This is the state of QM as it stands today

As perceived by @MrAl

 

As perceived by @MrAl

It's a good start to clearly see there is a reasonable alternative to a Newtonian universe, where you can believe the physics limits and restrictions of SR/GR and QM don't really exist, and those limitations might be overcome by clever tricks.

Saying "quantum mechanics must be incomplete" as per Einstein, so far, is counter to actual experimental evidence that QM breaks our intuition about local realism when we try use classic physics to explain the experiment. That's true unless (loophole) we live in a universe of Superdeterminism where we are just puppets that must follow a predetermined path no matter what. The experiment outcome is fixed and the scientist has no free will.

John Bell described the Superdeterminism loophole this way:

“There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic,
.."

Given that alternative, it's easy to see why the QM pill is popular in science.

 

That's an interesting summary.

The key point is that no matter what we measure, even after the second particle leaves the local area, we cannot predict the final state until we actually measure the state itself. That's because the state is separate from the point in space where the attempt to predict what will happen is performed and at that point there is nothing we can measure that will tell us what will happen in the future.
The difference between a classical prediction and the actual final state is small in terms of reliability, but it is considered very significant and not due to any measurement error.
The choice I think was to either declare a departure from reality, or just that it depended on locality. The idea of a difference in locality won. To me it still seems like a departure from reality, where reality is our human common experience. This is nothing that we ever experience directly, unless of course we just do not realize it yet.

This is the state of QM as it stands today. What tomorrow will bring remains to be seen. To that end I do not accept any advanced predictions because it's all guess work, although those guesses are also interesting to discuss.

This is the computational complexity I was referring to. As a matter of pure mathematics or logic, the amount of data points required to validate your first paragraph is quasi-infinite. The complexity is compounded by the fact that things change. There is nothing I've found in physics to suggest any unit of information is immutable in time and space. What we have is a system (the scientific method) which constantly compares a "known" dataset to an "unknown" dataset to distill out a convergence (aka a pattern aka a "fact"). The problem as I see it is the known dataset is constantly subjected to physical forces which either adds or removes information in the process. Since we have no idea what the other information could be or how it manifests, we arrive at what I think is an ineffable quality of the universe.

Our resident Yaakov said something very interesting relevant here. Basically we when we use words like "fact", is it synonymous to saying "I agree". I wrestled with this for a long time and I think he's right. At the end of the day, all we have are our senses to process the physical world and (body) language to communicate with other primates. We "know" the sky is blue because the data points obtained by all observers appear to converge. We also know that if you don't see the sky as "blue", you apparently have some kind of ocular deficiency.

But herein we get the same problem: If 95% of the population see the sky as blue, given we locally define blue to some set of parameters, we are forced to concede our conceptualization of the colour blue is nothing more than consensus. For all we know, the other 5% may have superior vision in ways that "normal" eyes can't image. Since the needed data points are effectively beyond our grasp, I fail to see how any living person can make grandiose claims about how any theory (scientific or not) describes the entire universe.

I think this relates to quantum mechanics because the scope of QM is limited compared to what the universe really is (the totality of information). As I said before, QM says nothing useful regarding things like emotions or curiosity. It seems many learned people think they can define a universe without quantifying things like love or hate as if they don't exist which is a tactical blunder.

...If something like hate is inherent in all our systems, to what degree does it affect the clear-mindedness of scientific people who devised QM? Here we have a degree of freedom I'm calling "hate" that clearly has a huge affect on many, many things. From the perspective of control theory, there are n degrees of freedom operating in my body as well as m degrees of freedom operating in the universe.

The m degrees of course include the n degrees you the reader locally experience similar to my own. If this is the case, the amount of information at work here is spectacularly immense. Here comes the kicker: if you agree with any of my claims, does this mean these claims are fact? How many people need to agree before it becomes fact? And at which point do we say we have analyzed "enough" data-points? This is where reductionist claims like determinism and free-will lose all their water. We simply do not have the data. It is sheer arrogance to think we can extrapolate our way out of this.

 

This is the computational complexity I was referring to. As a matter of pure mathematics or logic, the amount of data points required to validate your first paragraph is quasi-infinite. The complexity is compounded by the fact that things change. There is nothing I've found in physics to suggest any unit of information is immutable in time and space. What we have is a system (the scientific method) which constantly compares a "known" dataset to an "unknown" dataset to distill out a convergence (aka a pattern aka a "fact"). The problem as I see it is the known dataset is constantly subjected to physical forces which either adds or removes information in the process. Since we have no idea what the other information could be or how it manifests, we arrive at what I think is an ineffable quality of the universe.

Our resident Yaakov said something very interesting relevant here. Basically we when we use words like "fact", is it synonymous to saying "I agree". I wrestled with this for a long time and I think he's right. At the end of the day, all we have are our senses to process the physical world and (body) language to communicate with other primates. We "know" the sky is blue because the data points obtained by all observers appear to converge. We also know that if you don't see the sky as "blue", you apparently have some kind of ocular deficiency.

But herein we get the same problem: If 95% of the population see the sky as blue, given we locally define blue to some set of parameters, we are forced to concede our conceptualization of the colour blue is nothing more than consensus. For all we know, the other 5% may have superior vision in ways that "normal" eyes can't image. Since the needed data points are effectively beyond our grasp, I fail to see how any living person can make grandiose claims about how any theory (scientific or not) describes the entire universe.

I think this relates to quantum mechanics because the scope of QM is limited compared to what the universe really is (the totality of information). As I said before, QM says nothing useful regarding things like emotions or curiosity. It seems many learned people think they can define a universe without quantifying things like love or hate as if they don't exist which is a tactical blunder.

...If something like hate is inherent in all our systems, to what degree does it affect the clear-mindedness of scientific people who devised QM? Here we have a degree of freedom I'm calling "hate" that clearly has a huge affect on many, many things. From the perspective of control theory, there are n degrees of freedom operating in my body as well as m degrees of freedom operating in the universe.

The m degrees of course include the n degrees you the reader locally experience similar to my own. If this is the case, the amount of information at work here is spectacularly immense. Here comes the kicker: if you agree with any of my claims, does this mean these claims are fact? How many people need to agree before it becomes fact? And at which point do we say we have analyzed "enough" data-points? This is where reductionist claims like determinism and free-will lose all their water. We simply do not have the data. It is sheer arrogance to think we can extrapolate our way out of this.

Hello,

I may agree with a lot of that, but there is more to it. There is survival, the "need for speed" if you will.

We are living in a state where we want to survive, and history has taught us that we must make concessions in order to keep things simple enough so that we can react in a fast enough way to keep ourselves going. This boils down to being practical, and that means we have to consider the most important dimensions first and the others second.

We are trying to understand the universe, and to do that we have to keep it somewhat simple or else we would have too much to deal with and never come to any conclusions we could actually use to advance. That means ignoring some dimensions of the entire problem, and this is how we always deal with theory itself. We then have a basis for a measuring system we can use in order to determine not only what might happen, but also where we need improvement. If we did not have that, you would have had no ground to state that other dimensions may enter into the problem also. This is really part of discovery, and we are far from the end of that.

I do share your sentiments about how wrong we are to ignore some things. There are some things we simply can not measure and so it seems impossible to state that ideals in our local area are the same as billions of light years away. I believe this is part of heuristics. We need them, we must use them, otherwise the system would be far, far too complex to deal with at all.
I guess an analogy would be we are floating around in a cloud not knowing where we are going, so we use everything we see around us to try to make some sense out of it, and in doing so we may have to invent some things that temporarily allow us to navigate to some degree.

We are human and we have very limited knowledge, there's just no way around that, so we do whatever we can to make progress, at least the way we see it, and hope for the best. That's really all we have.

The other day someone told me about a mud slide in another country where something like 2000 people were buried, and it was nearly impossible to 'dig' them out because it was a large area and it was still mud. The thing is, that's nothing compared to what could happen. The universe is very powerful and unforgiving. The entire planet could be gone in the blink of an eye and there would be nothing we could do to stop it. Heuristics is our only hope, even in science. It's all we have really.

I know what you mean though. QM is not well understood yet. Some say that at the moment of observation the observer affects the outcome of the measurement and so NO previous measurements (so-called knowledge of the previous states) can predict the ultimate outcome. That's not quite the same as the Heisenberg uncertainty, but it still says that we won't know what the outcome is no matter what we do.

I suppose we could discuss this further but it's always going to boil down to from our point of view right now, everything is somewhat arbitrary. Even this discussion becomes part of that set. All we have is hope and heuristics.

 

I have no idea how big the universe is, but it must be huge in order to hold Brian Greene's ego.

 

 

 

I don't believe this guy's conclusions. He's saying that the universe had a beginning in Time (the Big Bang) but that it's already infinite. He's speculating, against observational evidence, that the Universe is just a bubble derived from previous Universes. No discontinuities have been found in the fabric of space-time of the distant universe to remotely support that idea.

Practically every human being is born searching for infinity. And anthropology in general recognizes that. But some scientists can't stand the fact that there is simply no evidence for physical infinity and start making things up.

 

I don't believe this guy's conclusions. He's saying that the universe had a beginning in Time (the Big Bang) but that it's already infinite. He's speculating, against observational evidence, that the Universe is just a bubble derived from previous Universes. No discontinuities have been found in the fabric of space-time of the distant universe to remotely support that idea.

Practically every human being is born searching for infinity. And anthropology in general recognizes that. But some scientists can't stand the fact that there is simply no evidence for physical infinity and start making things up.

We are constantly learning new things about the universe we can't yet know what might turn up next.

I found that my suspicion about the correlation between a narrow worm hole and quantum entanglement for now is true. That means we may now have a better way to study entanglement. This 'revelation' came from the experiments with teleportation.
I think that all of this ties in with the universe itself it's all part of the Great Mystery.

Maybe we should be happy we don't know everything yet, it gives us something to do

 

Not that I've read the whole thread, but I always wanted to ask someone from each camp:

1: The universe is infinite guy.
Q: Why is there any background radiation from the big bang still around? Like radiation, like all other forms of energy, starts at a point and moves away from that point like a ray, so it should all fly off into the infinite space, right?

2: The universe is finite guy.
Q: Energy, for example radio waves, travel away from the source, like a ray, so what happens when they reach the edge of the universe?

EDIT: Correct misunderstanding from when I was taught as a child.

 

I have watched some of Sabine Hossenfelder's videos. She has a way of explaining many of these questions. Very often, her final answer is "We just don't know and will never know".

She explains away the problem of the Big Bang hypothesis by saying there are two concepts of the Big Bang.
1) The expansion from a singularity.
2) The expansion after the initial expansion.

Her argument is that the current Big Bang hypothesis is (2) and not (1). We don't know that a singularity is even possible. The universe could actually be cycles of a Big Bang and a Big Crunch without having to become a singularity.

https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos

IDK if anyone pointed this out yet (it doesn't look like it), but a big bang followed by a big crunch in repetition would result is an ever decreasing amount of energy available in the universe. This would mean that there would be very few or no repetitions due to a lack of energy to perform the bang/crunch unless energy is somehow reflected and reintegrated back into the universe after striking the "edge" of the universe.

 

" It's not like radiation is affected by gravity "...better look up gravitational lensing.

 

IDK if anyone pointed this out yet (it doesn't look like it), but a big bang followed by a big crunch in repetition would result is an ever decreasing amount of energy available in the universe. This would mean that there would be very few or no repetitions due to a lack of energy to perform the bang/crunch unless energy is somehow reflected and reintegrated back into the universe after striking the "edge" of the universe.

The universe has no "edge". Space is bent in a 4th dimension and curves back on itself. It's like living on the surface of a sphere. Except that said surface is so large that it would be impossible to traverse without breaking the laws of physics.

 

Yesterday the world was flat. Not even the Universe can exist otherwise lol

kv

 

" It's not like radiation is affected by gravity "...better look up gravitational lensing.

What I was actually taught was that energy, whether it be light, radio waves, radiation, or heat, moved like a ray. Out from the center point. Being so young when I was taught, I didn't actually take gravity into account, and so came to misunderstand in that regard. I'll edit my other post to correct this mistake.

 

The universe has no "edge". Space is bent in a 4th dimension and curves back on itself. It's like living on the surface of a sphere. Except that said surface is so large that it would be impossible to traverse without breaking the laws of physics.

4th dimension? You mean like time? How does that work? Article? YT video?

 

What I was actually taught was that energy, whether it be light, radio waves, radiation, or heat, moved like a ray.

Yes, general relativity is not taught at the grade school level. All matter and energy is affected by gravity.

And heat is not a form of radiation, it is just the kinetic energy of the particles.

 

Not that I've read the whole thread, but I always wanted to ask someone from each camp:

1: The universe is infinite guy.
Q: Why is there any background radiation from the big bang still around? It's not like radiation, like all other forms of energy, starts at a point and moves away from that point like a ray, so it should all fly off into the infinite space, right?

2: The universe is finite guy.
Q: Energy, for example radio waves, travel away from the source, like a ray, so what happens when they reach the edge of the universe?

EDIT: Correct misunderstanding from when I was taught as a child.

Neither of these are precisely true according to current inflationary theory.

Both errors, IMHO, are cause by the way humans perceive space and time and the incongruities caused by a finite and definite speed of light (at least now, in the present), and by the extreme difficulty humans have in understanding what infinity is.

In short, the universe is both bounded and unbounded simultaneously, depending on how you look at it.

 

Not that I've read the whole thread, but I always wanted to ask someone from each camp:

1: The universe is infinite guy.
Q: Why is there any background radiation from the big bang still around? Like radiation, like all other forms of energy, starts at a point and moves away from that point like a ray, so it should all fly off into the infinite space, right?

2: The universe is finite guy.
Q: Energy, for example radio waves, travel away from the source, like a ray, so what happens when they reach the edge of the universe?

EDIT: Correct misunderstanding from when I was taught as a child.

Hi,

#1
Well, E=mc^2 so that would mean all mass would have to fly off too right? Not sure if that's possible but it may be happening as we speak with the expansion. That is, it's still an ongoing process.

#2
The 'edge' of the universe is hard to define. We believe the universe is expanding and that everything that exists had come into existence over time because of that, including that time. The expanse implies a timeline, but at the edge supposedly time is actually being created also. That means that if we had a road that led to the edge and we were walking down that road toward the edge, we would see the road expanding right before our feet. Each step we took would lead to a longer and longer road. Thus we would not hit any wall and bounce back unless maybe we could travel faster than the expanse. But then what if the expanse depends on how fast we were traveling, like the faster we go the faster it expands. It's like we would be creating more time and space just by moving outward. This could mean that the 'edge' is actually a very rough edge with jagged spikes or rounded caverns. Kind of like a very bumpy surface not a smooth lining of some kind. There could be some places where it reaches out thousands of light years farther than in other places. Maybe there were asteroids or other bits of matter that have created very long arms that stretch out very far unlike other places.

#3
There is just too much we don't know about the universe to exactly answer any casual questions. We don't even know what is just 4 thousand miles beneath our feet for sure yet. How could we really know what is billions of miles away. The James Webb telescope is changing a lot of that now too so we are getting new info on a regular basis. That could change everything.

#4
It's a little interesting that in one Hindu religion there is a god that is responsible for destroying the universe and then creating it all over again. Where did we hear that before in one of the theories of the expanding/collapsing/expanding/collapsing universe