mind. blown.

Sircrashalot

New Member
I got to 2:40 & something in my brain broke. I actually understood it with the ant/newspaper illustration.
Gonna watch more after I rest my brain cell :D
 

Cyclopath

Shop Owner / Employee
Shop Keep
Oooh, I really liked when it got into the ream of probable future potentials and having them all connected. Where you could basically move from one to the other seamlessly. That sounds like a real party!

You could go from the pinnacle of your racing career to sleeping in a cardboard to relaxing on your private yacht in the West Indies in a matter of seconds!
 

ellbiddy

Active Member
Similar to QM, these are interepreations of events rather than actual discriptions (i.e. the collapsing wavefunction (probability function or Probability Density Function PDF is part of an interpretation of QM it is NOT a direct extension of it). These types of things are effects of our attempts to rationalize rather than accepting them as truths (which is good and bad in its own ways).

Not to bore anyone but as to avoid wasting the years of schooling I had the idea really stems from the double slit diffraction experiment. You could pass anything, the best to start with is a beam of light, and it will diffract (if you don't know what that is I'll leave it for you to google) from both slits and these diffraction patterns interfere. This is acceptable behavior for something that is though to be a wave (like an electromagnetic wave). However, had you treated each light packet (which they actually travel as) as a single object instead of a wave you can see which of these two holes it passes throuh, however KNOWING this stops the diffraction and subsequent intereference from happening. The real funny stuff is when they did this with an electron. At first it looked like they were passing through the slits as particles and simply striking areas not obscured by both slits, but after time they developed a double-slit diffraction pattern from the individual hit. That means that it had to diffract as a wave by passing through BOTH slits, interfere with itself, and then determine where it was supposed to hit (as a particle!), however if you KNEW which of the two slits it passed through by measuring the EM field it would NOT diffract with itself and would behave like a particle. So in the end, what most people have agreed to (and this is where the interepration stems from) is that even a single object (electron) passing through two slits has passed through both holes, but it cannot do this if you "collapse the wavefunction" (e.g. knowing which slit it passed through).

The other weird thing is that even PEOPLE and huge objects can do this, it's just that the probabilities are much smaller and are wavelengths are very small assuming we can act as both particles and waves (which was shown to be the case with subatomic particles). That's what DeBroglie (I might have spelled it wrong) worked on, where your wavelengh is defined as a ratio of your mass and velocity. This has its own set of weird implications in that a "packet of light" has no mass at "rest" but because it is moving has a finite amount of momentum (defined as mass*velocity) so because it moves it gains "mass" And so on and so on....

I worked in physics labs for years, even made it out to Los Alamos (they developed the nuke there :p) for a 6 month stint and have always wished I stayed in it, it's super fun to think about. Sadly my end destination is healthcare, who would have thought!
 

ellbiddy

Active Member
The other thing that will blow your mind is that if you run into a wall there is a FINITE possibility you would run right through it. The probability is so small however that even given as much time as the universe was around, it would still not have happened yet, due to our size. However electrons do it all the time and it has been used in the tunneling electron microscopes with great success.....so the take home message is don't rely on it for rides :rofl:

If anyone is really interested in this stuff I have tons and tons of books on it from the technical math to really conceptual descriptions of a lot of this. I'd be more than happy to loan some of them out.
 

phathucker

New Member
How bout the famous Schrodinger's Cat paradox?

The hypothesis arose from a thought experiment envisioned by Erwin Schrodinger, the founder of quantum mechanics. In Schrodinger's thought experiment, a cat is placed in a box. Inside the box is a canister of cyanide, a Geiger counter, and an amount of radioactive material so small that there is a 50/50 chance that the Geiger counter will detect radiation. If the Geiger counter detects radiation, a hammer smashes the canister and the cat dies. Otherwise, the cat lives. (If you ask me, Schrodinger was one sick puppy.) The famous Schrodinger's Cat paradox arises when an observer attempts to compute the cat's wave function: before the box is opened, the wave function is the sum of that of a live cat and that of a dead cat. In a sense, the cat is both alive and dead. The many-worlds hypothesis seeks to resolve the paradox by saying that there are two universes, one with a live cat and one with a dead cat.

This is all well and good, except for the fact that in each of these universes the observer computes the cat's wave function and still finds that the cat is both alive and dead! The paradox remains.

The paradox is resolved by noting that the wave function is a subjective quantity dependent on the amount of information the observer has. If someone peeks into the box before computing the wave function, he/she will get a wave function consistent with either a live cat or a dead cat. If someone else comes along later, not knowing what has happened, that person will get a wave function which is half live cat and half dead cat.
 

ellbiddy

Active Member
Also an extension of an interpretation not a consequence of the science ;). Since no interpretation could rightfully be accepted as fact as they are, by name, interpretations. Stuff like that is merely an exercise of thought experiments :p Many other interpretations lead to other weird paradoxes.

It's worth to note that most "paradoxes" aren't paradoxes, but just "what happens" look up time dilation and the "twin paradox" when you get some time. Yet they still use special relativity to calculate proper coordinates for GPS systems! CAH-RAZY I TELL YAH!
 

ellbiddy

Active Member
On a similarly geeky note, I remember reading that some scientists think the universe is "curved" in the same way a mobious strip is so that you can travel in a straight line and hit the same spot twice. If that were the case and you were moving at a significant portion of the speed of light and passed by your "twin" after 10 earth years, ALL of the arguments used to describe time dilation (and consequently the seen age difference) are based around acceleration and change of interial frames, but this way you would never leave your inertial frame so according to them you'd be just as old until you stopped! Then you would age less! The only resolution is that you're accelerating and decelerating in a dimension higher than hours! SPOoOOOOooKY :rofl: Would be a good question to pose to a physics prof in lecture, though it centers around the fact that the universe is in fact curved. No way we'd find out in this life experimentally anyway, but maybe if you shine a laser in a straight line so it doesn't hit anything by the time you get to be millions of years old it'll hit you in the back of the head :p
 

ellbiddy

Active Member
So disapointed. Not what thought i was getting! :rofl::rofl:

Yeah well, here you go:

argyle-iphone-wallpaper.jpg
 

Sircrashalot

New Member
Was a show on Nat geo last night called Master of the universe about all of this....I have it saved in the black hole that is my DVR.
 

f2f4

New Member
I was able to comprehend up until the end, although I don't fully understand how scientists/physicists/theoreticians were able to come up with all this.


My NEW life goal is to ascend at least a few dimensions. You know, like those people on SG1?
 
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