On 1/6/2025 7:47 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:
On Mon, Jan 6, 2025 at 2:50 AM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
On 1/5/2025 9:46 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:
On Sun, Jan 5, 2025 at 11:41 PM Brent Meeker
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 1/5/2025 7:29 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:
On Sun, Jan 5, 2025 at 6:56 PM Brent Meeker
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 1/4/2025 11:45 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Saturday, January 4, 2025 at 8:06:38 PM UTC-7 Alan
Grayson wrote:
On Saturday, January 4, 2025 at 2:11:02 PM UTC-7
Alan Grayson wrote:
On Saturday, January 4, 2025 at 1:46:26 PM
UTC-7 John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Jan 4, 2025 at 10:00 AM Alan
Grayson <[email protected]> wrote:
/> Moderation is inappropriate where
Trump physics is endorsed. AG /
*About a month ago Sean Carroll uploaded a
very good video explaining the Many Worlds
theory, but it's over an hour long so I
know there's about as much chance of a
dilettante such as yourself of actually
watching it is there is of you reading a
post of mine if it's longer than about 100
words. *
*
*
*The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics | Dr.
Sean Carroll
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTmxIUz21bo&t=8s>
*
*
*
*John K Clark See what's on my new list
at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
*Sure, I'll watch it. But I am still waiting
for your reply to my question, posed around 10
times, why, based on S's equation, every thing
that can happen, MUST HAPPEN. And please don't
offer your BS that you've answered it
repeatedly. Such a claim would be blatent lie.
Finally, I know what you haven't offered the
answer. It's really simple. You don't want to
admit the Emperor has no clothes, as such an
admission might trigger a coronary when you
realize you've been preaching a lie these many
years. AG *
*I watched it. I can't say I fully understand it or
believe it. I'll probably watch it again. I do know
that lately I am less impressed with the cat
experiment, as I recall a recent comment by Brent;
that there's no operator which has Alive and Dead
as its eigenvalues. This, IMO, means that the cat's
wf isn't a valid quantum wf. AG
*
You're misinterpreting what I wrote. I meant that being
alive is a superposition of a bazillion of different
wave functions so it is impossible to formulate a
measurement operator which will return just one of two
values that actually correspond to Alive and Dead. In
other words the exist a range of states that count as
alive, some of which are dying, and a range of states
that would count at dead, but some of which are
recovering. It doesn't mean there is no WF of the cat.
I means that alive and dead are only well defined in the
extreme cases because the cat has many intermediate
states which we can't account for in our measurement
operator.
In terms of our fuzzy ordinary language this may be true,
but in classical mechanics we have the notion of a
"macrostate" which is defined as some large set of
microstates, can we do something similar in QM and just
imagine classifying every possible position eigenstate
But what's your assurance that position eigenstates are the
ones that provide a binary alive/dead dichotomy? And
position of what? Particles...that doesn't work because the
particle positions don't define an eigenstate of the whole.
It's a feature of QM that measurements are holistic. You
have to know what "alive" means in order to measure it.
Brent
I'm not a vitalist, so I don't think there is any objective
quality in nature of "aliveness" such that a human choice of
definition could be objectively right or wrong, any more than
there is an objective quality of "planetness" such that the
recent decision to change the definition to exclude Pluto could
be objectively right or wrong. To paraphrase Democritus, in truth
there are only atoms and void (or the modern equivalent, say
states of quantum fields), all higher level categories are just
useful conventions--Sean Carroll's book The Big Picture calls
this view "poetic naturalism". Given the understanding that terms
like "life" are just a matter of convention, one could come up
with a convention that's as precise as one likes, including
defining every position eigenstate as either a living thing or
not a living thing (and the choice to use position eigenstates
rather than momentum would also be a matter of convention).
So you're saying if you make "alive" and "dead" arbitrary then you
can measure them.
Not completely arbitrary because our choice of definition depends on
practical utility, but increasingly arbitrary when you get to
classifying edge cases. Consider the case of "species" categories in
biology--there is obviously a good case for having some such
definition because of the way organisms only interbreed with
sufficiently similar organisms, but on the other hand evolutionary
theory makes it obvious there's no exact natural boundary between an
ancestor species and a descendant species, so if you want an exact
definition in terms of the set of possible genomes that qualify as a
species, where you set the boundary will be pretty arbitrary with
nothing in nature to force the decision.
Are you just making a rhetorical point here, or do you actually
disagree that all our higher-level categories outside fundamental
physics are somewhat arbitrary in this sense?
I do not disagree. I agree that /most/ higher-level categories outside
fundamental physics are somewhat arbitrary in this sense; they rely on
arbitrary choices of boundary cases.
(Maybe chemical categories could be seen as non-arbitrary too, except
that if you had some precise quantum chromodynamics description of
nuclei splitting or merging I doubt there is any precise natural
boundary that would tell you *precisely* where one element changed to
a different element, down to the nearest Planck time.) Do you believe
that outside of physics, any scientific categories can be seen as 100%
objective "natural kinds" in the philosophical sense discussed at
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/ ? Do you think it's
meaningful to ask if astronomers were objectively wrong about some
natural fact when they chose the particular definition of "planet"
that they did, for example?
No. They are just defining a word, not determining a natural fact.
Brent
Jesse
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