

The Reality of Quantum Weirdness - tomhoward
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/opinion/sunday/the-reality-of-quantum-weirdness.html

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stared
Quantum mechanics is not that hard, the only thing we lack is direct
experience with it. So, I am developing
[http://quantumgame.io/](http://quantumgame.io/) \- a game governed by true
quantum rules, yet accessible to a child.

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bane
I'd love to play it, but no way am I going to go through a registration
process to play this.

~~~
stared
It's NOT yet, I am process of making it. So as of now there is only a
newsletter for announcing it. (It will be no-registration, no-ad, though.)

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vinceguidry
Hehe, I gathered that from going through the newsletter sign-up process, but
it does make that unclear. Perhaps a statement as to when you expect the first
draft of the game to be up would make it clearer.

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stared
I added "coming soon" \- does it look explicit enough by now?

"when" \- it's a tricky question, I would love to know!

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vinceguidry
Honestly, even "third quarter 2016" would get the message across.

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ffn
Quantum mechanics is weird only because we don't learn statistics in high
school (well I didn't anyway), and we can't come up with good real-life
analogies for quantum interactions.

For example, the twin-slit experiment used to illustrate collapsing the wave
function (a single electron fired through 2 slits will show a wave
interference pattern on the wall, but the pattern disappears if you find out
which slit the electron passed through) is portrayed by physicists as obscure,
weird, arcane, or even as indecipherable devil magic which us mere mortals can
never strive to intuitively understand beyond pulling out a PDE.

This flat-out isn't true, and here is my analogy for the 2x slit experiment in
real life (using trashy fiction):

The electron is an young impressionable female, slit A is the handsome
vampire, and slit B is the wild werewolf. Until absolutely forced to pick one
of the slits, the electron sort of strings both slits along (and the result is
a lot of interference which, in the literary world, we call plot). But, when
the reader looks at the end, she (the electron) inevitable picks one of the
slits. Summed over all the trashy romance fiction out there, one gets the
feeling it's the same damn electron and two slits everywhere, yet she is
clearly making different decisions each time.

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jostylr
I never understand why the double slit experiment puzzles people. Is it not
clear that we are dealing with particles guided by a wave? This is Bohm's
theory and it works perfectly well for answering these questions.

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stared
Bohm theory is not well regarded by most of physicists, as it is a desperate
try to use some intuitions from classic word. It helps with understanding
double slit the same way as "God created it" helps with understanding universe
- makes one calm and content. You may argue that Bohm theory works... but
well, once you get other systems, you run into nasty complications and loose
symmetries.

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stolio
You can reject Bohmians as being emotionally attached to their ideas, but you
can also reject non-Bohmians for the same reason. Many (most?) who grasp
quantum mechanics on any level feel they've climbed an important intellectual
mountain and don't want to find out they discarded their intuition for no good
reason.

~~~
stared
Emotional attachment it one thing. But pilot wave stuff does not explain
anything, adds complexity and makes problem for more complicated systems that
"a single particle in spatial representation". I do know professional
physicist who prefer Bohmian interpretation (but most I know are in some
version of Many Worlds or Quantum Bayesianism). The thing is whether a choice
is made for purity or because of adherence to classical physics.

BTW: If you want to get some data:

[http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-
most...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-
embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/)

~~~
stolio
I'm well aware of the adoption rates of Bohmian Mechanics. What I object to is
dismissing it as being the product of emotions and not differing ideas about
the universe. On that graph 42% went to the Copenhagen Interpretation whose
fans are just as emotional as Bohm's.

Feel free to reject BM on technical merit, really, I couldn't care less.

As an aside, the graph is a little funky since Bohmian Mechanics is not an
interpretation of QM but a reformulation of it.

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stared
I would guess that for Copenhagen interpretation its mostly experimentalists.
While its coarse grained (i.e. is problematic at timescales of the
"measurement") it does not add extra stuff.

Plus, let us take a very simple system: one particle in a two-level system.
Does Bohmian make it simpler for you?

> Bohmian Mechanics is not an interpretation of QM but a reformulation of it.

Could you explain the difference?

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physcs1823
Different "interpretations" of QM are in a large part just philosophy at this
point. Individual physicists might find one interpretation more appealing, but
it doesn't actually have much, if any, impact on their work.

A reformulation of a physical theory is a new mathematical approach. It might
be _motivated_ by a particular interpretation, but since existing approaches
are all confirmed by experiment, it won't actually offer different
predictions.

 _However_ , it might be substantially easier to calculate a particular
quantity in one formulation. Or, it might naturally imply a way to extend QM
that will ultimately produce different predictions than the original
formulations. (At some scale that we haven't yet probed.)

Feynman's path integral formulation[1] is a pretty notable example of this.
I've never looked at the Bohmian thingy, but the fact that I've heard more
about it on reddit/HN than from physicists is not an encouraging sign...

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation)

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blinkingled
An excellent book that addresses this topic is The Elegant Universe:
Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by
Brian Greene. You likely already knew it but consider this a reminder to
actually read it if you haven't! It was bitrotting on my Kindle for long but
once I started reading, it has got me hooked!

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platz
I would love to peek 1000 years into the future to discover what replaced our
leaky abstractions in the subatomic realm

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pointernil
Based on history: -) a (r)evolutionary new idea facilitated by increasingly
precise measurement-hardware comes up and a completely new theory/formulation
makes more sense to our human minds and allows for better predictions

-) it will turn out that no former serious theory was really completely wrong but only got parts of the new better theory right

-) We are today not accustomed any more to real breakthroughs (some conclude from the lack thereof that we are at an dead-end) but they still could happen; things along the lines of: There is only a constant gravity force! An Einstein-like breaking idea allowing for progress ...

And here is a small issue with the current QM Interpretations: yes, they are
very successful yet there is little effort to provide differing descriptions
of it allowing to extend the mental pictures used to work with it. 'It's all
statistics' is mostly the end of it.

For example: we all know about the experiments about "teleporting" (mostly
used by media, not the scientists) over larger and larger distances, up-
keeping and proving the entanglement over larger and larger distances... only
very seldom those experiments are described as ways to learn about what
entanglement really is, what specifically __breaks __it in what way, what
barriers for entanglement there are etc. Because it 's all, you know
"statistics", collerations in data.

I think there are some lessons to be learned from the WRONG theories in the
past about things we don't struggle as much today as with QM... analogies
don't have to work, but could provide hints about the ways we humans tend to
err when we examine natures reality.

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fluxtemp
This article seems to be alluding to the likelihood of parallel universes and
multiple outcomes of any moment, implications of which are too staggering to
ponder and rarely given attention.

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kaiwen1
It is indeed glossing over the most intriguing consequence of the paper, which
is evidence for parallel universes. David Deutsch's mesmerizing book, The
Beginning of Infinity, describes the barely comprehensible nature of this
reality and why it must be true.

