I agree, I should have written a conditional:
This is because, if we could measure them with full precision, the current position, direction, and speed of an atom (and all other measurements if we could do them physically) are only possible with one and only one specific history of everything else in the universe.
I will edit above.
Other than our ability to measure these dimensions I think that their current state is only possible with only one history of the universe since the beginning.
That is not at all true; for example, see the inverse problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_problem). Although the atom's position is uniquely determined by the rest of the universe, the inverse is not true: Multiple different states of the universe could correspond to the same position of the atom. And as long as the atom's position does not uniquely identify the rest of the outside universe, there is no way to infer the state of the universe from the state of the atom, no matter how much precision you can measure it with. The reason is that there are many ways that the boundary conditions of a box containing an atom could be arranged, in order to force it to any position, meaning that there is a limited amount that the atom can tell you about its box.
The atom is affected by its local conditions (electromagnetic and gravitational fields, etc), but there are innumerable ways of establishing any particular desired fields locally to the atom.
This causes challenges when, for example, you want to infer the electrical brain activity in a patient based on measurements of electromagnetic fields at the surface. Unfortunately, there are multiple ways that electrical currents could have been arranged in three-dimensional space inside the brain to create the same observed measurements at the surface, so it's not always possible to "invert" the measurements directly without some other knowledge. This isn't a problem of measurement precision; a finer grid of electrodes won't solve it (although it may help rule out some possibilities).
Really good ending chapter. The presence of Hermione's character totally changes the tone of the story, and reading this one, it became really clear how heavily the Sunshine General was missing from the last ~third or so of the story arc. Eliezer writes her very well, and seems to enjoy writing her too.
I thought Hermione was going to cast an Expecto Patronum at the end, with all the bubbling happiness, but declaring friendship works well too.
Irrelevant thought: Lasers aren't needed to test out the strange optics of Harry's office; positioning mirrors in known positions on the ground and viewing them through a telescope from the tower would already give intriguing results.
I hope that somebody (well, Harry) tells Michael MacNair that his father, alone among those summoned, died in combat with Voldemort. It seems sad for him not to know that.
Literally every group had at least one member who supplied a P(God) of 0 and a P(God) of 100.
Okay, I'll bite: What does someone mean when they say they are Atheist, and they think P(God) = 100% ?
According to Descartes: for any X, P(X exists | X is taking the survey) = 100%, and also that 100% certainty of anything on the part of X is only allowed in this particular case.
Therefore, if X says they are Atheist, and that P(God exists | X is taking the survey) = 100%, then X is God, God is taking the survey, and happens to be an Atheist.
A note about calibration...
A poor showing on some questions, such as "what is the best-selling computer game", doesn't necessarily reflect poor calibration. It might instead simply mean that "the best-selling game is Minecraft" is a surprising fact to this particular community.
For example, I may have never heard of Minecraft, but had a large amount of exposure to evidence that "the best-selling game is Starcraft", or "the best-selling game is Tetris". During the time when I did play computer games, which was before the era of Minecraft, this maybe would have been true (or maybe it would have been a misperception even then). But when I look at the evidence that I have mentally available to recall, all of it might point to Starcraft.
Probability calibration can only be based on prior probabilties and available evidence. If I start with something like a max-entropy prior (assigning all computer games an equal probability of having been the best-selling ones) and then update it based on every time I remember hearing the popularity of game X discussed in the media, then the resulting sharpness of my probability distribution (my certainty) will depend on how much evidence I have, and how sharply it favours game X over others.
If I happened to have obtained my evidence during a time when Starcraft really was the best-selling computer game, my evidence will be sharply peaked around Starcraft, leading me (even as a perfect Bayesian) to conclude that Starcraft is the answer with high probability. Minecraft wouldn't even make runner-up, especially if I haven't heard of it.
When I learn afterward that the answer is Minecraft, that is a "surprising result", because I was confident and wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean I had false confidence or updated poorly, just that I had updated well on misleading evidence. However, we can't have 'evidence' available that says our body of evidence is dubious.
If the whole community is likewise surprised that Minecraft is the right answer, that doesn't necessarily indicate overconfidence in the community... it might instead indicate that our evidence was strongly and systematically biased, perhaps because most of us are not of the Minecraft generation ( not sure if 27 is too old for inecraft or not?).
Similarly, if the world's scholars were all wrong and (somehow), in reality, the Norse God known as the All-Father was not called Odin but rather "Nido", but this fact had been secretly concealed, then learning this fact would surprise everyone (including the authors of this survey). Our calibration results would suddenly look very bad on this question. We would all appear to be grossly overconfident. And yet, there would be no difference in the available evidence we'd had at hand (which all said "Odin" was the right answer).
but we don't think of a tennis ball falling in a vacuum as gaining thermal energy or rising in temperature.
That's because temperature is a characteristic of a multi-particle system. One single particle has energy, a large set of many particles has temperature.
And still speaking of high-school physics, conversion between thermal and kinetic energy is trivially easy and happens all the time around us.
A tennis ball is a multi-particle system; however, all of the particles are accelerating more or less in unison while the ball free-falls. Nonetheless, it isn't usually considered to be increasing in temperature, because the entropy isn't increasing much as it falls.
You can always translate the ambiguity logically (into any sufficiently "complete" language?), but the increased awkwardness of the translation may have an effect.
You don't only add awkwardness. You nearly always also add additional meaning or lose meaning.
If you for example want to translate the English "Dear students," into German you can either say: "Liebe Schüler,", "Liebe Schüler und Schülerinnen," or "Liebe Schülerinnen und Schüler,". In German the words have a gender and if you want to be gender neutral you need both the male and the female form. Then you have to decide which one of those you write first and which one last.
Oh good point! And if you don't know the context when performing the translation (perhaps it's an announcement at an all-girls or an all-boys school?), then the translation will be incorrect.
The ambiguity in the original sentence may be impossible to preserve in the translation process, which doesn't mean that translation is impossible, but it does mean that information must be added by the translator to the sentence that wasn't present in the original sentence.
Sometimes I do small contract translation jobs as a side activity, but it's very frustrating when a client sends me snippets of text to be translated without the full context.
But the net average quality of life is increased overall.
I'm not sure this necessarily holds true. In very broad strokes, if the quality of life is increased by X for a single immigrant, but having that immigrant present in the country decreases the quality of life for the existing population by more than X/population, then even if a specific immigrants quality of life is improved, it doesn't mean that the net average quality of life is increased overall.
Yes..... you may be right, and it is a compelling reason, for example, not to admit terrorists into a country.
I suppose that if a particular individual's admission into the country would depress the entire country by a sufficient amount, then that's a fair reason to keep them out, without worrying about valuing different peoples' utilities unequally.
But the net average quality of life is increased overall.
If that is an argument for doing it, it's also an argument for managing one's own home the same way. That ended badly for George Price.
I don't recognise an obligation to give my stuff away so long as anyone has less than I do, and I take the same attitude at every scale. There's nothing wrong with anyone trying to emigrate to a better place than they are in; but nothing wrong with No Entry signs either.
That's fine. Do you consider yourself a utilitarian? Many people do not.
For that matter, following Illano's line of thought, it's not clear that the amount that poor people would appreciate receiving all of my possessions is greater than the amount of sadness I would suffer from losing everything I own. (Although if I was giving it away out of a feeling of moral inclination to do so, I would presumably be happy with my choice). I'm not sure what George Price was thinking exactly.
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Thx so much for the link above!
Since I am not a scientist I didn't know about the inverse problem, but I had thought about that intuitively.
I think it's true that a current state of an atom, in a 3 dimensional context, may be achieved through multiple histories or even manipulated by a living being who wants to "cheat the system".
But in a 4 dimensional context, where the coordinates on a base field (maybe Higgs field), which could also be called time, are included, that would eliminate the possibility of recreating the same position for different stories since time happens only once, in a forward motion, and thus making that state unique and irreplaceable.
I think a position of height x, width y, and depth z is replicable the way you say above.
But, is a position of height x, width y, depth z, at time w (considering a single time line since the big bang) replicable?
If yes then the inverse problem refutes my original idea in this thread, if not IMO it is still possible to reverse-understand the universe that way.
Ah, hmm.... Maybe! If you include the entire history of the atom, then I'm not actually sure. That's a tough question, and a good question =)