Recent content by jon4444

Doesn't the mathematics underlying Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle also essentially make these same predictions?

Is there any way to experimentally confirm the very short time scales that decoherence predicts? (E.g., are there certain interactions for which it predicts a measurable time that no other theory predicts?) (Short version: Is there any empirical evidence for this supposition of "Decoherence"?)

I just read an excerpt from Philip Ball's new book and was disappointed by its hyperbolic, boosterish tone. He adopts the pose that physicists have made great strides in understanding what happens during measurement. Wave functions decohere, etc. He concludes by saying something like "now...

Here's an issue I'm left unsure about after reading one of those popularizations ("The Order of Time"). Why didn't Einstein see the implications of entanglement with polarization that Bell saw? Was it that those aspects of polarization hadn't been worked out yet, or Einstein somehow just...

As someone also interested in the foundational questions, I found that book a disappointment. It did give interesting insight into research culture, but I felt it was rather weak on subject's like Bell's Inequality. (E.g., I had to go elsewhere to discover that experiments related to Bell's...

"...still lends itself to the question of whether the particles simply had some specific pair of opposite spins before measurement.." I would have thought this possibility is disproved by showing the differences in probabilities--i.e., measure one of the particles at a specific point in time...

I'd like to have a simple way of describing quantum entanglement for high school students and would appreciate feedback on whether the following is accurate (enough): "One type of entanglement involves spin, where two entangled particles will always have opposite spin (coming from conservation...

"I do not understand which experiment you propose concerning the double-slit experiment." I'm thinking of double slit experiments where the interference pattern can be eliminated by putting a photo detector behind one of the slits. Would the interference pattern also be eliminated if you were...

At a crude, intuitive level, I think Penrose must be on the right track. Just because the nature of consciousness and wave function collapse are two phenomena in nature we don't really have any solid framework to understand based on our everyday world (well, maybe that's more true of...

I'm trying to get a sense of the current state of knowledge regarding the relationship between gravity and quantum phenomena. For example, if you had a super-sensitive gravity detector, would that count as a "measurement" in the double-slit experiment in the same way that a particle detector...

"... You seem to not want to face up the reality that this chain of events will never end!" No, I get that. But it's more a matter of how consistent our understanding is. If we lived in today's society but still didn't have any understanding of how the sun seemed to rise in the East every...

At a high/abstract level, I'm trying to understand how QM treats gravity. What if you set up a Schrödinger's cat experiment so that the cat lost some of its mass when in the "dead" state. So, someone outside the box could "observe" the cat being alive or dead based on change in gravitational...

I think the other issues you mention are mysteries. Pondering them gives us an intuitive sense that there's some deeper structure to things we haven't gotten access to (so, we might guess that time and space are artifacts of some deeper physical reality, for example.) The unique aspect of...

What this discussion brings up for me is how much of a gap is there in our understanding of the physical world as regards wave function collapse? Yes, we have math to accurately describe the probability of different outcomes, but isn't it correct to say there's no theory (and perhaps more...

so, say certain materials require a certain amount of energy to join together (the smashing and deformation)--this essential sets a critical condition for if you could have an inelastic condition (i.e., only under certain relative masses and initial speed). Is that a correct interpretation of...