I would rather like to see the data from that particular model!
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
And in fact it is a silly idea. Games Theory tells us that we need an inner randomiser that makes our behaviour unpredictable to competitors/predators.
We don't need quantum theory for that - a menagerie of pseudo-random noise generators and a pseudo-random noise generator to chose between them will do the job perfectly adequately.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
God might have a different opinion.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Right. Namely, from God. Atheists are stuck accepting uncaused events, whic h is uncomfortable enough that some are prepared to argue seriously for an uncountable infinity of universes sprouting every moment, just to avoid it. Talk about flunking Ockham's Razor.
No. There's no such infinite regress in Platonism.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Well-- quantum theory for the mechanism, but it's simultaneously deeper and also more mundane than "quantum consciousness" people want it to be.
Brownian motion is a sufficient explanation. And as biological processes are underlaid by diffusion (Brownian motion being the mechanism, driven by quanta: molecules), it's no problem to generate random (of the same quality as integrated Johnson noise) concentrations of reactants, leading to random action potentials (in neurons), which are amplified by neurons biased to marginal thresholds, and so on until it becomes movements (or not).
A more basic (in the sense of having an abstract diagram to show the process, like what a Feynman diagram does for particle physics) view is information theory. Every time a pair of particles interact, they exchange information; thus the information carried by one particle is diluted by half (give or take..) on each bump.
Because the number of states is exponential in the number of particles (roughly), it very quickly gets impossible to record the total possible states a few-particle system is in, after just a few interaction events ("few" being on the order of hundreds..). And by "impossible", I mean using particles in the existing universe (on the order 1e80) to count the number of permutations.
Because of all these interactions, "quantum entanglement" really becomes a special case of an extraordinarily mundane process: rather than some quirk of particle generation, it's simply* the extreme reduction of state-mixing. Whereas the normal order of things has everything entangled so deeply that effectively nothing is.
*Simpler for some kinds of states than others, of course. It's a lot easier to lose, say, kinetic velocity of a gas particle, than the spin of a photon. Selection rules for very specific and restricted quantum states (like spin) harness the tiniest possible fraction of quantum behavior, because it's the easiest way to do it."Many Worlds" is just attaching pictures to an information tree. It's precisely (and necessarily) as meaningless as any other quantum worldview. The worlds don't actually exist, they're just probabilities imagined as physical outcomes.
Why even waste time imagining physical outcomes, when you can simply do the calculus with nice small lines connecting everything in a graph?
I suppose the explanation for that particular meme is, out of all possible ways to write a badly-written article about quantum mechanics (and they ALL are, without fail), "Many Worlds" is the most sensational and best-selling.
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
So you're claiming that my (free will) acts are actually acts of God? I suppose that's a relief, unless He's into self-punishment.
No. But there's no authentic source of meaning (aka freedom) either. There's either chaos, or determinism. Laws, or no laws, in both realms. Unless it's "sometimes God", which is capricious. Take your pick.
The example I gave (predicting the motion of an air molecule) is an adequate demonstration even with simple Newtonian physics. You don't need either QM or relativity to realize that stochastic behavior emerges from the noise of *everything* being connected.
You don't need to *enlarge* the universe adding a mystical realm to get all the properties one could hope for - meaning, order, chance, just the right mix of predictability and unpredictability to make life worthwhile and interesting.
Those folk want a real "significant" "meaningful" existence in another realm (spirit) to be able to act as a puppet-master in this physical world - which otherwise seems meaningless to them.
The problem is, the other realm they dream of (along with the religionists) is just as meaningless, and because it's inaccessible to experiment, ineffable, mystical - it doesn't even invite inquiry.
And as I explained, the "other realm" *cannot* add anything anyway. If it exists, it interacts as part of the universe. But it cannot fundamentally change the ontological problem, at least not as far as any human can observe.
Clifford Heath.
Why would anyone expect us to ever understand the universe totally? Everything we measure is an approximation and we are constantly discovering new realms to explore.
To put it another way, every question we answer raises two more new questions. Man is not equipped to understand the universe. In fact, you could say trying to "understand" the universe is a category error. The universe is not understandable by humans.
-- Rick C
ich is uncomfortable enough that some are prepared to argue seriously for a n uncountable infinity of universes sprouting every moment, just to avoid i t. Talk about flunking Ockham's Razor.
It's implicit in the logic.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
It is always possible that parts of our models are wrong. But what is not in doubt is that there is something heavy cold and dark holding every galaxy together to support their overly rapid rotation. We also know that it does not interact at all through electromagnetism.
Way back it was possible to hide this missing mass as non-lumious ordinarly baryonic matter: small rocks, biros, sticks of rhubarb. However, modern observational data rules this out since they would thermalise starlight and be detected with modern imaging instruments.
Dirac was amongst the first to consider this possibility. It didn't really lead anywhere but a discusion of it is in some classic texts.
The book you want is Martin Rees's "Just Six Numbers" which explores the fundamental parameters of our universe in careful detail and is accessible to an educated layman.
Crucially to get galaxies to form in computer you do need something along the lines of Cold Dark Matter or it doesn't work out. Interestingly when the gang of four were first doing this simulation work and the neutrino had been shown to have non-zero mass they tried Hot Dark Matter first since they knew that it really did exist.
There is an interview with Carlos Frenk about it on Radio 4's The Life Scientific in the ast couple of years.
The fine structure constant appears to be constant for as far back into the universe as we can see or the Lyman alpha forest would not be there.
Regards, Martin Brown
I'm going to hold off on the "not in doubt" part until dark matter has actually been found, identified, made in the LHC, etc. Certainly dark matter is our best current theory of what holds galaxies together. It may even be "beyond reasonable doubt" - but it is not "beyond /all/ doubt". So I'm fine that 99% of the scientific effort here is on looking for details and evidence for dark matter. But 1% should be looking for completely different ideas. The likelihood of those 1% being right may be small, but the consequences would be big. And it is vital for keeping the whole field scientific, rather than dogma - you must question the assumptions.
Well, I knew /I/ wasn't the first!
I'll make a note of that book title. I've a birthday coming up - my wife is always happy for ideas, or even better, if I buy it myself :-)
Couldn't it be due to some kind of weakening of gravity with distance (e.g. "MOND")? I know it is not particularly popular but is cold dark matter really beyond doubt? Especially if none of the dark matter searches are seeing anything?
[...]-- John Devereux
I believe the MOND theories are more an alternative explanation for dark energy, than dark matter. The "dark matter" part of the system is reasonably secure (though not, IMHO, beyond /all/ doubt). But the "dark energy" part is much more vague. I don't think it has progressed much beyond "it looks like there is something pushing distant galaxies apart. It's a bit like Einstein's cosmological constant, but that doesn't quite fit. We'll call it "dark energy" because we don't know anything about it."
So it goes. Cosmologists invent all sorts of dark stuff to explain why stars in galaxies are kept together, while at the same time whole galaxies are pushed apart from each other.
Cosmology theories are little more than curve fitting.
Jeroen Belleman
Robert, I'm guess you are not a physicist.
George H.
Can't spell, either. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
I think I could say that most of physics is curve fitting data to some theory. CMB gives some nice curves to fit.
George H.
Sure, indirectly. It's a design thing.
God wouldn't want me to give up coffee, would He? That is an unreasonable test of faith.
And to be good to other people and critters, which is I suppose part of the same thing. Altruism seems to be wired into (most of) us... most of the time.
I agree. He may not be conscious, but I sure am.
This all loops back to electronic design. We are in the ideas business, and a rigid attitude towards determinism can poison the generation of crazy ideas, which you need lots of to come up with a few good ideas. There is some deep connection between consciousness and spirituality and designing stuff. And altruism, too: the best way to learn to design is by teaching other people how to design.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Spelling is over-rated. Unified spelling is a fairly modern, fairly compulsive, concept.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
We can only observe and try to make some sens of what we see. No change to make dedicated experiments like your colleagues at CERN.
-- Reinhardt
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