Recent content by Nugatory

There's a fair amount of historical and biological accident in how we label the various ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum: for example, "infrared" and "ultraviolet" are only named categories because of how the human eye works, x-rays are their own category only because Roentgen observed...

The claim that quantum mechanics requires any ontology is a philosophical claim, not a physical one. All the physics is in the probabilities of measurement results following an initial state preparation, and that comes from the mathematical statement of the theory without assuming anything...

The quickest way to get someone to take a look is to report the thread, but now that I've seen this post from you I can take care of it.

Yes. Just about any system of multiple interacting particles will be entangled in some way. It’s more than “generally accepted”, it is true by definition: the meter is defined to be the distance that light travels in 1/299792458 seconds. Right, electrons do not move in orbits around the...

This works as an analogy, sort of. QM does indeed say that we have one quantum system here. It just so happens that our measuring devices are in different physical locations. But... does not work at all. When we push or pull one end of a rod, the other end does not move at the exact same...

Of course, and that's always been how we view it: the entangled pair is not two distinct particles, it is a single quantum system described by a single wave function. This is baked into the math of quantum mechanics, and one of the things that surprised classically trained physicists in the...

Further posts in this thread should be pointers to other level-appropriate sources of accurate information.

That's easy - the answer is "No". But why? You are conflating two unrelated concepts. The observed rotation of some galaxies leads to the hypothesis of dark matter, the observed increase of expansion is a completely different thing that leads to the completely unrelated dark energy hypothesis...

Something similar happens with waves in classical physics: the phase is determined by our choice of where we choose ##t=0##. I'm not sure how illuminating this correspondence is.

This thread has reached and passed the point of diminishing returns and will remain closed.

Who needs gravity? Check out "The Integral Trees" by Larry Niven.

It is Newsweek doing their best to describe what is going on in to a non-technical audience using non-technical math-free language.

That might be true if you're considering only the intro-level study of general relativity, but there's an enormous amount of active work in the astrophysics community. Searching for "neutron star" on arXiv just now brings up 22,638 papers, many/most in the astrophyics-HE (high energy) section.

You are conflating a bunch of different things here. Much of what you mention above (probability as squared amplitudes, role of decoherence, indifference to single outcome question, interaction with the measuring apparatus) is part of ordinary non-relativistic QM as well - although often...

you can, but you’re using the time dilation formula in the calculation…. and the derivation of that formula includes the assumption that the one-way speed of light is equal to the observed two-way speed. So the logic is unfixably circular.