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I really enjoy this video

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Bee Happy:
*Quantum Physics* The Reality As You Know It Does Not Exist

I know there are people who will find this completely ridiculous. (I want my studies to take me into understanding the actual equations)
What I find enthralling is that the theory here would reconcile - pretty much everything. The video includes Quantum physicists and buddhist monks (I think one of them is hindu as well).
There was another interview with another physicist who said (I'm paraphrasing- I dont remember the EXACT quote) "we didn't set out trying to prove this, this is just where the numbers took us"

c10250:
Very interesting, but a bit muddy.  I think they could have made their point a little better.

Having a degree in both Physics and Mathematics, I would say I know a little (literally) about quantum mechanics. I have had a course or two on it.  I never before thought how quantum mechanics relates to actual perception.  It got me thinking.

I think the problem with this line of thinking is that we use MATHEMATICS to try to explain the world. The MATH that best describes what is happening in the universe also states that parallel universes exist, and that things don't really exist until you measure them. Now, I'm not saying that the math is right or wrong, I'm just saying that it might be our feeble attempt at applying mathematics to try to explain something that simply cannot be explained by mathematics. I think it is generally accepted that this math breaks down at macroscopic scales.

See for example, Schrodinger's cat thought experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat





Ken

c10250:
From Wikepedia:

The thought experiment

Schrödinger wrote:
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.[3]
The above text is a translation of two paragraphs from a much larger original article that appeared in the German magazine Naturwissenschaften ("Natural Sciences") in 1935.[4]
Schrödinger's famous thought experiment poses the question, when does a quantum system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other? (More technically, when does the actual quantum state stop being a linear combination of states, each of which resembles different classical states, and instead begins to have a unique classical description?) If the cat survives, it remembers only being alive. But explanations of the EPR experiments that are consistent with standard microscopic quantum mechanics require that macroscopic objects, such as cats and notebooks, do not always have unique classical descriptions. The purpose of the thought experiment is to illustrate this apparent paradox. Our intuition says that no observer can be in a mixture of states; yet the cat, it seems from the thought experiment, can be such a mixture. Is the cat required to be an observer, or does its existence in a single well-defined classical state require another external observer? Each alternative seemed absurd to Albert Einstein, who was impressed by the ability of the thought experiment to highlight these issues. In a letter to Schrödinger dated 1950, he wrote:
You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gunpowder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.[5]
Note that no charge of gunpowder is mentioned in Schrödinger's setup, which uses a Geiger counter as an amplifier and hydrocyanic poison instead of gunpowder. The gunpowder had been mentioned in Einstein's original suggestion to Schrödinger 15 years before, and apparently Einstein had carried it forward to the present discussion.

Bee Happy:
I'm not trying to be a smart aleck, but I can't clearly understand what Schroedinger was illustrating with zombiecat. Unless it's a discussion of time itself - where S is saying that time is strictly linear and there is no perspective which can exist outside of linear time. If that's what the cat is about then I think I understand the argument.
    I can wholeheartedly agree that to us - the cat is absolutely alive or dead and never both - but (hypothetically - I havent studied enough math to prove any of this) - hypothetically another being capable of perceiving time (from outside the influence of time) as something other than a straight and irreversible line could perceive the cat as unborn, alive, and all the stages of it's life simultaneously, and dead.

I can also agree that math is insufficient to explain the universe in its entirety, but I can't say that isn't because we don't know enough math yet.

unrelated to the zombie cat:  I also stumbled into a neat explanation of 'the observation problem', and the experiment which demonstrated it.
I kept hitching on the assertion that something unobserved ceases to 'be' in the state it was observed in (I kept wondering how they could know by 'looking away' that anything had changed, or if it was just somebody's silly assertion that 'if I can't see it it isn't there, because I can't see it'.)
I also heard a few things from nonmath camps about matter having an innate 'intelligence' - a state of simply 'knowing of itself what it is'
hope you enjoy - I found this video pretty neato as well.
Dr Quantum - quantum physics simplified!

c10250:
That video was great.  

OK, so let me explain the cat problem as this:  If a radioactive atom has a chance of decaying, and we are not watching it, we say that it is in TWO possible states (the superposition of both decayed and not decayed). The act of watching it makes it choose one.  MATHEMATICALLY this is true.  Now if we tie a cat's life to the state of the atom, and don't watch the atom, we still say that the atom is in two superimposed states, but the can't can't be a superposition of both dead and alive! Clearly the cat is either dead or alive.

I think that this paradox is explained by "parallel universes" where both exist at the same time.  So in order to help explain this paradox, you need something weird, like parallel universes. I don't buy it.  I just think that we are using MATH to try to explain what truly can't be explained with math.

That's my take on it.  I might be wrong though.

Ken

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