What I am wondering about is what is energy exactly. I am sure that there is the formula, as expressed in physics. — Jack Cummins

We don't know what the inherent substance of energy is. What we know is E=mc2, and for @the mad fool E/c2=m. The c2 is a constant, so can be disregarded. We are left with E=m, which means Energy = mass, and only matter has mass. So energy is equal to matter. This has been well established and has resulted in the worlds nuclear arsenal.

I cant see how that can possibly be. A mind has to interpret reality. You need only to look at the variety of responses to questions asked in various threads. Or to look across cultures and through history , how differently people have interpreted it. If you are talking about the image we see as we look out at the world, then that is a function of DNA data, that is very similar in each of us - it varies only slightly - but some lack colour vision, have synesthesia, etc. A naive person looking at a forest sees something very different to an ecologist. As we look at something, we do so through a paradigm, based on our knowledge, and all that gets mixed into the vision, If that helps.

In the context, ‘recalling it’ is kind of the point.

minds operate through within a paradigm — Pop

OK call me pedantic….

We don't know what the inherent substance of energy is. — Pop

But...







(...no, Banno, don't... just leave it...)

(...no, Banno, don't... just leave it...) — Banno

Do tell?

The subsequent confirmation of 'Bell's inequalities' by the Alain Aspect experiments is generally regarded as decisive in favour of Bohr's interpretation over Einstein's. — Wayfarer

Care to unpack what you mean by this in a few sentences or paragraphs?

I agree. I am not a philosopher but Searle's routine involves defending realism. I would not be able to repeat it even if he told it to me himself.

A naive person looking at a forest sees something very different to an ecologist. As we look at something, we do so through a paradigm, based on our knowledge, and all that gets mixed into the vision, If that helps. — Pop

I understand the idea and it sounds alarmingly like common sense.

Well, ok, against my better judgement, ...didn't you say something abut everything being energy?

Well, it has philosophical significance. — Wayfarer

Oh definitely, for us, particularly as it presents a limit. Whatever else happens, we know the world must appear classical and coherent to us. This emergence might appear at the scale of a bacterium, or a cat, or a robot, but it definitely has to have occurred by us. Again, the role of the observer is important to the observer.

Einstein's moon, Schroedinger's cat, Wigner's friend... These all make similar complaints that the observer can't be special in any universal sense since there are clearly macroscopic processes involved in between the quantum mechanical system being measured and the observer doing the measuring where classical physics is meant to hold. I.e. they are arguments against an ontological interpretation of the wavefunction.

Bohr was a founder of the Copenhagen interpretation with its epistemic wavefunction, though this guy reckons he really believed in an ontic wavefunction:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33753316.pdf

If you believe in both the ontic wavefunction and collapse, you still can't escape the question of when collapse occurred. Was it the measuring apparatus, or the computer? Was it my lab assistant or me? Positing the human observer as the actual collapse mechanism seemed to me to betray the sort of anthrocentrism that has marred human enquiry forever.

If you believe in both the ontic wavefunction and collapse, you still can't escape the question of when collapse occurred. Was it the measuring apparatus, or the computer? Was it my lab assistant or me? Positing the human observer as the actual collapse mechanism seemed to me to betray the sort of anthro[po]centrism that has marred human enquiry forever. — Kenosha Kid

:100: :up:

The subsequent confirmation of 'Bell's inequalities' by the Alain Aspect experiments is generally regarded as decisive in favour of Bohr's interpretation over Einstein's.
— Wayfarer
Care to unpack what you mean by this in a few sentences or paragraphs? — 180 Proof

Sure. (This is from memory, I'm sure if I'm wrong KK will correct me. ) During Einstein's debates with Bohr, he came up with the EPR thought-experiment (Einstein, Podolsky, Rosenberg, or something.) This is because the implication of Schrodinger's equation seemed to be that particles widely separated in space remained 'entangled'. As the measurement of a particle determined its properties (i.e. spin), then determining the property of particle A caused an instantaneous correlated result in a remote particle B. The EPR thought experiment proposed that this was impossible as it seemed to imply propogation of information at faster than the speed of light, contradicting relativity.

John Bell was the one who figured out how to actually test this idea - in other words, make it a real experiment, rather than a thought experiment. This was through the measurement of the so-called 'Bell inequalities'. It's hard to describe but there's a clear explanation in the Jim Baggott video at the top of this thread.

Alain Aspect (and later Anton Zellinger) carried out the experiments which proved that 'Bell's inequalities are violated', thereby proving that Einstein's dreaded 'spooky action at a distance' happens in reality. In other words, you measure the spin of Particle A here, and that measurement instantly determines the spin of particle B there. And 'there' can be any distance away. But you can't say the spin of particle B was pre-determined - it isn't determined until a measurement is taken. It undermines local realism, i.e. that to change something, you have to physically affect it. There is no way a physical cause can propogate instaneously in that manner. That's what's spooky about it.

Positing the human observer as the actual collapse mechanism seemed to me to betray the sort of anthrocentrism that has marred human enquiry forever. — Kenosha Kid

What is 'marred forever' is the prospect of literal omniscience on the part of science. And that doesn't bother me in the least.

Anyway - I'd love your opinion on a question I posed on Physics Forum and Stack exchange about interpretation of the wave function.

Positing the human observer as the actual collapse mechanism seemed to me to betray the sort of anthrocentrism that has marred human enquiry forever. — Kenosha Kid

It suggests a just in time reality. A reality that occurs just as we collapse it. It would fit into an energy and information paradigm. But I think it will be a while before the world is ready for that. :smile:

Proving that QT is not incomplete as EPR suggested because entanglement can be measured in no way proves or "confirms" classical (i.e. deterministic) nonlocality.

Corollary: Many put this sort of surrealistic 'extrapolation' in their perennial puff pipes and blow woo-woo smoke rings up each other's observer-dependent arseholes; and yet, for all that, reality remains recalcitrantly observer-immiserating, y'know, "same as it' ever was" :death: :flower:

It suggests a just in time reality. — Pop

:up: We’re given some raw materials to assemble ‘on the fly’.

What is 'marred forever' is the prospect of literal omniscience on the part of science. And that doesn't bother me in the least. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure literal omniscience was ever an expectation. A complete set of laws is the ideal. I get your point though. When Gallileo rolls a ball down an inclined plane, he expects to be able to describe what happened from setup to measurement. It's not omniscience, but at least a solid grasp of what happened when on this particular occasion. Quantum mechanics rather trashes that, at least for now.

o

It suggests a just in time reality.
— Pop — Wayfarer

This would depend on an energy and information reality. Have you changed your mind about matter?

Not at all.

When Gallileo rolls a ball down an inclined plane, he expects to be able to describe what happened from setup to measurement. — Kenosha Kid

Galileo’s method leaves something out. It’s not that significant when it comes to calculating trajectories, but it becomes very important when science aspires to becoming truly universal.

This would depend on an energy and information reality. — Pop

What it depends is on is the ability of the human brain as a reality-generating organism.

↪Pop Not at all. — Wayfarer

:roll:

If collapse is true, then it is true for everything. This would mean naive realists would have to admit panpschism! :razz: It is the only way to maintain the paradigm if it is to remain coherent. Nothing could exist independently unless it was able to collapse a wavicle. The only time a wavicle can collapse is at a point of consciousness.

But you’re objectifying the wave-function. In reality, nothing ‘collapses’. That is simply the expectation that there should be something real there which collapses. But the wave function is simply a distribution of possibilities, which is actualised by measurement. You can’t say what is actualised. I think this was Bohr’s attitude.

Where this conflicts with realism is the belief that there’s an actual or real particle or entity which is measured. That is what quantum physics pulls the rug out from.

Hence the oft-commented convergence with Buddhism’s śūnyatā. ‘The world is not as it seems’, says the Buddha. ‘Nor is it otherwise.’ //or it might have been Alan Watts.//

But the wave function is simply a distribution of possibilities, — Wayfarer

representing a wavicle.

That might be a good name for a confectionary, but nothing more. It’s an attempt to come up with a name for something unknown. As such, best to avoid it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality

However there might be a different explanation If decoherence is correct.
12 mins long.

From which

It has been argued that there are never exact particles or waves, but only some compromise or intermediate between them. For this reason, in 1928 Arthur Eddington coined the name "wavicle" to describe the objects although it is not regularly used today.

The point is a very difficult one, and my knowledge of it amateur, so I’ll leave it there.

The point is a very difficult one, and my knowledge of it amateur, so I’ll leave it there. — Wayfarer

We can help each other out then. Physics is also my weakness.

I think we’ve both got bits of the elephant, but it’s a big elephant!

... when science aspires to becoming truly universal. — Wayfarer

When a toolkit aspires to ... I must have missed it: when did that happen? :roll:

Galileo’s method leaves something out. It’s not that significant when it comes to calculating trajectories, but it becomes very important when science aspires to becoming truly universal. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure what this means. Tbh I've been a bit lost as to what you're getting at since my comment that observation is important to the observer.