their struggle for life?

TaupeRanger• 7 years ago

A general notion of "universal Darwinism" exists, whereby any system that implements variation, selection, and retention is said to exhibit "Darwinism".

yters5• 7 years ago

Ah I see. I now propose the theories of typing Darwinism, shopping Darwinism, snacking Darwinism, 'making up my mind' Darwinism, Darwinism Darwinism, 'picking my boogers' Darwinism, 'doing my homework' Darwinism, 'programming' Darwinism. We should come up with a Darwin award for all the different sorts of Darwin theories and the most Darwinian of them all.

xorand• 7 years ago

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10456

api• 7 years ago

Evolution is learning, so this implies that learning in some form is intrinsic to matter and that the quantum->classical transition represents some kind of learning process, which is absolutely fascinating. I also think it has implications for the question of life's origins and perhaps supports a super-gradualist hypothesis in which life as we call it is merely an extreme expression of certain universal characteristics of matter. This doesn't necessarily imply really extreme ideas like panpsychism (the idea that consciousness in some sense is ubiquitous), but it doesn't rule them out either.

jerf• 7 years ago

This is why they really shouldn't call it "Darwinism". I won't say it's completely certain you're wrong, but I think you're extracting way more meaning from the fuzzy term "Darwinism" than the mathematics of this concept justifies... like, waaaay more meaning. It's possible this might end up there, but only via a lot more steps. On its own terms this is like talking about how important wave function collapse is because it shows how the universe is biased towards consciousness or how it must have wanted life... it isn't necessarily possible to completely eliminate the possibility in the most rigorous sense, but there's just a hair's breadth separating those phrases from outright word salad.

aeternum• 7 years ago

Any Darwinian theory should clearly explain the mechanism for selection.

The selection mechanism for quantum darwinism is usually said to be "those states that agree with classical mechanics". This seems like extreme circular reasoning when the goal of the theory is to explain why/how QM experiments result in classical observations.

labster• 7 years ago

Can quantum Darwinism be used in the blockchain as a engagement service?

Quantum Darwinism spotted in diamond spin

Related Stories