Ulukai on 5/12/2011 at 18:33
Quote Posted by demagogue
Turning out to be an interesting year for physics stuff.
Next on the list is a Higgs particle.
Next on my list of priorities for boffins -
Tea, Earl Grey, Hot *whoosh* Slurp
Nicker on 5/12/2011 at 20:43
So my old Heathkit Crystal Radio may have a new life as a sub-space receiver. Splendid! My plans for galactic domination proceed apace.
Kolya on 5/12/2011 at 21:16
Quote Posted by demagogue
But ... but the applications were exactly what I said I didn't care about. It's precisely
the understanding.
Understanding by itself does not change reality. It could be a way there, but not necessarily.
„Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.“Kolya on 5/12/2011 at 21:35
To give you a different example: (
http://www.decodedscience.com/%E2%80%9Cbird-flu%E2%80%9D-virus-experiment-sparks-controversy-and-a-biosecurity-review/6963) Scientists in the Netherlands lately mutated the bird flu virus into a form that spreads directly from mammal to mammal, air-borne like your common flu. Only you'll die.
Now does this mean we will all be dead soon? Is this then our reality, because we know how it works? I hope not.
Of course a pandemic would be terrible while instant computing would be awesome, but that doesn't change the point that understanding does not equal a change in reality. Not for good nor bad.
It is indeed the application of understanding that makes the change.
demagogue on 5/12/2011 at 22:10
Quote Posted by "Kolya"
I was kidding with the wedding rings, but that's an interesting take. I would say that the root (and true nature) of reality is that I'm having my morning coffee and feeling slightly tired. I understand that there are a lot of scientific ramifications to this discovery, but so far they're just ramifications and I don't see, feel, hear, taste or smell the quantum world in my human reality. I won't step into a teleporter in the hall but will still have to take the bike to work.
So from a PHILOSOPHICAL viewpoint - how can you call your dishwasher a fluke and an accident "that can collapse at any second" when it leaks into your kitchen and won't stop until you get it fixed?
At least this seems like a very impractical viewpoint that could easily get you killed on the next cross-walk.
I thought the wedding rings idea was cute, and I'd love quantum computers. I'm not inhuman. I was just indulging in the pure curiosity and wonderment at the universe part of being human, not really trying to denigrate the other stuff.
As for the "true" nature of reality, yeah there's a good case for everyday life being just as fundamental, sure -- what some would call lifeworld or Lebenswelt ... the smell of morning coffee, you gotta take care of your girlfriend and your daily obligations, stuff breaks & you have to deal with it, poor people need real help not platitudes... I wouldn't say the two perspectives are mutually exclusive. There's (1) a hidden physical dimension which manifests everything in reality that we (or those of us with the training, the rest of us can read about it) have the lucky privilege to understand a bit of (but possibly not all the way down), and getting insight into that world enriches us IMO, but (2) our only access to it is through human consciousness which is not a perfectly neutral observer but cares about eating and washing the dishes, and seeing space in Euclidian geometry & time no faster than ~40Hz even if it "knows" that's not what space and time are "really" like; but that's what time & space are really like as we live in it. That's one way to put the mind-body problem. It's saying that (1) and (2) can both be part of the same universe and both still fundamental at the same time.
Edit: hmm, the rest of my post got long, so I posted the rest of the rambling (
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1gG7cDmWR69mKPrsdg0RT0ezGezCt6LbxukTba0Sgz8Q) here. But I posted enough here to say I don't disagree that caring about stuff at a human level is and should be a really fundamental perspective we have on the world.
Edit2:
Quote:
Understanding by itself does not change reality.
First the caveat that sometimes pure understanding does change "reality" in a fair sense, like when the US got photos of the Soviets putting missiles in Cuba in 1962, the knowledge by itself marked a change in the geopolitical reality, or generally when people understand the intentions of others or some hidden element that changes how people behave, or they realize something they've been doing all along isn't what they thought it was, it changes the reality of that thing in a fair sense... But aside from a caveat like that, in the normal sense of "understanding" and "change" that you're talking about, sure, I wasn't ever trying to claim understanding changes reality itself. The change is in the individual's experience itself (which by the way is part of reality, so a little bit of reality does change); but generally speaking it's just that they have some deeper appreciation of the world or their place in it, or they realize possibilities they didn't realize before, stuff like that.
Kolya on 5/12/2011 at 22:29
I guess it's the human curiosity you mentioned where the mind and body meet. The will to transcend basic reality seems to come free with consciousness. And knowing that a million universes split off from ours at any moment without being able to do anything about it would be akin to religion. Until you realise that you can and do switch universes all the time. Hence starts practical application. :)
Pyrian on 5/12/2011 at 22:34
The experiment, in effect, substitutes extremely brief periods of time for ultra cold and/or ultra small. It's nice to see that the theory holds under such circumstances, but not surprising. If the people performing the experiment couldn't come up with any pie-in-the-sky applications, I'm guessing this isn't a route to quantum computing, which is kind of a pity. But again, not surprising, since last I heard one of the primary challenges to quantum computing is storing quantum states for any meaningful period of time. We don't need fleeting macroscopic effects, we need chip-scale effects that aren't fleeting under reasonably attainable conditions.
Nicker on 6/12/2011 at 04:06
Quote Posted by Pyrian
... I'm guessing this isn't a route to quantum computing, which is kind of a pity. But again, not surprising, since last I heard one of the primary challenges to quantum computing is storing quantum states for any meaningful period of time.
Perhaps not for computing but maybe a quantum internet, with the aforementioned QPorn, followed of course with infections by malicious entanglement haqs.
Azaran on 6/12/2011 at 04:30
If they can entangle objects, it stands to reason that they might be able to entangle people...I wonder what that would be like....:o
Sg3 on 6/12/2011 at 04:46
Probably painful.
