Quantum wonders: Nobody understands

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From Scientific American:

It is tempting, faced with the full-frontal assault of quantum weirdness, to trot out the notorious quote from Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman: "Nobody understands quantum mechanics."

It does have a ring of truth to it, though. The explanations attempted here use the most widely accepted framework for thinking about quantum weirdness, called the Copenhagen interpretation after the city in which Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg thrashed out its ground rules in the early 20th century.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... tands.html

this "spooky action at a distance" makes me feel extra-stupid everytime i try to grasp it.

It's fascinating that our gut-level conceptions of how the world works could be simply and profoundly wrong. --That what's in our heads, like Euclidean geometry isn't "real" at all, it's just an abstraction that helped our ancestors survive, so we have it too, but only because it was useful (as opposed to being a literally true property of the universe). And that there is no such thing as a particle, the way we think of particles. Or that going from point A to point B isn't a continuous trip. And on and on.

You are thinking in classical terms. Give it up.

ruveyn

If you're browsing through the back archives of working papers at the Santa Fe institute, you'll run across the occasional eruption from Stanley Kaufmann that rages against the embedded ongoing belief in the system that blinds us to quantum possibilities. Santa Fe Institute

Nice article.

Sheesh, this topic always irks me.

We have to stop thinking of ourselves as "something special"
Shroedinger's cat... THE DANG CAT CAN OBSERVE!! !!
Therefore the thought experiments fails off the bat.

Okay, so let's pretend it's a statue of a cat that has it's head broken off or not...
The very matter (aka stone made of molecules made of atoms made of quarks made of maybe something smaller ....) CAN OBSERVE.

I think only Roger Penrose has it right in his book "The Emperor's New Mind"
He talks about what he calls his "one graviton criteria"
Once the quantum field's statistical outcome would effect enough matter to change the state of the universe's state by one graviton (still a theoretical particle, but it serves it's purpose here) the universe will resolve it.

It doesn't really matter whether there is parallel universes, it doesn't change the understanding of the topic.

What the copenhagen vs. many-worlds hypothesis DOES have an impact on is the concept of free will and to whether it's real or illusionary.

I support Penrose in his assertion that we as human's with consciousness have the ability to affect the quantum field and force the so called collapse of the wave form, and that in itself is what free will is... And it's real as far as i'm concerned. (and if it weren't it wouldn't really matter anyways)

How do we "collapse the wave form"?
Well, if in observation we can set off other processes (greater than 1 graviton) that derive from an event (less than 1 graviton) then we force the collapse.
It is from this that he derives the mind being a quantum computer. I don't claim to agree 100% there... only that it can have quantum effects. Qu-bits... and all that stuff I'll reserve judgment on.

If you were writing a computer programme... And after entering an input. Would you then have it calculate all the values for all the variables for every possible input that you could have gave it, or would you have it just calculate the value for the variables for the actual input you gave it?
Why would the universe resolve/compute the effects of something that has no effect?
This "1 graviton criteria" is simply the smallest effect that the universe will resolve, that's all it is.

Btw.. i don't believe that Penrose really is implying that the criteria is SPECIFICALLY 1 graviton. rather it's an undetermined value of "change" in matter/energy (and therefore space-time curvature) small enough to make the planck length and planck masses look large.

Einstein might have said, in response to Quantum Mechanics... "God doesn't play dice"
I don't believe in god, but whatever you believe in... DOES play dice... That's what QM is all about. And it's real, like it (and it's implications) or not.
My version of god I guess is free will... and it's not really that free will plays dice... it LOADS the dice... Fixes the outcome.
Consciousness is simply the technique that we (as humans) and some other (if not most other) animals on earth, and all other life-bearing worlds (if there are any) have developed to cheat the universe.
It is in some ways the only reason that the universe even exists.... If all quantum events were certain.... back to the computer programme... there would be no reason to ask for inputs, no reason to do calculations of "variables" because there would be no variables, just constants. and thus, there would be no reason to write the programme in the first place... and back to the universe.. there would be no universe to resolve.

Actually Penrose suggests the barrier is somewhere around the Planck Mass, below that point we have observed quantum superpositions, above it we have not.

If you treat his mass threshold as a way of describing temporal interaction between the acausal strangeness of QM scales, and the boring day to day world, it's the same thing I've been saying for a while now.

The cat can observe only if it is alive. If it is dead, it cannot possibly know whether or not it is alive.