I'm leery of those who take science and try to extend what they learn into areas completely disconnected from the original material. I'm sure that Einstein had to roll his eyes thinking about how people misapplied and misused his theory of relativity.
Of course if you want to try to lend scientific credibility to your particularly offbeat and unscientific ideas it helps to use a part of science most people don't understand. The more modern and obscure the better. The more seemingly wild ideas in the theory you can apply to your own pet theory the better.
Which means that the modern scientific theory most often misapplied is.... Quantum Mechanics.
John McGowan has written an article entitled The Quantum Mystics in which he goes after those that misapply Quantum Theory. What sets him off on his journey is the 'documentary' What the Bleep Do We Know?.
He does a good job trying to explain what Quantum Mechanics theory actually says and the problems it leaves unanswered. There is math involved, and understanding the math helps a great deal, but the prose around the equations does a very good job at explaining the issues at hand. Don't get scared away because there are equations.
There are parts of the article I'm not sure I agree with. I can't challenge the math or the science nor do I think I need to. He meanders a bit when talking about 'crypto-mysticism in mainstream physics' and he goes off on a tangent that doesn't seem to add or detract from his arguments until that point. But that doesn't lessen the importance of the article.
The main takeaway for me is that whenever I see someone outside the scientific community start using scientific theories to bolster their beliefs I should wary. If you want to understand if a theory is being misapplied the people to go to are the people who understand the theory. Let them tell you if the application of the ideas is worthwhile or bunk.
More often then not when scientific theories are used in other disciplines or by those without scientific training and understanding the results are bunk.
Showing posts with label Quantum Mechanics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quantum Mechanics. Show all posts
Friday, October 15, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Science: What if Quantum Mechanics Makes Sense?
Science has gotten increasingly complicated. Take physics as a perfect example. It makes sense to us that the Aristotelean view of the universe is wrong. The universe isn't made up of earth, water, air, and fire. It makes no sense to us to think that heavenly objects moving in perfect circles while earthly objects move in straight lines. Watching a juggler for a few seconds shows how wrong that idea is.
Things start to seem right to most of us when we get to the discoveries of Newton. We may not know what attracts objects to each other but we don't mind just knowing that it's called gravity. We like the idea of an orderly predictable clockwork universe in which everything moves along in cosmic harmony.
Maybe the Newtonian view of the world feels comfortable because it's still within the realm of our senses. Our common sense is based on the world around us. We feel comfortable dealing with ideas that are within our grasp. You pick up an apple and let go and it drops towards the centre of the earth. There's nothing unusual happening there. You throw the apple hard and it moves off at a certain speed. Throw it twice as hard and it leaves your hand moving twice as fast. That's practically intuitive.
Then along comes Einstein and the concepts don't mesh well with our intuitive sense of the world around us. It's hard to imagine that someone on a moving train or rocket ship has a different perception of time than you do. You see them moving slower and they see you moving faster. All because there's an absolute speed limit and light has to always move at that speed. Light can't travel through a vacuum slower or faster. No one can see light travelling through a vacuum slower or faster than anyone else.
We may grasp the idea that space is curved but we grasp the concept using the metaphor of a rubber trampoline that dips whenever heavy objects are placed on it. It's much harder to visualize a three dimensional universe as having curves near large objects.
It's even harder to grasp the idea that since objects have a potential speed limit you can't just keep throwing them harder to make them move faster and faster. As you push something faster and faster it gets harder to speed it up. Let's say you take one of Newton's apples and push it from a standing start to one quarter the speed of light while measuring how hard you had to push. Now take the apple from a standing start to half the speed of light. Turns out it takes more than twice as much pushing.
So where does that extra energy go? If it takes more than twice the push to go twice as fast what happens to the extra push? That's where Einstein's famous equation comes in. Energy and Mass are equivalent. The extra push goes into making the apple more massive. Yes... the reason it gets harder and harder to push apples or rocket ships is that they get heavier and heavier the faster they go.
This isn't within the realm of our common sense. It makes you want to go back to Newton's universe and sit under an apple tree doing simple calculations.
What happens when you move on to quantum mechanics?
As I see it there are two choices. You either give up and say it's not understandable by the typical person or you go looking to see if someone has attempted an explanation that makes some sense.
One such attempt was made in 2008 by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Less Wrong. A series of posts called the Quantum Physics Sequence goes through many of the concepts behind quantum mechanics and does a respectable job trying to make them more intuitive.
The entire sequence of articles is in the link above. There are also a few short lists that take some of the articles and help you understand part of quantum mechanics. Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious is a good look into why modern physics isn't all that hard to grasp.
Eliezer's central approach can be summed up by a quote from the article in the sequence called Quantum Explanations:
Things start to seem right to most of us when we get to the discoveries of Newton. We may not know what attracts objects to each other but we don't mind just knowing that it's called gravity. We like the idea of an orderly predictable clockwork universe in which everything moves along in cosmic harmony.
Maybe the Newtonian view of the world feels comfortable because it's still within the realm of our senses. Our common sense is based on the world around us. We feel comfortable dealing with ideas that are within our grasp. You pick up an apple and let go and it drops towards the centre of the earth. There's nothing unusual happening there. You throw the apple hard and it moves off at a certain speed. Throw it twice as hard and it leaves your hand moving twice as fast. That's practically intuitive.
Then along comes Einstein and the concepts don't mesh well with our intuitive sense of the world around us. It's hard to imagine that someone on a moving train or rocket ship has a different perception of time than you do. You see them moving slower and they see you moving faster. All because there's an absolute speed limit and light has to always move at that speed. Light can't travel through a vacuum slower or faster. No one can see light travelling through a vacuum slower or faster than anyone else.
We may grasp the idea that space is curved but we grasp the concept using the metaphor of a rubber trampoline that dips whenever heavy objects are placed on it. It's much harder to visualize a three dimensional universe as having curves near large objects.
It's even harder to grasp the idea that since objects have a potential speed limit you can't just keep throwing them harder to make them move faster and faster. As you push something faster and faster it gets harder to speed it up. Let's say you take one of Newton's apples and push it from a standing start to one quarter the speed of light while measuring how hard you had to push. Now take the apple from a standing start to half the speed of light. Turns out it takes more than twice as much pushing.
So where does that extra energy go? If it takes more than twice the push to go twice as fast what happens to the extra push? That's where Einstein's famous equation comes in. Energy and Mass are equivalent. The extra push goes into making the apple more massive. Yes... the reason it gets harder and harder to push apples or rocket ships is that they get heavier and heavier the faster they go.
This isn't within the realm of our common sense. It makes you want to go back to Newton's universe and sit under an apple tree doing simple calculations.
What happens when you move on to quantum mechanics?
As I see it there are two choices. You either give up and say it's not understandable by the typical person or you go looking to see if someone has attempted an explanation that makes some sense.
One such attempt was made in 2008 by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Less Wrong. A series of posts called the Quantum Physics Sequence goes through many of the concepts behind quantum mechanics and does a respectable job trying to make them more intuitive.
The entire sequence of articles is in the link above. There are also a few short lists that take some of the articles and help you understand part of quantum mechanics. Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious is a good look into why modern physics isn't all that hard to grasp.
Eliezer's central approach can be summed up by a quote from the article in the sequence called Quantum Explanations:
...I don't believe in phenomena that are inherently confusing. Confusion exists in our models of the world, not in the world itself. If a subject is widely known as confusing, not just difficult... you shouldn't leave it at that. It doesn't satisfice; it is not an okay place to be. Maybe you can fix the problem, maybe you can't; but you shouldn't be happy to leave students confused.
The first way in which my introduction is going to depart from the traditional, standard introduction to QM, is that I am not going to tell you that quantum mechanics is supposed to be confusing.If you don't want to give up on trying to grasp quantum mechanics then give the Quantum Physics Sequence a read. You'll be surprised how much of it you can grasp.
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