Quantum Physics

Jack's Smirking Revenge

Jack's Smirking Revenge

i am the one who knocks
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This is the kind of stuff that seriously messes with your head, more so than any psychiatrist ever could. To begin to understand it, you have to throw all logical thinking out the window.

Some of the best examples of such a situation is that when you jump out of a window, if you were so inclined, until the point that you begin the motion out of the window, there is a chance that you could go up. There is a chance that gravity could fail entirely, and you would leave the Earth. Until you jump, you will go both up and down.
Another example is a famous (theoretical) experiment. Take on cat, one sealed box, one radioactive emitting material and cyanide. Place these things in the box. Until you open the box, there is a chance Mittens is still alive. Until the box is opened, the cat is both alive and dead.
Basically, quantum physics gives birth to paradoxes.

And as an interesting little thing that can help you win endless bets in a pub, did you know that it's almost impossible to actually touch something, by technical definition? The repelling force between the particles of your hand and the object you wish to 'touch' is so strong at a short enough distance (we're talking negligible distance), that they will never actually touch, but will repel. Not so much that you can feel it, or see the effect. But it still happens. The only true way to touch something is to fuse with it, which brings about a nuclear reaction and then you quite literally have the power of the sun in your hand.
That's just the rule for solids touching solids, however. I don't know how it works with liquids and gases.
 
I think my brain just melted.
Seriously.
None of that makes sense to me... And I don't see it making sense any time soon. o_O;;
 
I'm only somewhat acquainted with quantum physics via the fiction novel 'Timeline' by Michael Crichton and the whole 'Shroedinger's Cat' experiment.
 
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Umm... I love the potential this thread has, as this sort of thing pretty much gets me hard, but what exactly would you like to debate?
 
Let's debate what we're going to debate!

Or... just try to figure out the logic behind that crap up there in the first post.
 
xD Pretty much, Quantum Physics (with the cat experiment, anyways) shows the possibility of alternate universes... You set up an experiment, pretty much, with a living creature you cannot control in an experiment site you cannot immediately see into.

Of course, anything can happen in that experiment site. And the only way to find out what happened is to break the experiment by opening the site and looking in. What you are shown is only one of the outcomes. Only one 'universe'.
 
Basically... If you cannot see it, some weird, illogical bullshit is occuring that makes no sense because there are other universes that spontanously appear inside a dinky box?

Uhm, WTF?
 
I don't see the physics aspect of Schroedinger's Cat; I see the epistemological/psychological/philosophical aspect of it, but not the physics.
 
Exactly. xD It's logical to me, though... Pretty much... In one universe, that cat in the experiment would have gotten to the cyanide and died. In another universe, the radioactive item would've killed the cat by being in proximity to it. In a third universe, the cat is still fine.

You viewing the experiment, breaks the experiment by showing you only one of the three universes.
 
LupineVoid said:
Exactly. xD It's logical to me, though... Pretty much... In one universe, that cat in the experiment would have gotten to the cyanide and died. In another universe, the radioactive item would've killed the cat by being in proximity to it. In a third universe, the cat is still fine.

You viewing the experiment, breaks the experiment by showing you only one of the three universes.
Click to expand...

Ah, I see the physics part of it now: the divergence of the universes. It's in the scope of only one universe that it's mainly an epistemological problem.
 
Yes. I always loved this experiment, though it is quite a paradox to wrap one's head around... I read it up in sixth grade, six years ago.
 
That's not the only kind. Say you dropped a basketball and covered your eyes. Until you open your eyes, the basketball could be anywhere within earshot. You can't say for sure whatsoever.
 
The cat dies of multiple causes cause it's in a box... Suffocation, radiation, and poisoning it at once kill it quicker. There is no one cause and universes for each one.
 
Dark Tidus said:
That's not the only kind. Say you dropped a basketball and covered your eyes. Until you open your eyes, the basketball could be anywhere within earshot. You can't say for sure whatsoever.
Click to expand...

The accuracy of people's hearing abilities, however, can let them know. This I'm pretty sure is a problem of pure epistemology. What would make it a physics paradox is asking whether it'll go up or down if you let go of the ball (like the example with jumping out the window).
 
Hearing would allow us an educated guess as to the ball's location, but not proof of its location. Without seeing it, how can we PROVE that the ball is in the room at all? We can make an educated guess based on what we know about the human ear and how sound is effected by objects in it's way, but until you physically see the ball, what is to say that the laws of physics took a crap when you weren't looking?

The problem with quantum physics is that it's nothing but a mindfuck head game. There can be no real answers. It's essentially a permanent way to always have the position of Devil's Advocate.

Which, by the way, is why I love it so much.
 
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Hmm.. so is this like the 'If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?' type of question, where a sound is only vibrations and doesn't actually become a sound until it has been recognised by the brain, so if nobody is around then the vibrations won't ever be recognised and therefore never become a sound? Or is it more advanced, as if you were to say 'If no-one was around to see or hear it, then nobody knows if the tree has fallen at all, so it is both fallen and standing.'?

Or am I completely off-track with this....?
 
xD No it's more of an idea of 'pick a forest, set a fire in it, and never look at it, and later, still without looking at it, guess which trees got burnt and which ones didn't.' pretty much, it's taking something unpredictable and setting it aside. Looking at the test subject invalidates the test, because it only shows one of perhaps an infinite number of results.
 
WolfBlack said:
xD No it's more of an idea of 'pick a forest, set a fire in it, and never look at it, and later, still without looking at it, guess which trees got burnt and which ones didn't.' pretty much, it's taking something unpredictable and setting it aside. Looking at the test subject invalidates the test, because it only shows one of perhaps an infinite number of results.
Click to expand...

Wow.. okay, I was wrong then XD Can't blame me for trying though :P I'm probably thinking more along the lines of philosophy...
 
I'm pretty sure relative time is a bit more difficult to understand.

time flows differently not only for different people, but for different places. if someone lived on the top of a mountain, and someone else lived in a deep valley, they would age at different rates (not dramatically but slightly)

not to mention trying to understand 4 dimensions (space x,y,z and time) and possibly the fifth dimension (the psyche which defines time)
 
i think i get it?
you conduct an uncontrolable experiment, where there is more that one possible outcome.
but you purposely dont find the outcome of the experiment as that would prove that the other outcomes didnt happen?
 
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