Interesting Links for 08-10-2022
Oct. 8th, 2022 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- 1. How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end?
- (tags:russia ukraine civilwar viaDanielDWilliam )
- 2. National Galleries of Scotland issues closure warning over growing cash crisis
- (tags:museums scotland doom )
- 3. Here's someone who knows exactly what the picture will look like before the pen touches paper
- (tags:art video impressive )
- 4. The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
- (tags:nobel physics reality viaSwampers )
- 5. Where does "British people don't eat spicy food" come from?
- (tags:food history uk )
- 6. Miami man hopped a bus to start a new life. His parents got a court order.
- (tags:autism parenting OhForFucksSake USA )
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Re: The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
Date: 2022-10-11 08:54 am (UTC)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics
Re: The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
Date: 2022-10-11 10:45 am (UTC)Re: The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
Date: 2022-10-11 10:46 am (UTC)I still find it boggling, for instance, that there are people who think that "Let's add an uncountably-large number of parallell universes" to be the simplest answer!
Re: The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
Date: 2022-10-12 01:13 pm (UTC)I think people who think that to a greater or lesser extent (including me), don't think that's a simple theory as such, but that the apparently simpler theories are ruled out so it's the only viable theory left in the running and is left provisionally in the lead by default.
This is what I'm getting at with my descriptions. "An invisible undetectable force travels instantaneously faster that light according to whatever unspecified reference frame is intuitive to humans who happen to know about it, which manipulates the random events that happen to subatomic particles to imitate the way the equations say they would behave if you followed the equations into a many-worlds-compatible interpretation" is "simple" in some sense, but I think all those unspecified parts make it less likely to represent a law of physics. All the laws of physics we discover tend to be mathematically simple but don't care about being mind-boggling to human intuition.
Likewise "don't think about it too hard, just trust your intuition for what experiments are 'small' and which are 'large'" I think is a worse explanation because it doesn't explain how to model arbitrary experiments. And... I don't think any of the other candidate interpretations are any more viable.
I don't understand this *well*. I think it's likely that the answer which will eventually become accepted will be *like* the many worlds interpretations and be effective and unpalatable for similar reasons, but make more sense in some other way no-one's considered yet. I don't understand the physics well enough to say what I think *is* right, but my opinion is based on reading opinions by people who *do* understand, and anticipating that the parts they seem confident on with lots of specifics they will probably turn out to be right about, and the parts where people seem to hedge a lot and keep talking past each other, will probably turn out not to be right :)
Re: The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
Date: 2022-10-12 02:00 pm (UTC)That's a non-local hidden-variable theory, which is totally allowed.
Or one of the Objective Collapse theories?
Those both seem a lot simpler than infinite branching worlds we can never touch to me.
Edit: Of course, actual physicists can't agree: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23331074-600-physicists-cant-agree-on-what-the-quantum-world-looks-like/ - and the plurality goes to Copenhagen.
Re: The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
Date: 2022-10-12 06:34 pm (UTC)Wait, sorry, do you mean "it's not a 'local hidden variable theory'" or a "it's a 'non-local" hidden variable theory". Wait, I guess maybe those are the same. But what do you mean, allowed? We have rapidly moved beyond the parts I actually know anything about, but I thought "local" meant "only normal forces, not secret superluminal effects" and I thought that probably was needed for any theory which might match reality.
I do not understand pilot wave theory! But my vague impression was that the original reason people liked it was because it hypothesised a pilot wave with clear physical existence which could be an underlying reality which could lead to behaviours of particles of which the observations and other theories were a close approximation, i.e. even if not practically detectable, in principle could produce different physical observations to all the other theories. But then it seemed that didn't really work out, mostly because it didn't explain non-local effects. So then there's a version which is more like "equivalent to the wave function but everywhere at once", but I'm not clear what the benefits are.
I'm sure there are *some* benefits, or physicists wouldn't still be thinking about. But I don't think it's a slam dunk, or I think physicists would be more excited by it...
Re: The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
Date: 2022-10-12 06:45 pm (UTC)Re: The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
Date: 2022-10-13 06:06 pm (UTC)There's a lot of subjectivity here. I mean, I'm one of the people who generally favors Many-Worlds, and yes -- I do find it "simple". But that means that it is IMO conceptually simpler and more satisfying than the alternatives: "simple" is categorically different from "small".
Yes, it involves more-or-less infinite numbers, but those show up all the time in modern cosmology -- for example, if you accept the common interpretation that we live in a bubble universe that boiled out of runaway inflation, that's a different enormous-infinity of universes.
Honestly, I find the infinities comforting. I like the sense that the world is vaster and more complex than we can possibly ever explore. That's weird, but it's not boring...