

How the Hippies Saved Physics - Alex3917
http://forum-network.org/lecture/how-hippies-saved-physics

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PaulHoule
As someone who's been both a hippie and a physicist I think that's the
"physics and eastern mysticism" connection is 99% bunk.

It's certainly true that some great physicists, such as Oppenheimer and Murray
Gell-Mann have been interested in eastern philosophy, but for the most part
physicists have been drawn kicking and screaming into the strange reality of
quantum mechanics by harsh encounters with experimental reality.

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Alex3917
"For the most part physicists have been drawn kicking and screaming into the
strange reality of quantum mechanics by harsh encounters with experimental
reality."

The presenter in this video shows a graph of the citations over time for
Bell's uncertainty theorem paper that contradicts this view.

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PaulHoule
And Bell's theorem (in itself) isn't all that exciting. There's no
contradiction or paradox here, except for people who don't believe in what the
quantum mechanical equations say. It's only profound if you insist on
believing that the world is classical.

That said, interest has increased in that sort of thing because of quantum
information theory, because it is necessary to draw a line between the
behavior of classical information and quantum information.

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Alex3917
"It's only profound if you insist on believing that the world is classical."

That's like saying heliocentrism is only profound if you believe in the
geocentric model. By your definition, is there anything that can be said to be
profound? It seems to me that your definition not only ignores history, but
ignores what makes science worth doing in the first place.

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PaulHoule
Personally, I'm much more blown away by the fact that quantum entanglement
makes solid matter possible. In classical mechanics you can't have solids:
only the fermionic exchange behavior of spin 1/2 particles makes solids
"solid",

In my opinion, it's exactly the opposite: the pop-physics obsession with
Bell's inequality comes from people who don't actually understand quantum
mechanics but just want to see some miracle which they can then extrapolate to
other miracles and end up in science fiction. It leads to the same kind of
bogus science as "The Emperor's New Mind"

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TheAmazingIdiot
What the?!

Can you at least give notice that it's an auto-playing video. Some of us are
on dialup out here... and can use a cell phone for high speed every so often.

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kscaldef
FlashBlock is your friend.

