A rant : Magic (possibly Spirituality to)

[The Good Reverend Roger]

[Captain Utopia]

 

I think you just won the next horrormirth competition.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think you just won the next horrormirth competition.

I think I just did the whole internet experience in one pic.   

[NotPublished]

 
Lots of love JohNyx!!

[Kai]

it doesn't even have a precise location until a measurement event, and it likewise doesn't have a precise momentum until a measurement event.

I've heard/read that before, but how was such a thing found out?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

People used to be split among three camps:
a) Particles don't have a position before they're measured (which is counterintuitive)
b) They do, we just don't know where that position is (which means QP is incomplete, since it can't tell us where)
c) Asking what the state of something is before it was measured is moronic, since it's completely untestable and therefore unscientific - by definition you can't know what an unmeasured quantity is.

Then Mr. Bell came along and showed that it made a testable difference whether a) or b) was correct, which immediately threw out c).  Later, the experiment he proposed gave really good evidence for a).

Thats because particles (like photons) don't collapse to particle vectors unless they are interacting with another particle. Otherwise they are more like a probability cloud, diffuse over an area. The very act of measurement causes the collapse.

Am I close?

[The Johnny]

[NotPublished]

 

Oh my god hahaha

[Golden Applesauce]

it doesn't even have a precise location until a measurement event, and it likewise doesn't have a precise momentum until a measurement event.

I've heard/read that before, but how was such a thing found out?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

People used to be split among three camps:
a) Particles don't have a position before they're measured (which is counterintuitive)
b) They do, we just don't know where that position is (which means QP is incomplete, since it can't tell us where)
c) Asking what the state of something is before it was measured is moronic, since it's completely untestable and therefore unscientific - by definition you can't know what an unmeasured quantity is.

Then Mr. Bell came along and showed that it made a testable difference whether a) or b) was correct, which immediately threw out c).  Later, the experiment he proposed gave really good evidence for a).

Thats because particles (like photons) don't collapse to particle vectors unless they are interacting with another particle. Otherwise they are more like a probability cloud, diffuse over an area. The very act of measurement causes the collapse.

Am I close?

I think so.

[Faust]

it doesn't even have a precise location until a measurement event, and it likewise doesn't have a precise momentum until a measurement event.

I've heard/read that before, but how was such a thing found out?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

People used to be split among three camps:
a) Particles don't have a position before they're measured (which is counterintuitive)
b) They do, we just don't know where that position is (which means QP is incomplete, since it can't tell us where)
c) Asking what the state of something is before it was measured is moronic, since it's completely untestable and therefore unscientific - by definition you can't know what an unmeasured quantity is.

Then Mr. Bell came along and showed that it made a testable difference whether a) or b) was correct, which immediately threw out c).  Later, the experiment he proposed gave really good evidence for a).

Thats because particles (like photons) don't collapse to particle vectors unless they are interacting with another particle. Otherwise they are more like a probability cloud, diffuse over an area. The very act of measurement causes the collapse.

Am I close?

The act of measurement doesn't cause the collapse, it creates an uncertainty in Your data as you can only know it to arbitrary accuracy. Additionally its more because position and momentum are tied together that you cannot know both to exact accuracy, as you increase the accuracy of knowing one, the other becomes harder to pinpoint, however you can get the expectation value which is its overall probability for position/momentum for an area.

[-Kel-]

 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This belongs on every forum on the internet.

[BabylonHoruv]

[Epimetheus]

GA, by what mechanism do you measure smaller-than-photon or even photon-size particles? Doesn't hitting something with the measurement particle (I'm thinking with photons) change the measured particle's movement? or something? 

[P3nT4gR4m]

So if QM is all fuzzy and full of shit like "we'll never know" how the fuck is it useful for anything?

pls note: I'm not disputing it's use (apparently it is) I just need an explanation as to how. 

[Xooxe]

I spent so much time trying to get my head around it, and I really didn't, so I don't want to talk much about quantum physics. Though, it helps to visualise that between the measuring instruments and the actual events that are being measured, there is a mathematical model that attempts to map and predict what is happening in the time it takes for a particle to be fired and for it to be detected. That mathematical model is what mostly gets talked about, not explicitly what is happening in reality.

Here's a browser applet for the double slit experiment that's quite fun to play with. 
http://www.fen.bilkent.edu.tr/~yalabik/applets/collapse.html