
Fermilab Experiment Finds No Evidence That We Live in a Hologram - ourmandave
http://gizmodo.com/fermilab-experiment-finds-no-evidence-that-we-live-in-a-1746130140
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vilhelm_s
I don't know any physics, but I did enjoy this grumpy blogpost:
[http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-fermilabs-
holo...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-fermilabs-holometer-
experiment.html)

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cLeEOGPw
It seems to be one of the "negative results are bad" category opinions,
manifested through a grumpy blog post. I don't share that opinion. I think
negative result is sometimes as valuable as positive, in that it allows us to
remove some competing theories from the table and focus on the good ones.

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dhimes
It's actually more of a "this experiment isn't good enough to measure what you
are trying to measure." If that's the case, then it is a waste.

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bionsuba
For those of us who do not wish to give page views to Gawker:
[https://archive.is/ybW22](https://archive.is/ybW22)

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holografix
Legal disclaimer: I know nothing at all about physics, prepare eye roll. Isn't
the fact that certain quantum particles only "exist" when measured validation
that they get "computed" when needed?

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gus_massa
It's very difficult to explain the quantum mechanics without math, and most of
the "explanations" without math are misleading or plain wrong.

This is a usual misconception that I saw a few times before. I'll repot an old
comment that I made in a similar article (with some minor changes):

Quite the opposite, the quantum version of the word needs more process power
instead of less process power.

When you use Classic Mechanics, you only need to "compute" one trajectory.

With Quantum Mechanics the system may have a many choices, and you must keep
the details of all the possibilities. The easy case is a qbit that only has
two choices. But if you have a few qbits nearby, they may interact and now you
must "compute" the 2^n possibilities. This is why if we can ever build a
quantum computer, it would be exponentially more powerful than a classic
computer.

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gizmo686
>This is why if we can ever build a quantum computer, it would be
exponentially more powerful than a classic computer.

The truth is a little more complicated than that. If we could precisely
inspect the quantum state of a system, then quantum computers trivially give
us an exponential speed up. However, once we measure the result of the
computation, we collapse the state down to a pure state[0], and all future
measurements of the system will give us the same result. This means that we
would need to repeat the computation an exponential number of times to get the
full result with a bounded probability of error.

As it turns out, there are some tricks we can do with interference to improve
efficiency, and for some problems achieve an exponential speed up.

[0] Or rather, according to the many worlds interpenetration, we become
entangled with the system; however this is one of those cases where the
Copenhagen interpretation is actually easier to use.

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rgrieselhuber
Well it wouldn't be a very good hologram then, would it?

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danbruc
Related - discussion of the cited article from symmetry from two days ago [1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10674526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10674526)

