Comment on Decoherence is Simple

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 18:53:51 GMT

You're doing the middle-school physics "an object dropped in vacuum" calculation :-)

Yes, exactly. Because for many everyday situations, it's close enough.

So, since you've mentioned accuracy, how accurate your 34.3 m/s value is? Can you give me some kind of confidence intervals?

No, I can't. In order to do that, I would need, first of all, to know how to do the air resistance calculation - I can probably look that up, but it's going to be complicated - and, importantly, some sort of probability distribution for the possible masses of the ball (knowing the radius might help in estimating this).

Of course, the greater the mass of the ball, the more accurate my value is, because the air risistance will have less effect; in the limit, if the ball is a hydrogen balloon, I expect it to float away and never actually hit the ground at all, while in the other limit, if the ball is a tiny black hole, I expect it to smash into the ground at exactly the calculated value (and then keep going).

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