I dont know if this is the right spot for this type of thread, move if need be/possible.
I love QP, so I wanted to make this thread and see if there are any other QP fanatics out there. IMO QP is/will have tremendous impact on all that is conceptual. It is , right now, laughing in our faces, destroying our "modern" ideas of how things work/exist/function. The biggest impact I see so far, is on philosophy, especially the copenhagen view. Quantum physicists and theorists are now turning to buddhism for alternative insight. The cohesivness of these two is astounding, they are completely symbiotic .
Dont know where I am going with this, but I just wanted to put this out there so it can start getting tossed around.
Hey there,
Well I know very little about QP but am eager to learn more. From the very little I have read the first thing that occured to me was the similarity with QP and various spiritual teachings. The whole perciever and percieved.
If you can recommend any good starting place for me to learn more im all ears
Booosh
There's a book called "The Tao of Physics" can't remember the author.
The author on my copy is... Fritjof Capra.
Another potential read of interest is the Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav.
I should finish these books...sigh.
For QP beginners, that have no math background whatsoever, try out the book "Quantum: a guide for the perplexed" by (not sure of the name) Jim Al Kalil. It is basically laymans QP 101 and has great illustrations and explanations. Also, a little biased to the copenhagen view.
I guess, to get a better topic than just overwhelmingly broad topic "QP", I will explain the basis of QP. The Young Slit experiment (any joke you are thinking of right now has been said....) is basically the heart of QP. It proves, in a QP sort of way, that photons (light particles) can be both wave and particle.
The YSE made two rectangular slits, equal in every way, and shot a beam of photons (basically, a flashlight) at a point equidistant from both slits. Behind that board with the 2 slits, was another board, which when a flashlight was shone through a stratification of light occured; Bands of light, followed by no light etc.
Since we already know about the properties of waves, we knew this would occur through something called diffusion (could be wrong on that term).
The amazing part is when they started shooting one photon at a time, and the pattern it made after thousands of these photons were shot. It made the same pattern as before, UNTIL!!!! they attempted to observe the path of the photons. At that exact moment, the photons stopped acting like waves, and started acting like particles, and they made a pattern of two slits on the solid board.
Once they stopped observing it, it acted like a wave again.
***the above explanation is merely a laymans explanation, much more math and complicated processes were used in the actual experiment***
So, from this occurence, many theories and schools of thought have come, to explain why. From these speculations, theoretical "laws" have came to be.
I don't know anything about qp; although I did go to the latest Matrix movie with some mushroom tea. I just about reached total enlightenment, but the film broke, so we ended up just sitting around the theater smoking pot.
Since that experience the only thing I've seen is the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?". It's a loose mix of science and spirituality. Probably would be better with mushroom tea.
What the Bleep do we know, is really just a nice explanation of the implications QP is having on modern concepts of reality.
Cheers for those responses, im going to delve intothe subject a little. Ages back i bought Stephen Hawkins 'A brief history of time' I only read a few pages of it at the time and never really got into it. Shall be interesting to see what I can get from it this time,
Booosh
psilocyberin, that sounds like the observer effect. Many things can't be observed because the act of observing or measuring them changes them.
My take on qp is that everything is made of energy. Solids, liquids and all physical properties are really illusions. Many systems of philisophy say that all is mind or all is some other term like sound (om), light, thought, god and so on. Physics and metaphysics do seem to be converging in some ways.
I would offer manifestations as a better word than illusion.
Whatever, at least the illusion/manifestations are rather similar regardless of the observer. My eye and your eye (if not colorblind) and a spectrophotometer will tell you that a cherry is red.
And your hand and my hand and an Instron tensile tester will tell you that the table is hard.
Therefore I am uncomfortable with the illusonary reference. They are real. Several different observational methods can and will provide the same conclusion.
Discover magazine recently had an article about the distance scale over which quantum effect gives way to Newtonian existance. The scale is at about 1 mm if I recall properly.
sorry I lapsed on the thread, I had to fly to a casino for some intensive interviews and havent posted on any of my forums for about a week now.
But, while I was away, I was kicking around this idea: that everything is conceptual. I know at first it seems kind of philo 101, but hear me out.
If our reality is striclty perception of phenomenon and we only experience everything through this, then even the tangible would be abstract in nature. An apple is as much of a concept as the idea of "patriotism". Just as when I say "patriotism", we seem to have a shared understanding, much like if I said the word "apple". Our realities are simply constructed from the constant stream of perceptual data, none of us ever have any real grasp on true reality. So, that got me thinking about how we have never really measured anything, all scientific measurment would be based on this illusory self perpetuated reality. So, in one way, I can see how the concepts in What the Bleep could have basis, since basically all our reality is just a hallucenation, thusly we could affect and change it just like Neo in the matrix. On the other hand, we only interact and are affected by the real reality, which we have no magical control over, what we do have control over, is how we choose to perceive our fake reality, and what we make of it, that is where magical power lies.
While apple and patrioism may both be terms found in the dictionary, only one is able to give sustenance to a physical body. I'm confident that hunger will trump the abstract concept of patriotism almost every time a reasonable person is presented with the chioce.
The physical surely exists,
as my stomach tells me so.... - the book of laughingwillow -
lw
psilo, I see what you are talking about. We see everything through our senses and through our ideas about the world. People from two different cultures might look at the same object and see two very different things. Winder, if two people share the same illusion, does that make it real?
Not just two people, but many many.
And more than people, but instruments are designed to look in ways we cannot and as such are either contributing to the compleixty of the illusion or to the understanding of how the illusion operates so that it is not so slippery a hoax.
if a 'placebo' works everytime (to the efficiency of the real thing) is it not worthy as a real treatment?
thus in an essence, its real if it can be reliably re-experienced (given all parameters are the same)
also, if it is all an illusion, then any proof we come up with for being an illusion or not an illusion, is infact only an illusion, and vice versa, so basically we cannot prove what existance 'really' is whilst we are subjected to it
....i just babbling.... but at the same time, the biggest presumption is that myn perceptial world (in my head, from sensory input) is the same as yours... to a near enough level of similarity that is ;)
~vb
We always crash into Planck's wall, in so many ways...