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Plasmon comments on [FINAL CHAPTER] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 122 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Gondolinian 14 March 2015 04:00PM

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Comment author: TobyBartels 17 March 2015 06:04:16AM 1 point [-]

No, he's certainly not completely wrong, but he's bringing up irrelevant complications and missing the main point. Quantum vs classical has nothing to do with it, for example.

Comment author: Plasmon 17 March 2015 06:23:24AM 4 points [-]

The fact that quantum mechanics conserves energy is stronger evidence for the hypothesis that reality conserves energy than the fact that classical mechanics conserves energy. He is saying "our best model of reality conserves energy" which is very relevant.

Comment author: TobyBartels 19 March 2015 08:12:00AM *  0 points [-]

If quantum mechanics allowed for small violations of energy conservation (which sometimes people even say that it does, on short time periods, although this is not really correct), then McGonagall's tranformation would still violate physical law as we know it. In physics, you don't always push everything down to the most fundamental theory, which is a good thing, since we don't actually have a most fundamental theory of physics. There is no such thing as ‘our best [single] model of reality’; there are some ways in which our quantum models are (so far) worse than our classical ones.