How I learned to stop worrying and love uncertainty

https://nautil.us/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-uncertainty-245816/

by nsoonhui • 4 years ago

102 38 4 years ago

hartator3• 4 years ago

I don’t get why people overcomplexify quantum physics.

Can’t everything be explained by the future holding more data than the present and past? Like if you view time as another physical dimension, you are not surprised by the world when you start exploring what is on let say on your left. The rest of the bed, floor, wall, outside of the house. And if you lose your cat, the universe didn’t magically split in multiple dimensions but the cat state is somewhere on your left. If you consider time just as a 4th dimension already written, you don’t need to make complex theories.

blueprint10• 4 years ago

i think it's because they're in denial about parts of themselves which they don't want to see properly. quantum makes plenty of sense. for someone to claim it doesn't is a self contradiction.

canjobear• 4 years ago

This has nothing to do with quantum mechanics.

Enginerrrd• 4 years ago

I mean it does, but it's a total violation of unitarity and OP doesn't appear to realize that nor understand its implications.

mjburgess4• 4 years ago

If the future "holds more data" than the past then it's random with respect to the past, by definition. This is one of the major interpretations of QM.

So if we have a function from past states to future states, we can't, eg., which of two past states occured (dead, alive).

However, those who hold a many-worlds view (or chaos-theory view) do not believe you can just "insert data", since to do so is essentially equivalent to a blind miracle.

To believe the future "holds more data" is to believe that at each instance things are happening without any prior cause, all of the time, and this is fundamentally inexplicable.

"the future holds more data" view therefore basically gives up on the possibility of science in this case, indeed as a view, it can always be offered in place of a scientific explanation, and amounts to saying "its inexplicable"

blueprint10• 4 years ago

Such a good comment. But I have a question for you. You said this is 'one of the major interpretations' of QM. But if the hypothetically greater future data is not observable by anything outside of the universal wavefunction, then is it not the case that the entire system is evolving without external observation, i.e., the system itself does not have to be able to verify that it "knows" what outcome will occur for it to be able to generate new data by a causal mechanism. So it sounds like randomness is not proven by what you said is definition, alone. Is this what you meant by it being "one of the" interpretations of QM?

mftb2• 4 years ago

I also think your comment is pretty insightful. Most scientists seem stuck here:

We can’t make confident predictions about the outcomes of experiments, but instead have to rely only on fuzzy probabilities. There are fundamental limits to what we can know.

...on the fact that we live in a probabilistic universe, not a deterministic one. One of the many things I don't understand is why it causes so much more trouble with QM than Relativity, doesn't it say largely the same thing? That eventually you reach a singularity where we have not the unknown, but the unknowable, because all of physics stops working?

hartator3• 4 years ago

If the future "holds more data" than the past then it's random with respect to the past, by definition. This is one of the major interpretations of QM.

Yet, we don't say whatever is on the X axis is random with respect of the Y axis in a 3D space.

howmayiannoyyou• 4 years ago

Paywalled after you've read 2 articles, so guess I'll have to keep worrying.

wordyskeleton• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/ipQ0P

yeswecatan• 4 years ago

Beat me to it :)

theonemind• 4 years ago

incognito mode/private browsing works on this one.

blueprint10• 4 years ago

"The statements that quantum mechanics makes about the subatomic world fly in the face of our natural intuition about the macroscopic world"

plenty of atomic and higher scale systems behave like "quantum" systems. in fact if you incorporate decoherence, every "system" is "quantum".

"The wavelike nature of matter doesn’t manifest itself at macroscopic scales"

yes it does. that's how it was discovered and where qm came from. google the debroglie hypothesis.

this article is ridiculous

xchip• 4 years ago

TL;DR: I have anxiety but let me pretend I overcame it using quantum mechanics. I also need your validation, which is the main purpose of this article.

tetris11• 4 years ago

Related: https://xkcd.com/1240/

mjhay• 4 years ago

There's a lot of interesting philosophical/metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics, not the least of which is the particular observationally-equivalent interpretation (e.g. Copenhagen or Von Neumann-Wigner[0]).

This essential subjectivity opens the floodgates to all sorts of quasi-profound nonsense. This is unfortunate, because quantum physics is easily a Copernican-level revolution in the relation of the mind, observation, and the world observed, but these lines of investigation have become radioactive due to association with the crystal-power crowd - who are among those trying to turn back the clock to a non-universal world of humans occupying a distinguished place at the center.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...

bheadmaster2• 4 years ago

Well put. I had the exact same conclusion reading this article, but couldn't put it into words.

jbirer• 4 years ago

Whatever works.

fedeb95• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist or even a good mathematician. I've read some things about quantum theory, and other interesting reads is Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics" and Lazslo Mero's "Moral Calculations" which touches quantum theory very interestingly.

Comevius• 4 years ago

Quantum physics is a low-level approach to understanding the Universe, not you life. This is like saying that you studied the microprocessor executing a chess program in order to understand how chess is played. We don't live in the quantum world, we live under the reign of the classical laws of physics, which happens to be powered by quantum physics and not an alien supercomputer. Not that it matters what powers it until you need to understand the underlying platform, like you do for photosynthesis or microelectronics, both of which exposes quantum physics.

edmundsauto• 4 years ago

I think of it as something like "scale weighted abstractions". Quantum physics still matters on a human scale, just much much less than classical physics. Similarly, chess on silicon is massively more influenced by the information processing strategies than by the minor differences in silicon architecture. I believe there are entirely other types of computing structures. Our optimization of one type of information processor doesn't mean the others aren't good, or could be a superior strategy in the long run. It just means under the conditions which selected the initial winner, this one succeeded, and the following optimizations mean we'll keep exploiting this path until stopped.

If the details are abstracted away, I wonder where the abstractions are leaky. Are there certain areas of existence (perhaps consciousness?) at the human plane where quantum effects dominate?

How I learned to stop worrying and love uncertainty

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