Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Reggie on November 1, 2009 at 1:02am

Lol. Well, when you frame it like that....

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Doug Reardon on November 2, 2009 at 9:38pm

"The deeper physics and cosmology get the more it feels mystical."
Any sufficiently advanced technology will be seen as magic! - Arthur C. Clark

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Atheist Ninja on November 2, 2009 at 10:35pm

I'm very thankful for everyone's participation in this forum, and for leading me to so much information. However I now feel like I'd have to take years at university before it would even make enough sense for me to ask comprehensible questions. I do have one question though, hopefully it can be answered without an overwhelming amount of technicality. I've seen several times mentioned now that QM formulas have proven to be very accurate once able to be experimented. Is then QM able to account for the aforementioned differences in the double slit experiment caused by mere observance of a particle? Does this imply that an observation translates into a physical force?

I started this forum thinking that indeterminism was hard to grasp, now I find that there are features of QM that are even more troubling.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Reggie on November 2, 2009 at 10:44pm

In order to "see" the particle, you have to interfere with it in some way. That changes the outcome from when you measure it and when you don't.

Of course, we now have some real, live physics folk who could do a lot better at explaining than me.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Danielle on November 2, 2009 at 11:08pm

Yes, one of the bases of QM is that observing a probability waves "collapses" it to a particle form. The problem with doing experiments in QM is the observer cannot be separated from the experiment and has to be fundamentally considered as part of the "set up" of the experiment. It's not a force as in the definition of a force (in the F=ma sort of way) but observing something is an integral part of an experiment and contributes to its outcome as much as the physical set up.

It is troubling, if you think about it too much in anything but an abstract way, and start to really think about that these things acting in this manner make up everything we see/know, it makes your brain hurt haha. At least mine.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Atheist Ninja on November 17, 2009 at 2:04am

Here is an interesting article relevant to the topic.

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep/06-discover-interview-roger-pe...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by a7 on November 17, 2009 at 12:42pm

Hi there, I had a go at reading the below mentioned book, however I found the video a lot eariers to grasp than the written word.


hope this helps

http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8

• ▶ Reply

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next ›
• Page