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Do you know calculus? If so, it will be very easy to explain what the uncertainty principle actually means quantitatively, which should reduce any qualitative confusion.
I know calculus. Not enough to enjoy looking at the harmonic equation though.
It's a shame I never took a class on Quantum Mechanics. Most descriptions I've heard of it, even from professors, are indistinguishable from magical thinking.
I'm not a physicist, and I couldn't give a technical explanation of why that won't work (although I feel like I can grasp an intuitive idea based on how the Uncertainty Principle works to begin with). However, remember the Litany of a Bright Dilettante. You're not going to spot a trivial means of bypassing a fundamental theory in a field like physics after thinking for five minutes on a blog.
Incidentally, the Uncertainty Principle doesn't talk about the precision of our possible measurements, per se, but about the actual amplitude distribution for the observable. As you get arbitrarily precise along one of the pair you get arbitrarily spread out along the other, so that the second value is indeterminate even in principle.
I didn't come up with it. It's called the EPR Paradox.
That is not what the uncertainty principle says. The uncertainty principle says that you can't measure two complementary observables such as position and momentum or energy and time to arbitrary accuracy at the same time. However it does not say that you can't measure any one observable such as position or momentum to an arbitrary degree of accuracy.
If you have a set of entangled particles, would it not be possible to measure one aspect of each particle in the set, and thus achieve a fully accurate observation?
In response to
Truly Part Of You
I've always been intimidated by this. I'm quite positive I couldn't regenerate the Pythagorian Theorem, but I know that I should be able to. I certainly wouldn't be able to figure out basic calculus on my own. I wish that I could, but I know that I wouldn't be able to. Are there any things we've learned from mathematicians in the past that make figuring out such things easier? Anything I can learn to make learning easier?
The Pythagorean Theorem is just a special case of the magnitude of a vector, aka the Euclidean Norm. Though, I wouldn't be able to derive that if that were deleted from my brain.
In response to
Applause Lights
See also Trust Cues.
When I click that link, my browser downloads a file called redirect.php.
In response to
Explain/Worship/Ignore?
I say "must" in the Worship option. It is irony.
But if there is an infinite regress of causality, I should find that highly curious, and would like to hear Explained why it is allowed, and why this infinite regress exists rather than some other one.
At some point, the answer may become "we cannot know". For example, in quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle tells us that there is a limit to the accuracy of our measurements, and once we hit that limit, attaining more accuracy is impossible. The big bang is similar -- if time makes no sense in a singularity, perhaps we can't know what happens before that point. Maybe at some point we will find a way around these limitations, in which case it was just another instance of hitting Explain and letting science grind along, but it could be that we have already reached the ultimate limit, and no more explanations will ever come.
In response to
The Virtue of Narrowness
Two vertices are connected if there exists a walk between them
-- proofwiki
Given this definition of connected, I believe "Everything is connected to everything else" is true.
Can you think of a counter-example?
Edit: Wow, downvotes? I wouldn't have expected that on this site. My point relates to the absence of "floating" ideas in reality. Everything really should be connected, because everything comes from reality. If a thing wasn't based on reality in some way, where could it come from? I thought this line of reasoning would be obvious though. My other point, however, is that Eliezer's blog posts often seem to grossly misinterpret things people say and mean, for example his definition of "connected" above.
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Neat. Consider my objection retracted. Although I suspect someone with more knowledge of the material could give a better explanation.
I'm going to read the QM sequence now. I have always been confused by descriptions of QM.