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Parallel universes? Quantum shit and stuff like that.

Started by Kryton, May 19, 2020, 07:51:36 PM

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Kryton

Discuss!
Only because there's a few other interesting threads about space etc and it's better than arguing about 9/11.


Entertain or educate me.

What about parallel/alternative dimensions? Smarter people might try and explain quantum physics to me. I don't know much (so correct me) but I assume 99% of it is theory with the tiniest of toes dipped into experimenting at the lowest possible level. I've heard we've successfully teleported light atoms? Have we?
I'm aware of the observer theory, double slit experiments and such, and  new discoveries of matter and new theories evolving at micro/macro levels, but can someone try and explain the theories to me?
What's outside the universe?

What is a quantum computer in layman's terns? What essentially does it do?

Shit like this.



Fuck it post.

BlodwynPig

What if two people open the two boxes simultaneously and find two dead cats?

Kryton

Quote from: BlodwynPig on May 19, 2020, 07:56:27 PM
What if two people open the two boxes simultaneously and find two dead cats?

Residue from a cat dimension, maybe this dimension is some kind of tip?

Dewt

Quantum physics is largely a lot of statistics that seems a lot more mysterious because it's always distilled into thought experiments because statistics are too boring to digest.

touchingcloth

Quote from: Kryton on May 19, 2020, 07:51:36 PM
Discuss!
Only because there's a few other interesting threads about space etc and it's better than arguing about 9/11.


Entertain or educate me.

What about parallel/alternative dimensions? Smarter people might try and explain quantum physics to me. I don't know much (so correct me) but I assume 99% of it is theory with the tiniest of toes dipped into experimenting at the lowest possible level. I've heard we've successfully teleported light atoms? Have we?
I'm aware of the observer theory, double slit experiments and such, and  new discoveries of matter and new theories evolving at micro/macro levels, but can someone try and explain the theories to me?
What's outside the universe?

What is a quantum computer in layman's terns? What essentially does it do?

Shit like this.



Fuck it post.

I think diagrams like that are only really useful for trying to explain the concepts for people - like me - who can't do the maths which describes how tiny particles actually behave, or seem to behave. I know that physics students are often given the mantra "shut up and calculate" where quantum physics is concerned, because even to them it makes no bloody sense when you try and frame it in terms of balls and boxes rather than tiny particles and forces and fields.

ETA:

Quote from: Dewt on May 19, 2020, 08:02:12 PM
Quantum physics is largely a lot of statistics that seems a lot more mysterious because it's always distilled into thought experiments because statistics are too boring to digest.

Same idea. It makes sense if you can crunch the numbers, otherwise it's basically like talking about magic.

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Keebleman

I find reading about this subject - in small doses - bizarrely compulsive for the sense of intellectual vertigo it induces.  It's like watching GoPro footage of a rock climber.  "I don't belong here," it makes me think, "but it's great that this lets me pretend for a moment."

It's not even that I don't understand it, but I don't understand what it is that I'm not understanding.

Here's a recent conversation between Ezra Klein - son of a mathematician but a doofus at the subject - and Sean Carroll.  All the main issues are discussed, including Schrodinger's bloody cat, entanglement and quantum computing.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mind-bending-conversation-about-quantum-mechanics-parallel/id1081584611?i=1000474534796

Kryton

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-gravity-quantum/

An article about how gravity itself could be considered the decider of what becomes what.

QuoteAll the fundamental forces of the universe are known to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, save one: gravity. Finding a way to fit gravity into quantum mechanics would bring scientists a giant leap closer to a "theory of everything" that could entirely explain the workings of the cosmos from first principles. A crucial first step in this quest to know whether gravity is quantum is to detect the long-postulated elementary particle of gravity, the graviton. In search of the graviton, physicists are now turning to experiments involving microscopic superconductors, free-falling crystals and the afterglow of the big bang.

Quantum mechanics suggests everything is made of quanta, or packets of energy, that can behave like both a particle and a wave—for instance, quanta of light are called photons. Detecting gravitons, the hypothetical quanta of gravity, would prove gravity is quantum. The problem is that gravity is extraordinarily weak. To directly observe the minuscule effects a graviton would have on matter, physicist Freeman Dyson famously noted, a graviton detector would have to be so massive that it collapses on itself to form a black hole.

The last sentence amuses me ^.

And this I find interesting.

QuoteAnother strategy to find evidence for quantum gravity is to look at the cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint afterglow of the big bang, says cosmologist Alan Guth of M.I.T. Quanta such as gravitons fluctuate like waves, and the shortest wavelengths would have the most intense fluctuations. When the cosmos expanded staggeringly in size within a sliver of a second after the big bang, according to Guth's widely supported cosmological model known as inflation, these short wavelengths would have stretched to longer scales across the universe. This evidence of quantum gravity could be visible as swirls in the polarization, or alignment, of photons from the cosmic microwave background radiation.

So we're actively looking back in time for answers to the future.


Alberon

As to the question on what is outside the universe the old answer used to be that there wasn't an outside - the universe was all that existed.

Nowadays, most scientists in that field belive this isn't the case. Brane Cosmology based on String Theory (the idea that the smallest basic particles in the universe are very tiny vibrating 1-dimensional strings (each different frequency of vibration being a different particle) rather than points) suggests that our universe is just a three-dimensional brane drifting in a bigger space called the Bulk that has at least eleven dimensions.

No one can visulise that so imagine the 2D of Flatland. Flatland only has width and height, no depth like in our 3D world. Imagine this 2D world as a piece of paper, you can twist and move it through our 3D world and even scrunch it up into a ball, but the inhabitants of Flatland wouldn't, indeed couldn't, notice.

Brane cosmology also possibly answers the question of why, of all the fundamental forces, gravity is so weak. The gravity of the whole Earth is pulling at you and yet you can still jump off the ground. In Brane Cosmology gravity is so weak because it leaks into the higher dimensions of the bulk. If we could measure it in all eleven (or more) dimensions it would be as strong as the other forces. Or so that's the idea.

The basic problem with this whole elegant edifice of Brane Cosmology is that there is absolutely no way at present to prove that any of it is true. We can't see things small enough to determine if particles are really vibrating strings and we can't detect the Bulk. So some scientists write it off as just a nice thought experiment.

Dewt

I reckon that if we combined this thread with the "End Slice" thread we might make a few breakthroughs.

olliebean

I'm pretty sure gravity doesn't work the way we think it works, and the idea of an object having a "centre of gravity" at a single point is somewhat flawed. There is more to explain about this, but there isn't enough room in this post to explain it.

Schrodingers Cat

The thing that most people don't get about the whole "cat in a box" thing (I forget it's name) is that it isnt as simple as "we don't know if it's alive or dead" (in the above case, blue or red) it's actually both alive and dead at the same time. Which is what enables things like the double slit experiment to make sense. It's called a superposition of states.
In the double slit experiment, an individual particle (e.g. an electron) shows the diffraction pattern expected of a wave, rather than a particle. We already know this is possible from de Broglie and general wave-particle duality, but it only makes sense if the electron passes through both slits at the same time. Which of course should be impossible, hence the superposition of possibilities of it passing through each slit occurring at the same time. (It's much easier to show with diagrams but I'm posting on my tablet at the minute.)

Quote from: touchingcloth on May 19, 2020, 08:02:38 PM
"shut up and calculate" where quantum physics is concerned
Basically, yes. Though, personally I found this to be even more true of Gen Relativity. Trust the maths, it works. What it tells you about how the universe works is fucking mental, so just trust the maths.

Alberon

As to parallel universes I don't believe in the idea of neat universes side by side, each one slightly different.

When we observe a quantum event, such as the position of an electron, it will collapse to one single result. So does the universe care that it is being conciously observed? I don't think so.

Take Schroedinger's Cat experiment. In that before the box is opened the cat is in a state of being both alive and dead at the same time. But when the box is open it is either one or the other. Or is it simply the case that the quantum entanglement expands to encompase the person opening the box.

QuoteWhen opening the box, the observer becomes entangled with the cat, so "observer states" corresponding to the cat's being alive and dead are formed; each observer state is entangled or linked with the cat so that the "observation of the cat's state" and the "cat's state" correspond with each other. Quantum decoherence ensures that the different outcomes have no interaction with each other. The same mechanism of quantum decoherence is also important for the interpretation in terms of consistent histories. Only the "dead cat" or the "alive cat" can be a part of a consistent history in this interpretation. Decoherence is generally considered to prevent simultaneous observation of multiple states.

Possibly this is happening all the time. There is only one universe, but near infinite ripples of quantum entanglement are forever moving around the cosmos containing every possible state.

Kryton

Quote from: Schrodingers Cat on May 19, 2020, 08:20:32 PM
(It's much easier to show with diagrams but I'm posting on my tablet at the minute.)

Can you post them when you can please.

Schrodingers Cat

Quote from: olliebean on May 19, 2020, 08:19:33 PM
I'm pretty sure gravity doesn't work the way we think it works, and the idea of an object having a "centre of gravity" at a single point is somewhat flawed. There is more to explain about this, but there isn't enough room in this post to explain it.

This is basically the version of gravity you are taught at GCSE and A level. And it remains so until about masters level (or at least I did it at masters level)m when General Relativity takes over. And it's a real headfuck (to quote Einstein). Essentially, there is no difference between an acceleration and the effect of gravity. And masses curve space-time. So an object in orbit for instance actually perceives its local space as being flat and but to an external observer, it is travelling a curved path around a mass. It's usually shown by putting a rubber sheet over, say, an empty barrel and putting a heavy mass A in the middle, then pushing another ball B in a straight line across it - the ball B will curve its path towards the mass A.

Kryton

Quote from: Alberon on May 19, 2020, 08:21:24 PM
When we observe a quantum event, such as the position of an electron, it will collapse to one single result.

We can't observe the wave just the point right?

Alberon

Quote from: Kryton on May 19, 2020, 08:26:18 PM
We can't observe the wave just the point right?

The act of observation collapses the wave or entagles us in it depending on your preference.

Schrodingers Cat

Quote from: Kryton on May 19, 2020, 08:26:18 PM
We can't observe the wave just the point right?

Depends on the experiment your doing! Electrons can be seen as waves or 'points' (particles) depending on the situation.

Edit: I may have misinterpreted your question!
Edit2: Hmm, I'm probably better off dropping out and letting a real expert talk about this stuff! (I think I'm right that Alberon is a PhD and/or researcher is Physics?)

Alberon

I worked in a Physics department, but only as a technician. Actually the building was named after the man who got a Nobel Prize for proving the electron is a particle, his son also won the Nobel Prize for proving the electron is a wave which just sums up the problem with Quantum Mechanics.

I think an electron will only collapse to a point when you try to lock down it's location or momentum (you can't do both).

Kryton

All thoughts and opinions welcome btw. Any and all.

Replies From View

I have been to a parallel universe before.  It was exactly the same as this universe except I hadn't shaved yet.  Now I am back in this universe and lo and behold I have shaved.

Kryton


Dewt

Quote from: Alberon on May 19, 2020, 08:33:09 PM
I worked in a Physics department, but only as a technician. Actually the building was named after the man who got a Nobel Prize for proving the electron is a particle, his son also won the Nobel Prize for proving the electron is a wave which just sums up the problem with Quantum Mechanics.
Wow, you worked at the Sir Kenneth Particle building?

Schrodingers Cat

Quote from: Alberon on May 19, 2020, 08:33:09 PM
I worked in a Physics department, but only as a technician. Actually the building was named after the man who got a Nobel Prize for proving the electron is a particle, his son also won the Nobel Prize for proving the electron is a wave which just sums up the problem with Quantum Mechanics.

I think an electron will only collapse to a point when you try to lock down it's location or momentum (you can't do both).

Ah, right. Ok, well in that case, I'll say that whilst I have a Master's in Physics, it was many years ago, and I've not had any involvement in physicss since (apart from a couple of years training as a teacher).
Yes, that's my understanding as well. I sort of misread the question being asked and though it was about wave-particle duality (hence electrons behaving as waves or points/particles depending on the situation). The electron is essentially a dimensionless probabilistic point charge and mass, and there are some quite fundamentalist quantum theorists who will assert that everything is waves. I'm not so sure, but not really in a position to argue.

Mister Six

Wasn't the "cat in a box" thing originally supposed to highlight how all the quantum weirdness doesn't really scale up to a macro level? It's deliberately absurd, and wouldn't work in real life (not least because the cat is observing itself).

Dewt

The cat observing itself is another thing that reveals how badly thought experiments turn this all into pop science nonsense. There are some good discussions about level of consciousness you'd need to consider an observer.

Schrodingers Cat

Quote from: Mister Six on May 19, 2020, 08:54:04 PM
Wasn't the "cat in a box" thing originally supposed to highlight how all the quantum weirdness doesn't really scale up to a macro level? It's deliberately absurd, and wouldn't work in real life (not least because the cat is observing itself).

Sort of yes. Schrodinger was, along with Einstein, one of the early developers of what became Quantum Theory, but didn't like it. It was too inelegant, and relied on chance,(Einstein famously saying "God soes not play dice with the Universe") and so devised both the cat-based thought experiment, and the famous (to physicists) Schrodinger Equation, which describes a particle in terms of its momentum, energy and wave function. Essentially to describe the motion of an electron as a neat equation, rather than the Bohr model which was heavily probabilistic and essentially said that we can't really pin down an electron (Bohr was right btw). These days we think of electron motion in an atom interms of orbitals, which is the area you would expect an election to be and they each have different shapes depending on their energy level (and quantum numbers, but we'll not get into that). The catinabox was if I remember rightly, part of a series of letters with a colleague devised to show that Bohr can't be right as there is an inevitable overlap of possible states. Subsequent experiments (especially in the advent of nuclear physics which was just around the corner) have shown that on small scales, this is exactly what happens (as far as we can tell), but doesn't scale up to the macroscopic (or even mesoscopic) level. Likewise our best understanding of gravity can't scale down to quatum scles, so we know something is amiss somewhere.


Schrodingers Cat

Quote from: Dewt on May 19, 2020, 09:03:27 PM
The cat observing itself is another thing that reveals how badly thought experiments turn this all into pop science nonsense. There are some good discussions about level of consciousness you'd need to consider an observer.

The strangest example of consciousness affecting an experiment is the double slit again. As I mentioned before, a particle can behave like a wave when passing through the double slit, which is (sort of) explained by passing through both slits at the same time. To test this, it was natural to put a camera next to the slits to observe the particles as they pass through them. At which point, they behaved like particles. The very act of making a measurment changes the obervation! (Exactly as Heisenberg said it would). So the next thought is what id=f we have a camera there, but don't record anything? make no observations? Immediatley, behaved like a wave again! Apparantly, nature knows when its being observed. In one lecture, Jim al Khallili said something to the effect of "if you can explain that, simply and clearly, without invoking quantum weirdness, don't keep it to yourself because there's a Nobel prize in ot for you."

As I said it is easier to show in images:

Expected pattern of particles:


Expected pattern of a wave (e.g. light) / actual observed pattern of particles


Of course, this only happens under certain conditions. Such as the width between slits has to be right for the 'particle' being fired into it for example.