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Found in a book on physics:

Started by LMNO, August 23, 2007, 05:44:58 PM

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Triple Zero

just to clarify for Bo (if necessary): with "tasty menu", LMNO means the "the map is not the territory" phrase, which we have reformulated here to

1 "the meal is not the menu",
2 "don't eat the menu",
3 and finally "it's a really tasty-looking menu, but you shouldn't nibble on it."

just saying

please continue your QM talks
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

LMNO

More stuff from that book:

So much for experience. What about theory? Raw experience is chaotic even in the macroscopic world. Theory helps us organize this chaos by proposing models whose components simulate the things we actually see. If the theories work, that is, if they appear to simulate accurately the pattern of observable events, then we are inclined to attribute a kind of reality to their components.

We might call these models theoretical reality, which sounds like an oxymoron. This is the kind of reality, however, most relevant to human affairs. It is this image of reality that persists in conscious memory and motivates future actions. Short of inadvertent knee-jerks, or a more or less conscious surrender to impulse, we rarely act upon raw unfiltered experience, but rather upon images based on past experiences that we carry in our minds.

These are the images that give meaning to experience. They are the visions that suggest possible consequences of actions, and they have an extraordinary psychological power. Only these remembered images are continuous and permanent. The actual experience of physical reality is fragmentary and fleeting.

So we attribute persistence or trajectories or world-lines to all visible objects despite the hopelessness of observing them directly at every instant. We think of the world-lines as real because the theory that contains them ,Äì the possibly hard-wired model in our brains ,Äì works spectacularly well for big things. One of quantum theory's striking features is that it does not have any component resembling trajectories or world-lines for microscopic objects. That is, the quantum world view does not fill in with theoretical entities all the parts of nature that are missing from our direct experience.

LMNO

Also:


The early literature on quantum theory, which is still widely read by scientists as well as by philosophers and historians, is an archaeological midden in which the precursors of our current understanding are mixed with misleading and irrelevant debris. Much confusion has been created by authors who have tried to reconcile this old language with the modern unambiguous understanding we have achieved, especially about the issue of waves versus particles.

So let me state clearly: One of the fundamental concepts of quantum theory is a wave, or more precisely, a field, but it is a probability field that does not itself carry energy or momentum, and can be considered "real" only insofar as the theory that contains it is successful.

On the other hand, at the fundamental level, the theory does not contain "particles" even as theoretical entities. What it does contain is registrations, and these do not appear in the mathematical formulas, but in the interpretive statements that link the theory with experience (Born,Äôs interpretation).