Thank you!
I actually had this written on the { Notes } post before, before but took it off: I use mini post-its (1.5 x 2 in) & stick them on the edge of the pages (next to the relevant content) so they’re just a few millimeters off — enough to write a title and see where things are in a book. Much better than highlighting.
Uncredited Photographer
Theoretical Physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman
1959“…will you understand what I’m going to tell you? …No, you’re not going to be able to understand it. …I don’t understand it. Nobody does…. The scale of light can be described by numbers—called the frequency—and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can’t see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It’s still light… Light is something like raindrops—each little lump of light is called a photon—and if the light is all one color, all the ‘raindrops’ are the same color… Every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering that the same thing: light is made of particles…” Richard Feynman, “QED : The Strange Theory of Light and Matter” 1985
“Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn’t mean all bets are off.” Murray Gell-Mann
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These two are my favorite.
Gell-Mann’s { The Quark and the Jaguar } is possibly the best, most clarifying book I’ve read, about quantum physics (and systems, to date).
Feynman was one of the first to truly open my eyes to the incredible nature of this world, via { The Meaning of it All }.
(via fuckyeahquantummechanics)
Again, thank you.
Could you provide source(s) to learn more about this?
A quick Wiki of infinities brings up other interesting questions / paths to follow:
{ Continuum Hypotheses }
What the Hell is { Cardinality }
‘“But why”, you ask, “are they called ‘real’ numbers? Are there ‘pretend’ numbers?” Well, yes, actually there are, though they’re actually called “imaginary” numbers; they are what is used to make the complex numbers, and is what the “i” stands for.’
••••••
It was at about that point in high school math that I was like, “F this, I’m done here.” I have a bit more patience now.
Thank you for your answers. I’ve been sitting on these, as I still have questions and wanted to dissect them properly. In regards to this one; a direct quote from Page 26:
Since nothing can ever be measured with perfect accuracy [i.e. weather and other chaotic phenomena; not just ANYthing], chaos gives rise to effective indeterminacy at the classical level over and above the indeterminacy in principle of quantum mechanics. The interaction between these two kinds of unpredictability is a fascinating and still rather poorly studied aspect of contemporary physics.
Shortly after, on page 27:
“[Todd Brun’s] results seem to confirm that for many purposes it is useful to regard chaos as a mechanism that can amplify to macroscopic levels the indeterminacy inherent in quantum mechanics”
You’d say it’s not a direct magnification, as they’re different types of chaos, but could it be regarded as an amplification mechanism — that’s different. Gell-Mann says there that it can; I’m wondering if that’s still the case.
As for the former, the question is more about the relationship between the two types of indeterminacy. How do they scale — where does one become the other, how do they interact, if at all?
From what you’ve said, it seems like they don’t necessarily interact and that the classical doesn’t necessarily come from the quantum, as the former is just due to a huge system with too many variables and the latter from effects we don’t yet understand. But if you look at the system in a sufficiently detailed way, the classical system is the quantum. Is the question over with: we’ve decided we’re ending at “too many variables”? Or is there any value in supposing that some quantum effects translate into the more coarsely-grained, classical system?
It’s probably also useful to add that on page 24-25, he mentions the well-known Heisenberg principle, and that:
“While that principle has received wide publicity (sometimes in misleading terms) over many decades, the additional indeterminacy that quantum mechanics requires is rarely mentioned. We shall take it up in some detail later on.”
Though, I’m not quite sure where the “later on” is right now, so can’t include those notes.
Being that Schrödinger’s cat is in essence a [quantum-mechanical] system within a [QM] system (the environment), it is always physically interacting with the world around it. There’s no way to encase it in a box that would separate it from the universe. Via those interactions, the system (cat and world) is measuring itself — physically observing itself — and due to those interactions / self-observation, options (probabilities) that were prior available are collapsed.
Analogy or not, it isn’t useful for us [laypeople] if it only mystifies and confuses.
Similarly, is there any reason to believe that “Many Worlds” exist, instead of collapsing into the single path taken when the system (cat, universe, and all) configures itself into a single chosen state, and not the others?
