Recent content by wavering

This is still a great mystery, Einstein called it ""spooky action at a distance" But science and mathematics are full of concepts which at first cause great bafflement but in due course are just accepted. In the case of Quantum Mechanics this gave rise to the saying "Shut up and calculate". In...

The incompatibility between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity is one of the stumbling blocks in physics Is it possible that this problem is related to the phenomenon of emergence? For example, a traffic engineer can treat the movement of a large number of vehicles as the flow of a liquid. But at...

I spent a bit of time doing an analysis BEFORE I found this thread, this is what I came up wth: According to Wikipedia, the best power stations convert fuel to power at 60% efficiency whereas a car is nearer 40% efficiency. But of course, there are further losses from the power station to the...

That is precisely my point. They would examine the universe to assess where to go but even that is a herculean task and could take millions or billions of years and use huge resources That is exactly what I did earlier but in fact the numbers look worse. In a nutshell if there are super...

That assumes the Aliens who are not bound by the speed of light can somehow view every planet remotely. I would have assumed this would be very difficult and must have a cost associated with it. Let us suppose they could do this for .000001c ie one millionth of a US cent per planet considered...

Point taken. I will confine myself to analysis. There would seem to me to be two classes of Alien visitors - those who like us are restricted by the speed of light and those who have found a way round it Class 1 Aliens - Restricted by speed of light I have seen analyses that suggest there are...

Well, the guy did ask the question " ... has it visited Earth?". So I think that is a question to which the only answers must be speculative. As far as I am aware, there is no scientific evidence either way. Accordingly, you could look back through events recorded by historical commentators of...

Is there life in the universe? Well, the latest estimates I have read suggest that there are between 10^22 and 10^24 stars in the universe. That is such a staggeringly big number that even if only one star in a billion had life on one of its planets then there would be trillions of planets...

Thanks everybody for your help Here is a thought (doubtless not original - with 7,000,000,000 people in the World it is very difficult to have an original thought). If the entangled particles are a few hundred miles apart then given that there is no such thing as absolute time, if they are...

f95toli Many thanks for your two replies. I am genuinely seeking enlightenment here - I have no agenda to pedal. You wrote: Well, I have no problem with particle/wave duality or with 4D space-time continuum but I am struggling to understand what you mean here. Please don't take that as a...

Dr Chinese Thank you for your detailed response. I think that I lack the intellect to follow all the ins and outs and I suspect that trying to explain things in terms of "classical reality" is a mistake. Nevertheless, if it is possible to summarise the current state of thinking in layman's...

Dr Chinese has an admirable exposition of Bell's Inequality, here: http://www.drchinese.com/Bells_Theorem.htm From this it appears (and please correct me if I am wrong) that a pair of entangled particles each have opposite spin BUT this spin is NOT a hidden value waiting to be revealed by...

I need an external turntable that I can control automatically by a routine which I will write in either Visual Basic 6, C or Visual C++. So I need a suitable interface to do this It will sit on my balcony overlooking the sea and will have a couple of dome cameras mounted on it which will...

The question of "Observation" and "Measurement" seem to be covered by "Quantum Decoherence" so this may be the best word to use in searching eg see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence

I am glad you wrote that as I have read a lot of stuff that seems to give a special place to human consciousness in "Observing"! Would I be right in assuming that any deliberate or accidental circumstance that forces a particle to decide its location, momentum or spin would count as an...