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I really don't get the whole String Theory deal. Strings of what? Vibrating in what? Why? I get the notion that the maths behind it is staggeringly elegant and may well be a very useful tool that allows to do some extraordinary things with spacetime and matter, but I have this nagging feeling that it's just an abstraction of what is really there, and it will never be proven or disproven, merely utilised if or when there can be some sort of application for it.
Personally I think Quantum Mechanics will give us all the tools we ever need to do just about anything. And on that subject I personally despise whoever it was that started the "If you think you understand QM you don't understand QM" meme... what a shockingly obtuse statement! Just because something is difficult to comprehend doesn't mean that everyone who has some grasp of the subject is delusional! I think adding that meme to the meme-pool has been an act of scientific vandalism. It might of seemed a nice cute way of expressing how hard it is to do the maths of QM or to really get into the nitty gritty of how it works, but at the end of the day, it completely neglects the 100th monkey syndrome, and now we have a whole load of self-righteous fools trotting the old "you don't understand QM" mantra out whenever anyone even tries to discuss it with the aim of furthering their study and understanding of it. Personally I have no problem with the concept of the Static Singleton Multiverse that is suggested between the lines of the Everett interpretation. I find no inconsistency in it when you remove the necessity for universes to be popping into existence from nothing along Quantum branch points, by reducing the concept of Time from a fundamental dimension of Space to an illusion created by the action of conciousness. I find no problem with the concept that conciousness itself is a function of and part and parcel of the very fabric of reality, perhaps it's encapsulation as a whole. I arrived at my own version of Everett's interpretation through my own means after discussing the matter of QM at length with a friend of mine, so why on earth should I believe that since I think I understand the principles of QM, I don't in fact understand it? That's like saying, if you think your a Zen master, your not infact a Zen master. Well sorry but someone came up with the thing, and if they knew through careful study that they were not talking bullshit, so if they can't know they are a Zen master, then there can be no such thing as Zen in the first place, which is clearly nonsense, because exist it does! If you think you know the power of the dark side, you don't in fact know the power of the dark side... pffft rhetorical memetical garbage. |
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| Webmaster of AhoyNoob | Apr 17 2012 at 08:15:10 GMT | |||
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Since it was Feynmann I guess I can forgive that one faux-pas in a brilliant career! I still don't see what the big fuss is about, I mean sure, having an epistemological world / universe view based on the foundations of QM is a far cry from being able to do anything in an engineering sense with QM, but still, the comment itself is inherently destructive to conversation when parroted and propagated by the masses, because it seeks to belittle anyone from actually discussing ideas on the subject, even if they be half-assed.
We can only learn and improve our understandings by studying facts and then participating in discussion and debate as to how we should interpret those facts, and that comment puts a barrier in place to that discussion. "Oh don't even bother trying to understand QM, your not a physicist and even physicist who understand what they are talking about don't really understand what they are talking about..." NOT HELPFUL, RICHARD! Personally I take the known facts from experiments on board, such as the experiments with the 80 carbon atom bucky balls which still display interference like photons do, thus lending huge weight to Everett, and I weave in things I know to be true from my own experience and philosophical musings, such as "no matter how we define an experience, be it dream, hallucination or daily life, all of these things are the result of physics", in order to derive my own understanding of what it means to me to be a concious participating observer of a fluid evolving universe time frame of the static eternal wave function. I actually rejected the idea of the Big Bang prior to coming to terms with that "Weird Spooky Quantum Stuff" TM. Because of thoughts I had on the nature of relativity and how within that paradigm the flow of time is relative to velocity and local gravitation. The argument goes something like this, if you were right down near to a black hole, you would be approaching the event horizon at near to the speed of light and time would slow down for you until it halts. You would, if you could survive the process, see the rest of the universe age billions or trillions of years in the matter of seconds. In that position of space, the universe is from the point of view of an observer, trillions and trillions of years old. Now contrast that, with a position half-way between two galaxies, where there is virtually no mass and thus no gravitation. In that position the exact opposite would be true, and out there in the vast intergalactic gulfs of empty space, virtually no time at all has EVER passed. So instead of a linear model where time is an external universal tick that everything is relative to, we have a sort of timezones effect, where the universe is both brand new and incredibly ancient at the same time in different locations. Moving on from that and staying within relativity, you can show therefore that the flow of time is really nothing more than the curvature of space dependant of the amount of mass in the vicinity. Thus if you really must think in linear timeframe terms, the "start" is actually a position in space where there is 0 mass within billions of light years, and the "end" is a black hole where there is billions of mass in 0 light years of space. oh how I love poking holes in accepted cosmological theories :) :) Gotta wonder though, why it is that everyone knows all about black holes and spends loads of time thinking about them and theorising about how they work, and yet their exact opposite the intergalactic voids, get next to no attention at all. Bit of an oversight, hrm? Especially when you consider that like 99.99% of all the space in the universe is in these voids between galaxies. Riddle me this, Riddle me that, if 99.99% of the universe has no gravitational curvature and therefore very little to no time has ever elapsed there, how old is the universe? |
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| Webmaster of AhoyNoob | Apr 17 2012 at 11:47:47 GMT | |||
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