January 18, 2023
WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:
Quantum mystery: Do things only exist once we interact with them? (Marcelo Gleiser, 1/18/23, Big Think)
The German physicist Werner Heisenberg attributed this fuzziness to an inherent property of matter he described with what he called the Uncertainty Principle. Put simply, the principle states that we cannot pinpoint the position of an object with arbitrary precision. The more we try to ascertain where it is, the more elusive it becomes, as the uncertainty in its velocity increases. [...]The reason for the mystery is that the central equation of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, is different from the usual equations found in classical physics. When you want to compute the path a rock will follow when thrown, Newton's equation will describe how the position of the rock changes in time from its initial position to its final resting point. You would expect that the equation for the motion of an electron would also describe how its position changes in time. But it does no such thing.In fact, there is no electron in Schrödinger's equation at all. There is instead the electron's wave function. This is the quantum object that encapsulates fuzziness. By itself it does not even have a meaning. What does have meaning is its square value -- its absolute value, as it is a complex function. This value issues the probabilities that the electron may be found in this or that position in space when it is detected. The wave function is a superposition of possibilities. All possible paths leading to different outcomes are there. But once a measurement is made, only one position prevails.
First, an Observer...
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 18, 2023 1:00 PM
