Parallel universes

[jimmoyer]

...but quantum theory is so completely counter-intuitive that all metaphors and analogies ultimately fail, there's no way to grasp it except through the mathematics. And it still won't make sense.
-------------------------------------------Dexter Sinister--------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for the description of the double slit experiment giving rise to claims that particles
exist in two locations at the same time.

But despite your warning against analogy, I thought the best window into this non-intuitive world is that little book by the Dutch Mathematician Abbott, FLATLAND.

In particular I liked the example of the 3rd dimension being the same everywhere and so this dimension became invisible because of lack of contrast. All flatlander could see were two dimensions, the edges of things, width and length.

But when a sphere invaded their plane perpendicularly (such a word !!) all the flatlanders saw was a dot becoming a varying width with its edges receding.

They thought this was God.

But the sphere took one of the square flatlander citizens out of his plane of existence and simply
turned him perpendicular to his world and then moved him rapidly like a shutter camera so that this square could see his world 3-dimensionally...

Counter intuitive ? The square would have had a hard time understanding were it not for what the sphere (God in the Square's eyes) did for him.

 

[darkbeaver]

Schrodingers Cat was my last attempt at quantum mechanics. I started drinking heavily shortly thereafter.

 

[Niflmir]

...but quantum theory is so completely counter-intuitive that all metaphors and analogies ultimately fail, there's no way to grasp it except through the mathematics. And it still won't make sense.

Its not really counter intuitive at all. We are not born with intuition about how the world works. We develop it slowly. By the time you have grown to the point where someone presents you with the quantum description of the world, you have deep rooted assumptions about how things work due to past interactions with them. These assumptions are what you would call intuition.

I can ask all sorts of questions that don't make sense, that is essentially something like Russell's paradox. Once you understand what questions actually make sense, then you can understand what quantum mechanics can tell you. I don't really know what more sense something can make. It gives better predicting power than classical mechanics, so in a sense it makes more sense.

 

[jimmoyer]

Niflmir, that was me quoting Dexter Sinister.

Perhaps you're right to say intuition is just a misleading shorthand word for a set of assumptions you've long lived with.

But..
Regarding these matters, I prefer to state our puzzlement at these obscure matters as a problem between human size dimensions versus the very macro and very micro dimensions. When it gets too large or way too small, we enter a very unfamiliar world.

 

[triedit]

I think Im falling in love with Jim

 

[Niflmir]

I think Im falling in love with Jim

We were discussing multiple marriages elsewhere, perhaps you two should look into it.

I can show you some pretty phenomenal behaviour at the everyday scale. Laminar flow, oobleck, chaotic pendulums, heck even curve balls in baseball. All of these phenomena are highly non-intuitive but are perfectly described inside of Newtonian mechanics. Really, even a good gyroscope is enough to fascinate and confuse most people: conservation of angular momentum is just strange for most people.

 

[jimmoyer]

I think Im falling in love with Jim

---------------------------------------------triedit--------------------------------------------------------------


Obviously this is evidence of a parallel universe.



I've recently married in this universe, but it may well be I'm a polygamist in many universes. This might explain many incidents of confusion that assails me from time to time.

 

[Curiosity]

Too late Tried - Jim just got married! woo hoo - that's why he is an occasional poster these days I guess ....

Regarding soul, migration or unification, proof of parallel or other lifeforms, why would be privy to any of that knowledge when we are still at the tie-your-shoelaces stage of evolutionary matters.

Why would it be necessary for us to know anything for all of our scientific experiment and dreams and
fore'tells'....

At our rate of growth, we may never know or catch up to the possibilities of what exists beyond our conscious minds.

I guess we have to dream however - and search - and experiment - at least it gives those specialists a goal and task to master.

Having said that, I post among gods of brilliance and rumination.... and know my place as having contributed very little to this topic....as expected.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

...conservation of angular momentum is just strange for most people.

Yeah, one of my favourite demonstrations of it is to put someone on a chair that can rotate, like a standard office chair, then give him or her some fairly large object that can be made to rotate as well. I've done this with a bicycle wheel mounted on an axle about a metre long. Hold the axle vertically with the wheel at the top and get it rotating briskly--I used an electric drill with a little rubber drive wheel in the chuck for that--then tell them to turn the axle around so the wheel's on the bottom. Almost everybody is surprised by what happens; the only people who aren't are the ones who've worked through the physics of it. It makes the chair rotate, but only while the axle is in motion.

Yes Niflmir, I'm sure you knew that :smile:, but most people won't and I didn't want to leave them hanging. Anybody who uses power tools much has probably noticed the same effect. A drill's a bit small to get much of an effect, but I've certainly noticed it with a circular saw and a router. If you rotate them through any axis except the one the motor's spinning in, they'll try to twist out of your hand.

But we're getting a long way from parallel universes and the counter-intuitive nature of quantum theory. You're quite right that much of classical physics is pretty counter-intuitive too. It's certainly not obvious that apples falling from trees and the moon orbiting the earth are manifestations of the same aspect of reality, it took a transcendent genius like Newton to make the connection. But at least it's explicable in terms of everyday things. No such explanation is possible for quantum theory. The "everyday things" of quantum theory don't behave anything like the objects we're familiar with, and ideas like entanglement and superposition and collapsing state vectors just seem bizarre.