Blog Hill

Friday, April 13, 2007

Who Are You, O Man?

I used to be threatened by Quantum Weirdness. It upset my deterministic worldview. My paradigm is a bit more flexible now, but I also see that Quantum Weirdness is humbling. It defies conventional, macro-scale laws and mathematics (which is very bizarre because people tend to think of things like mathematics and logic as etched into reality), and so shakes much of the understanding that we pride ourselves on.

Edit: Just a caveat, it annoys me +1 when people use Quantum Weirdness to justify their hippie-new-agey-otherwise-impossible-to-justify philosophy, because it defies logic. That misses the point. Logic "still works" on the macro scale; just because it's god-like status is questioned on the picto-scale doesn't mean that it can be used to justify illogicalness.

5 Comments:

  • Does it really defy mathematics? I don't really know enough about quantum mechanics to say.

    By Blogger Unknown, At 12:55 PM  

  • Yeah, it defies Bell's Inequality, which applies to all sets. That is when you count quantum objects, you can't count them like "ordinary" objects.

    By Blogger The Borg, At 12:57 PM  

  • It can't defy mathematics, surely?

    It may challenge your ideas of how to apply mathematics to the world (it seems to imply that imaginary numbers correspond to some aspects of physical reality, for example), but mathematics still works.

    Common sense, on the other hand, is right out the window...

    By Blogger Radagast, At 4:02 PM  

  • can you explain quantum weirdness for the little people ? especially with it defying mathematics :(

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 11:51 PM  

  • It makes sense to say something defies Bell's Inequality, but it doesn't make sense to say it defies mathematics. It just shows that Bell's Inequality has a particular requirement or assumption.

    Mathematics is knowledge, and what we know is always changing. If we think we have discovered something that defies mathematics, then surely it's simply because our knowledge of mathematics is insufficient?

    By Blogger Randy Rarity, At 1:14 PM  

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