RE: Neutrinos still travel faster than light
November 26, 2011 at 11:25 am
(This post was last modified: November 26, 2011 at 11:35 am by little_monkey.)
(November 26, 2011 at 12:45 am)apophenia Wrote:
Unfortunately, there are numerous assumptions about reality, intuitive judgements, which must simply be discarded, because some of our common sense notions become incoherent or downright invalid in QFT. This is very hard to do coming at it from a "PBS Nova" science popularization type angle, as it takes you out of a lazy Aristotlo-Newtonian consciousness into a world where these "funky notions" aren't just frill at the edges, they are the meat of the matter. Not sure how that can be approached from a pedagogical or popularization angle. The world, in a nutshell, simply does not work the way most people think it does. I wonder if it's a matter of not having evolved cognitions which can wrap around these ideas, or simply unlearning bad habits; I suspect more of the former than the latter.
It turns out that classical physics is just an approximation of QM. But our brain is not hard-wired for quantum mechanics, it evolved to understand classical physics -- forces, momentum, position, etc. -- and that's what we discovered first historically. To get any grap at QM, you need to do it with its mathematical formulation. Words just fail. Therefore explaining it to the average person, sans math, has too many pitfalls. I steer away from these as much as possible.
(November 26, 2011 at 11:03 am)IATIA Wrote: Nobody 'understands' quantum physics. There is math that describes actions, interactions and possibilities, but no one actually understands the particles and waves because they are what we measure. It cannot be a wave and a particle, but when we attempt to 'look' at a wave, we 'see' a particle. This wave/particle duality means there is a 'form' that we have yet to grasp or describe.Then there is "spooky action at a distance", which has yet to be explained within the confines of relativity. Any 'consensus' on QM relates to observations and predictions of results, but not to 'what' is actually being observed or measured.
There are three aspects of QM to bear in mind: 1) there's the data, 2) there's the theory to explain the data, and 3) there's the interpretations of the theory. Pretty much every physicist agrees on 1) and 2). It is in the interpretations that you will find great differences among physicists. But note that the great advancements in the field after the 1930's were done by those who steered clear of number 3.
EDIT: I'm going to get flack from the people in quantum computing/information.
