reflexblue

Love This Stuff.

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S.H.E.S.
I Likes Spikes.

Pujo

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19875410/site/newsweek/

This has nothing to do with politics, but I thought some people here might enjoy it. Sure blew my mind!

Holy Diver

Quantum mechanincs and quantum physics are so hard to grasp.....Its odd to me that scientists accept these as fact when they can't be proven. Its kindof just a way to say that crunching all possible outcomes...anything is possible.

example:

at some point in time...in a parallel universe....YOU are reading what I have typed in this very message. The words I've typed will eventually fly out of the screen and eat you.

THAT is a theory of quantum physics.

Its awesome!

So, Pujo, it indeed does have to do with politics.....it has to do with EVERYTHING. Wanna get really confused? Read "The Holographic Universe"

Pujo

Well, I wouldn't say that they can't (or haven't to an extent) been proven. The practical effects of quantum mechanics have been experimentally verified (at least the big 4 QM predictions: quantinization of matter & energy, the uncertainty principle, entanglement, and wave-particle duality). Now some of the weirder aspects of QM are starting to show up experimentally (see the future-affecting-the-past experiment in the link I posted). Many QFT's (quantum field theories, like QED and QCD - the theories of "forces") have also been shown to make extremely accurate predictions (QED has been called the most accurate theory in physics). What's not known (though I have a strong feeling it will be within our lifetimes) is whether the non-determinism (randomness) & non-locality ("action at a distance") of quantum theories are the "true reality", or whether it just seems that way to us because we aren't getting the whole picture. And of course the "next generation" of physics, string theory and beyond, is entirely in its theoretical stages, nothing has been experimentally proven (and won't be for a long, long time) though those aren't quantum theories per se.

I think the "anything can happen" thing gets used too casually. While the Heisenberg uncertainty principle does (accurately) say that things that are clasically "impossible" might still happen because of QM, the probability of something macroscopic happening is so small that the chance of it actually happening in the lifetime of the universe is very, very close to zero. On the other hand, small objects (like electrons) take advantage of the HUP to tunnel through solid barriers regularly. Tunneling microscopes are based on it.

That looks like an interesting book, thanks. I haven't read it, though I read a very good book partially on the subject by Leonard Susskind, who was also involved in formulating the holographic principle ("Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design"). I don't quite understand the holographic principle myself (though I understand the reasoning behind it, having to do with the entropy of black holes), but it's very interesting and ties in with an idea I take great interest in called digital physics (the idea that the universe is a computer, whether intentionally built or not).

Real World

Who's on first?

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897

STFarmy

It can if you're Hiro from Heroes.

Pujo

What's really freaky is that in a thread about the future affecting the past, reflexblue's reply somehow got placed above my original post.

Don't toy with me, laws of physics!

Holy Diver

QUANTUM MECHANICS at its finest right there!

PatsFanInVa

Sure, we don't want those messy macroscopic effects ever occuring. Oh no, perish the thought. Worse yet we don't want them controllable...

Unless of course it's 2005 and we're thinking of the trajectory of a certain football thrown by one Tom Brady and picked off by one Champ Bailey...

Then, perhaps, we're willing to step into... the twilight zone.

But what then? How many Rrrrraiders fans want that tuck game back? Time-meddlers will virtually erase Adam Vinatieri's career, given how many game-winners he's booted in the big ones...

I remember the good old days when we just got an inkling of something unexplainable which then transpired, and called it a day, and I strongly suspected last night I'd feel this way this morning. It was a premonition of nostalgia for deja vu.

I'd trot out my own understanding of the topic, just to demonstrate the true meaning of "microscopic," but that would just be beating a half-dead cat.

But I will leave you all with my contribution to the macroscopic time-meddling: were it to become available, we could go back in time, grab TS Eliot's "The Holo Men," and "fix" the title of it to read by the stanard spelling, "Hollow," to preemptively squash the entire ridiculous realm of speculation that he had been affected by merry pranksters from the future.

Oh, I see one of you guys took that one and ran with it.

And so we prove once again that the best proof of a conspiracy is its unproveability, which just proves the conspirators are really good.

QED,
pun intended,
PFnV

QuiGon

Yes, it's entirely possible that the future can affect the past. What we first need to establish is that time is not observed the same for everyone and everything everywhere (Einstein taught us this). Imagine time is a highway, and all of us human beings are on a bus travelling down this highway... other cars and buses are going to pass us, or we're going to pass them.

The mind blowing part comes from the realization that (if we are to believe quantum mechanics) there are also going to be buses travelling in the opposite direction.