Jim hits the nail on the head when he writes, “The key is not measurement, but scale.” He cites Schrödinger from 1935, “The simple procedure provided for this…is perhaps after all only a convenient calculational trick, but one that today, as we have seen, has attained influence of unprecedented scope over our basic attitude toward nature.” The Heisenberg Cut, for all intents and purposes, is happening at the sub-atomic, or atomic level. He tells the history and evolution of this often misunderstood concept of quantum physics that humans toss around as thought experiments. In many ways, this error is not different than modern understanding of theory and philosophy, such as social-Darwinism, or being stoic. No human is necessary in the universe for the universe to be. Complexity is the matter of scale he speaks of, and the interaction of these “particles” (that can be calculated as waves with a function that “collapse”) increases so much after the atomic level that the calculations of probability become so infinitesimally small that they are essentially meaningless. It would take longer than the age of the universe for these cocktail party hypotheticals to occur. It’s essentially a trick. Moreover, the particles themselves interact and determine existence, not humans or consciousness. Your reading this comment right now is proof that you can count on the quantum states occurring in the particles in the elements right in your phone right now, and you are probably not so worried you will fall through your chair today.😄
Great discussion… I was going to explore how The Cat got so famous… so finding the article was very welcome… it’s part of a longer story started by Einstein needling everyone about the spooky action at a distance / EPR… and Schrödinger cites Einstein as motivation for his paper; the EPR paper did a lot more, it is the motivation for resurgence of entanglement research, now manifesting in progress with quantum computing and ‘teleportation’ science
Christ! Jim Baggott is on Substack, and I only just found out. I guess I'll stop wasting my time with all the drivel on Notes. I guess that does say something about me, ugh.
That was fun to read, firstly, because it's very cool that you're here on Substack posting. I'm a fan of your books and talks, and I couldn't agree more with the thinking behind Farewell to Reality. I like your sailing metaphor. Scylla is bad enough, but I'm astonished how many trained scientists vanish down the Charybdis whirlpool.
This was fun to read also because I wrote a very similar article, including that the Heisenberg Cut comes from the amplification of a quantum event to a classical event using the stored power of the device. In my post I compared it to a mousetrap. A light touch sets off a reaction that uses the energy stored in the coiled spring.
Lastly, I've long thought Wigner's Friend rules out an MWI view that it's meaningful to talk about a wavefunction for a classical object. That's like finding one choir in a group of 10²³ singers.
Thanks. Fun read if difficult from Substack inability to allow two finger expansion. As a student of history before opting for medical science, the mythical cat in the box confusing but fun. Now with this essay and the gadfly even more thought provoking
Many thanks for this. I ran into one of those literary uses of the Cat and had to chew on these thoughts without the benefit of your education; my thinking is clearer now.
The super-simplification I came up with is that it's 100% sure to be a quantum world INSIDE one atom...but the moment it affects the next atom over - the moment an electron jumps over during an electrical current, the moment the particle escapes one atom and hits one other in the geiger counter, that second atom has "made an observation".
Your talk of cascades clarifies that maybe it does extend to more than ONE atom...just not a lot more than one. I'm going to think of it in future as an order-of-magnitude scale. By the time the cascade has hit 10 atoms (arbitrary) the event has crossed into the Classical World.
Between one and ten atoms are the jaws closing down on the problem from two directions.
I went to the great Quantum Gravity public conference in Vancouver two years ago, with Jim Peebles, Kip Thorne, Roger Penrose speaking to, mostly, general public (my table was full of Physics students that had needed to go on to non-academic jobs, and missed it). And they spoke of the Quantum Gravity problem as being approached by the two jaws - investigating inside the atom, and from outside.
Fingers crossed for some breakthroughs in my lifetime. (What everybody at my table was saying, and most were 20 years younger..)
This looks to me like a crime half solved with many loose ends. Except that a half solution could sometimes be a totally wrong solution. We will not know until the real solution is found.
Jim hits the nail on the head when he writes, “The key is not measurement, but scale.” He cites Schrödinger from 1935, “The simple procedure provided for this…is perhaps after all only a convenient calculational trick, but one that today, as we have seen, has attained influence of unprecedented scope over our basic attitude toward nature.” The Heisenberg Cut, for all intents and purposes, is happening at the sub-atomic, or atomic level. He tells the history and evolution of this often misunderstood concept of quantum physics that humans toss around as thought experiments. In many ways, this error is not different than modern understanding of theory and philosophy, such as social-Darwinism, or being stoic. No human is necessary in the universe for the universe to be. Complexity is the matter of scale he speaks of, and the interaction of these “particles” (that can be calculated as waves with a function that “collapse”) increases so much after the atomic level that the calculations of probability become so infinitesimally small that they are essentially meaningless. It would take longer than the age of the universe for these cocktail party hypotheticals to occur. It’s essentially a trick. Moreover, the particles themselves interact and determine existence, not humans or consciousness. Your reading this comment right now is proof that you can count on the quantum states occurring in the particles in the elements right in your phone right now, and you are probably not so worried you will fall through your chair today.😄
Great discussion… I was going to explore how The Cat got so famous… so finding the article was very welcome… it’s part of a longer story started by Einstein needling everyone about the spooky action at a distance / EPR… and Schrödinger cites Einstein as motivation for his paper; the EPR paper did a lot more, it is the motivation for resurgence of entanglement research, now manifesting in progress with quantum computing and ‘teleportation’ science
Christ! Jim Baggott is on Substack, and I only just found out. I guess I'll stop wasting my time with all the drivel on Notes. I guess that does say something about me, ugh.
That was fun to read, firstly, because it's very cool that you're here on Substack posting. I'm a fan of your books and talks, and I couldn't agree more with the thinking behind Farewell to Reality. I like your sailing metaphor. Scylla is bad enough, but I'm astonished how many trained scientists vanish down the Charybdis whirlpool.
This was fun to read also because I wrote a very similar article, including that the Heisenberg Cut comes from the amplification of a quantum event to a classical event using the stored power of the device. In my post I compared it to a mousetrap. A light touch sets off a reaction that uses the energy stored in the coiled spring.
Lastly, I've long thought Wigner's Friend rules out an MWI view that it's meaningful to talk about a wavefunction for a classical object. That's like finding one choir in a group of 10²³ singers.
Thanks. Fun read if difficult from Substack inability to allow two finger expansion. As a student of history before opting for medical science, the mythical cat in the box confusing but fun. Now with this essay and the gadfly even more thought provoking
Many thanks for this. I ran into one of those literary uses of the Cat and had to chew on these thoughts without the benefit of your education; my thinking is clearer now.
The super-simplification I came up with is that it's 100% sure to be a quantum world INSIDE one atom...but the moment it affects the next atom over - the moment an electron jumps over during an electrical current, the moment the particle escapes one atom and hits one other in the geiger counter, that second atom has "made an observation".
Your talk of cascades clarifies that maybe it does extend to more than ONE atom...just not a lot more than one. I'm going to think of it in future as an order-of-magnitude scale. By the time the cascade has hit 10 atoms (arbitrary) the event has crossed into the Classical World.
Between one and ten atoms are the jaws closing down on the problem from two directions.
I went to the great Quantum Gravity public conference in Vancouver two years ago, with Jim Peebles, Kip Thorne, Roger Penrose speaking to, mostly, general public (my table was full of Physics students that had needed to go on to non-academic jobs, and missed it). And they spoke of the Quantum Gravity problem as being approached by the two jaws - investigating inside the atom, and from outside.
Fingers crossed for some breakthroughs in my lifetime. (What everybody at my table was saying, and most were 20 years younger..)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/quantum-gravity-conference-vancouver-1.6554344
This looks to me like a crime half solved with many loose ends. Except that a half solution could sometimes be a totally wrong solution. We will not know until the real solution is found.
Enjoyed the whole piece from beginning to end.
It's all statistical mechanics, per my reductio, which uses THREE radioactive elements and does one other thing: has the cat out in the open, visible at all times. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2009/03/why-schroedinger-was-wrong-about-his.html