Imagine having an infinite number of girlfriends pissed at you
Quantum physics
Submitted 2 months ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/28a60220-1d7a-43a3-9575-7d41f433d4bb.png
Comments
HootinNHollerin@lemmy.world 2 months ago
troglodytis@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This needs one Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball
random_character_a@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hugh Everett III disagrees.
dudinax@programming.dev 2 months ago
You Jelly, spontaneous positron emission?
niktemadur@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This isn’t right.
It’s not even wrong.
dudinax@programming.dev 2 months ago
You’re wrong, it’s definitely going through both slits at the same time, but it’s not an electron at that time.
bunchberry@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What is it then? If you say it’s a wave, well, that wave is in Hilbert space which is infinitely dimensional, not in spacetime which is four dimensional, so what does it mean to say the wave is “going through” the slit if it doesn’t exist in spacetime? Personally, I think all the confusion around QM stems from trying to objectify a probability distribution, which is what people do when they claim it turns into a literal wave.
To be honest, I think it’s cheating. People are used to physics being continuous, but in quantum mechanics it is discrete. Schrodinger showed that if you take any operator and compute a derivative, you can “fill in the gaps” in between interactions, but this is just purely metaphysical. You never see these “in between” gaps. It’s just a nice little mathematical trick and nothing more. Even Schrodinger later abandoned this idea and admitted that trying to fill in the gaps between interactions just leads to confusion in his book Nature and the Greeks’ and Science and Humanism.
What’s even more problematic about this viewpoint is that Schrodinger’s wave equation is a result of a very particular mathematical formalism. It is not actually needed to make correct predictions. Heisenberg had developed what is known as matrix mechanics whereby you evolve the observables themselves rather than the state vector. You can also do a similar trick and derive continuous evolution of the observables in between interactions in matrix mechanics, but what you get is, again, observables continuously changing, not the evolution of a wave function.
The wave function is purely a result of a particular mathematical formalism and there is no reason to assign it ontological reality. Even then, if you have ever worked with quantum mechanics, it is quite apparent that the wave function is just a function for picking probability amplitudes from a state vector, and the state vector is merely a list of, well, probability amplitudes. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic so we assign things a list of probabilities. Treating a list of probabilities as if it has ontological existence doesn’t even make any sense.
niktemadur@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not wrong… but I’m not even right!
I just enjoy quoting my favorite Wolfgang Pauli line.
Seriously now - “but it’s not an electron at that time” - is quite a doozy of a way of… erm… looking at it.
Goddamn it, I looked at it! Again! Which goddamn collapsed the goddamned wave function! I can’t seem to get anything done around here with my Newtonian/classical physics tools (level, pincers and a pendulum) with these here subatomic particles.