Mythical Creatures and Other Fully Explainable 'Unexplainable Phenomena'

faetal on 15/9/2013 at 23:03

You could almost argue that quantum states might be the result of information at that scale being less distinctly defined and thus various values share an identical relationship with the observer.

demagogue on 15/9/2013 at 23:06

At least that much [i.e., different observers in QM or SR see the same thing differently], but I thought he was saying something stronger too, about the nature of systems themselves. Like it sounded to me like the relevant analogy in QM was duality, that things act like a particle (discrete) *and* a wave (spread out in space) at the same time, depending on the context. But it's apparently not just a fluke of observation, but two different ways of looking at the same reality, both of which are true of the thing at the same time without contradiction. I'll have to go back and see how he worded it.

faetal on 15/9/2013 at 23:12

That's sort of what I mean - that the informational relationship between the two quantum states is too small to be causally differentiated by the observer algorithm, leading to both being equally valid and either being observed separately in the same way.

demagogue on 15/9/2013 at 23:30

Well you ninja'd your post in, I was technically responding to Renz's pre-edit post, but yeah, I think that might be one way to put it, although I don't know if "too small" is the way to put it, or if something else fishy is going on.

I mean some people talk about the "hidden variables" interpretation, which says there's more, finer-grained things going on at levels we can't observe that would reconcile the differences if only we could see them... But not everybody actually agrees with that IIRC. Some talk about QM like just practically we can't see the hidden variables, but others talk like it's not even conceivable to see it; like observation below what we observe doesn't even make sense and there can't be hidden variables because reality can't be anything more than what we actually observe, or they phrase it like "anyway there's no fact to the matter" (which may not actually be inconsistent with what you're saying either, crazily enough).

But when you're talking about reality below the level of observation, all the rules start getting tossed out the window anyway and who knows what we're really talking about anymore... Always cool to think about though.

Renzatic on 15/9/2013 at 23:34

The way I've always taken wave-particle duality, and I guess the way it could be applied here to a larger scale, is that a wave doesn't collapse the moment you look at it, as much as it is you're viewing the most direct subsection of the wave as it relates to you, which looks like a particle.

To give an example, say you're looking at a star to your left, with a black hole closer to you to the right. When you stand in one position, the light from the star hits you directly in one unbroken line. From your perspective, it looks like a full star. If you move a few steps to the right, parallax makes it look like the star moves behind the black hole. From your viewpoint, the star now looks lens distorted due to the light bending towards the center of the black hole, and eventually disappears when it moves directly behind it from your perspective.

So did you taking 5 a few steps to the right cause the light to interact with the black hole? No, it was always interacting with the black hole. You're just moving from one direct possibility to another, and seeing the results. Because we interact with the universe from one fixed point in time, we're only able to see a single cross section of a wave as it relates to us, which appears as a particle. And how that particle acts depends on where we're standing while we look at it. The wave and the particle both exist as one and the same, we're just not able to view both at the same time.

...though I'm still kinda confused why the dual slit experiment gives us entirely different outcomes depending on if someone or something is measuring it, though.

faetal on 16/9/2013 at 10:34

Dema - that second point is more or less what I mean. "Small" is not the right word, but finding the right word for such exotic things is hard. I'm more along the lines that rather than hidden variables preventing the differentiation of quantum states from a single causal origin, perhaps it's just that either of those pieces of information have the exact same chance of being related to the next tier of information, thus they are both correct.

The way I sum all of it up is that our reality and observable universe is just self-referential apophenia. Take infinite information and eventually a pattern is going to form just like this. Monkeys & Shakespeare.

Angel Dust on 16/9/2013 at 11:02

Quote Posted by demagogue

The way Susskind's lecture was explaining it (disclaimer: I'm no expert, so this is my poor memory & understanding)... IIRC he wasn't exactly saying all 3D was really 2D in essence. It sounded to me more like he was saying, for any system, you could have a 3D description and a 2D surface description, and they're both very different descriptions of course, but nothing you could do could distinguish which is the right one; there's no fact to the matter, or they're both right at the same time.

It was easier to see with the example he gave. There's two descriptions of activity around the horizon of a very large black hole. In the 3D local description, a spaceship passes the horizon & doesn't even notice. Nothing changes. In the 2D surface description from people far away, the horizon is millions of degrees and incinerates & atomizes the ship into a pooling smudge smooshed out across the horizon. And then there's some fancy math which says all the info smooshed out across the horizon could be reconstructed into the 3D ship passing inside; like the deeper it goes in, the more smooshed out it gets.

Now the wild part was that there isn't any way for an outside observer to tell the difference; I mean, see that the two descriptions are inconsistent & existing at the same time. The guy in the spaceship by definition can't send a signal out that he's fine. And (the really crazy part I thought) if the observer tried to do an experiment, like bounce some light or rays just as the ship nears the horizon to see that it's in tact, the rays would have to have so much energy to get back that the experiment itself would incinerate the ship in exactly the way the math says he should look.

So the punchline was supposed to be something like, there are these two realities side by side, the ship passing the horizon without even noticing anything different to a local observer, and the ship smushed out across the horizon at a million degrees to a distant observer, and they're both true at the same time, both true descriptions of the same thing, but from different perspectives. Then the next punchline was that you can apparently do the same thing for any arbitrarily enclosed space anywhere. So then the big punchline is supposed to be something like, at the end of the day, reality is data, that can even be packaged in different ways as long as they all translate into each other, that interacts with other data out there to make what we see. We're not really talking about little balls bouncing around "out there" anymore as the best way to describe reality.

Thank you! I recently, well a few months ago, read Susskind's The Black Hole War and was barely grasping the whole holographic principle but this, and probably the rest of the convo - so thanks faetal & Renz also, just put a whole lot of the pieces together in my head. Susskind does explain it all quite clearly in the book I guess, but my mind was a little frazzled by the concept I think for it to really take. I think I needed some time plus all this yabber for it to click. So thanks once again guys. :thumb:

I have nothing of value to add to the conversation though. :p

faetal on 16/9/2013 at 11:26

A large part of my undrstanding was actually give by the first few chapters of The Emperor's New Mind by Sir Roger Penrose. The moment I understood how the most basic binary information could essentially fold in on itself by creating deeper and deeper emergent functions, it let me imagine the entire of everything as being able to be represented as an infinite sea of basic information which gives rise to emergent patterns. The beauty being that it isn't even a change from what we know, just a more granular level to how it relates to itself.