Do you "believe in Quantum Mechanics"?

[autogyro]

Science and theories/models stemming from it, are not a beuty-contest, something where you can pick and choose to your liking.

But we live in a free society, why we have the Lyndon LaRouches, White Arian militias and whatever self-appointed geniouses who claim to have proof that man lived together with T-Rex once upon a time.

Ehhhh, what?

[xpensive]

Wake up to the www, gyro;

http://www.squidoo.com/evolutionism-is-a-lie

[autogyro]

What has evolutionism got to do with it?
I do not think you grasp it xpensive.
No offence meant.

[Miguel]

What has evolutionism got to do with it?
I do not think you grasp it xpensive.
No offence meant.

I don't, either. Because so far all your posts seem to do is saying that science is a religion. I asked you why you think it is so, but I'm still waiting for an answer.

[Just_a_fan]

which is why science can be described as a religion. It is the most powerful source of human manipulation ever seen.
However just like all other religions, science also tries to tell the truth and gives its followers a path to follow in their natural human demand for answers.

Most of the time it fails miserably like all religions.
Simply put they are all crutches for human fears and vulnerability.

No science says "we think this is what is going on in this situation". Later on someone comes along with contrary evidence and says "I think this is what is going on and here's my evidence" and everyone looks at it and say "hmmm, nice evidence" or "hmmm, bad evidence" and all goes on from there.

Religion says "this is the truth" and if someone says "what about this?" they get answered with a stoning or burning or ex-communicaton etc. See the difference.

[Just_a_fan]

It is clear that the world/universe around us was Created in a beautiful balance, not something that randomly came together. To deny that is to deny your own existance.

Thank you. You have illustrated my point beautifully.

I don't deny my existence by being happy to accept that my existence is just happenstance.

I don't deny my existence by accepting that I don't matter to the Universe.

I don't deny my existence by not needing to feel that my existencce is important to anyone other than me. You might need to feel that you are here because something made you for a purpose. Fine - your purpose is to pass on your genes. Is that enough for you or do you need the existence of some mystical being to give your existence purpose?

[autogyro]

which is why science can be described as a religion. It is the most powerful source of human manipulation ever seen.
However just like all other religions, science also tries to tell the truth and gives its followers a path to follow in their natural human demand for answers.

Most of the time it fails miserably like all religions.
Simply put they are all crutches for human fears and vulnerability.

No science says "we think this is what is going on in this situation". Later on someone comes along with contrary evidence and says "I think this is what is going on and here's my evidence" and everyone looks at it and say "hmmm, nice evidence" or "hmmm, bad evidence" and all goes on from there.

Religion says "this is the truth" and if someone says "what about this?" they get answered with a stoning or burning or ex-communicaton etc. See the difference.

There is no difference at all.
You are simply trying to justify the human suffering produced from science with you own personaly biased theology.
Learning to think outside the box is the secret. Something also needed to win in F1 and something that has been dieing slowly with the passage of time and the so called progress of modern science. It can be seen in the modern politicaly correct way of work and the decline in the teaching of common sense.

[autogyro]

It is clear that the world/universe around us was Created in a beautiful balance, not something that randomly came together. To deny that is to deny your own existance.

Thank you. You have illustrated my point beautifully.

I don't deny my existence by being happy to accept that my existence is just happenstance.

I don't deny my existence by accepting that I don't matter to the Universe.

I don't deny my existence by not needing to feel that my existencce is important to anyone other than me. You might need to feel that you are here because something made you for a purpose. Fine - your purpose is to pass on your genes. Is that enough for you or do you need the existence of some mystical being to give your existence purpose?

Hmmm Mystical being, do they teach that in Quantum Mechanics?

[Jersey Tom]

Believe it? It's not something to be believed or disbelieved. It's a model. So far, works the best.

[autogyro]

Who defines the model and from what base of authority?

[Miguel]

Who defines the model and from what base of authority?

This is science. It does not matter who defines it. His authority does not matter. The only things that matter are:

• QM describes well the known experiments
• Predictions made in novel experiments by QM have turned out to be true (EDIT: within the experimental and theoretical error)

Actually, this is the beauty of science. When Wegener proposed his tectonic plate theory he was a "nobody". Actually he got his idea basically because South America fits into Africa. Well, in the beginning nobody believed him. After a while, evidence was found that this is how earth actually evolved.

As another example, Brian Josephson won the Nobel in physics for his PhD thesis. After that, he decided to study psychics (no, no spelling mistake) and telekinesis and the powers of the mind. Does that invalidate his work on superconductivity? No.

@Jersey Tom,

I wouldn't really go as far as calling QM a model. Some people call the Standard Model a model because the masses of the particles are parameters we put. But the basics of quantum theories, like what is an observable or what we can actually measure, that's a very well tested set of hypotheses.

[autogyro]

Who defines the model and from what base of authority?

This is science. It does not matter who defines it. His authority does not matter. The only things that matter are:

• QM describes well the known experiments
• Predictions made in novel experiments by QM have turned out to be true (EDIT: within the experimental and theoretical error)

Actually, this is the beauty of science. When Wegener proposed his tectonic plate theory he was a "nobody". Actually he got his idea basically because South America fits into Africa. Well, in the beginning nobody believed him. After a while, evidence was found that this is how earth actually evolved.

As another example, Brian Josephson won the Nobel in physics for his PhD thesis. After that, he decided to study psychics (no, no spelling mistake) and telekinesis and the powers of the mind. Does that invalidate his work on superconductivity? No.

@Jersey Tom,

I wouldn't really go as far as calling QM a model. Some people call the Standard Model a model because the masses of the particles are parameters we put. But the basics of quantum theories, like what is an observable or what we can actually measure, that's a very well tested set of hypotheses.

So QM defines itself and this science states that the results of experiments are true.

Interesting but flawed. A bit like the Catholic religion then?

[Miguel]

So QM defines itself and this science states that the results of experiments are true.

Interesting but flawed. A bit like the Catholic religion then?

First of all, I think you mean Roman Catholic Cristian. May I also add "apostolic"?.

But back to QM, no. Here we are in the beginning of the 20th century. Although classical physics has been incredibly successful, there appear to be some breaches. These are the black body radiation, the photoelectric effect and the absorption/emission spectra by atoms. If one applied straightforwardly the known physics at the time to black body radiation, he would find out that we apparently receive an infinite amount of ultraviolet radiations from radiating bodies. This contradicts experimental evidence, so classical physics are wrong.

In order to explain those facts, you need to assume that light (a very controversial matter since Newton's times) is not only a wave, but also a particle. In order to explain the third one, plus the Compton effect, you have to assume the opposite for the electrons (only found in 1898). The thingie about spins and discrete levels is stirred up in the 1920's with the Stern-Gerlach experiment.

So after the first 20 years of the XX century, some experiments have torn down the infinite confidence we had on classical physics, and in the next 20 years a few very bright men set the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, a very funny theory in its own.

Are we set? No. By the 1930's, we can prove mathematically that Quantum Mechanics, which applies at small scale, produces Classical Mechanics on a large scale. This is good. Some people, however, are really uneasy, so they propose alternates, or a couple of tests. It is not belief, but experiment, that has seen QM withstand those tests. They might as well have favoured other theory. Please note that someone like Einstein was a QM skeptic, and he proposed a paradox and a couple of tests. QM has passed those tests. Had they failed, we would have had to come up with a better candidate.

We're now in the 1940's. Some people didn't really like how time and space are treated differently in QM, while special relativity tells us they should be the same. So we adapt special relativity and QM, and the result is Quantum Field Theory. This theory isn't too nice, since the maths are really complex and we have to treat everything using perturbation theory (math tricks). To add insult to injury, when we do this we see infinities everywhere, which require further maths to remove them (Renormalization Groups, to those that are still following). However, the result is that we can predict theoretically the electron's g-factor, which happens to be something we can accurately measure.

So on one hand we have the measurement of something that should be 2, but it happens to deviate slightly. On the other hand, electromagnetism plus quantum mechanics plus special relativity predict that, indeed that something is not really 2, but something else. Well, today, experiment and theory agree to the 12th significant figure. The 12th.

Fast forward to 2009. Maybe you've heard of the "strong nuclear interaction". Well, we know its symmetry characteristics, and we know that, if we were able to treat it properly at low energies, we could obtain the mass of a proton. The computers have made this possible, and the result is, well, the mass of the proton.

Meanwhile, QM has been a pretty nice tool to explain superfluidity, normal superconductivity (High-Tc is still a mystery, as is collosal magnetorresistance), the properties of solids (electrical, structural, or even melting curves) and nifty little things like Bose-Einstein condensates and fractional quantum Hall effect.

Finally, let me add one more thing to this long post. You don't have to believe this. All you need is the money and knowledge to build some experimental apparatus and measure things by yourself.

In science, something that cannot be replicated cannot be accepted as true. If QM stands where it does today is because many people repeated experiments trying to find a breach, or a misshap, or a failure. The people that repeated the famous experiments got the same thing.

PS: When someone publishes "A produces B" and the other researchers can't replicate this, the original researcher is taken for a fraud.

[Belatti]

Miguel, you should better waste your time partying and drinking in the name of Spain World Football Champion than to speaking to a deaf stone.

If I was a scientist I would thoerize Autogyro doesnt read/understand/reason other people posts and just try to convince everybody he is a super-clever I-figured-it-all-out guy. I would call this "Autogyro´s spirit of contradiction theory" and I would probably win the Nobel Price, given all the evidence to back up my theory in this forum.

[Ciro Pabón]

Oh, well. It turned into a "science is another religion" argument. As this thread has moved (thanks to extreme trolling by autogyro, when defeated in a clean argument... as usual) into a very different one than the one about quantum mechanics (or relativity, for the love of Pete), let's take, head on, the new target that other members's vanity takes us to and try to blend it all.

You know me: my usual way to "detrollificate" threads is by simple, sheer intellectual argument, twisting them back, trying to make my post, sincerely, an answer to its original question and "diluting" the trolling that could exist in between, instead of being upset by other people that doesn't think like me. I won't defend complex ideas, as Miguel tries to do. I attack simple ideas: after all, I live in Colombia and you know colombians.

So:

How sad to read that: "science is another religion". Probably Mr. Autogyro waits for me to rant and rave against religion, to deny its validity (given the public fact of my atheism... ).

Well, one of my favorite readings is religion. I love religious texts and I love everything written about it. I also love science: there is no end in it for me. So, I think that comparing one to the other is demeaning for religion.

Religion is fundamentally different from science. Religion reaches a realm science cannot fill. Attending to its etymology religion (re-ligare or re-link) is something you use to relink human beings to their soul when they are lost.

Religion is much, but much, much older than science. It can be 30.000 (perhaps 100.000) years old. Religion is based on extremely solid knowledge about how the human mind works. Well, I shouldn't talk about "mind": religion includes feelings, emotions, fears, expectations, sensations. In short: your very soul. Let me tell you: it's not psychiatry. It encompass the whole human experience of being, right here, right now.

Religion is a guidance that helps most human beings to grow into adults. All the myths and tales of religion, from the ones of our fairy tales to the ones present in the mass are devoted to YOU. Your whole you, if I'm allowed to put it that way.

If you want to learn about religion, you have to read and try to understand it, in the very same way that I advocate to try to understand quantum mechanics.

Let me share something with the forum. In the very same way I had an epiphany the day I finally understood that "particles ain't matter" (I mean, as Xpensive understood, they aren't tiny billiard balls, as I said before: on the contrary, "matter is particles") I had a very similar epiphany the day I read these words in Joseph Cambell's famous work "The hero with a thousand faces", words I've already mentioned in this forum:

"Freud, Jung and their followers have demonstrated irrefutably that the logic, the heroes, and the deeds of myth survive into modern times. In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream. The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change."



And that's why I think autogyro is wrong again. It's insulting for religious people (and for the ones like me, atheists that call religion a myth, but understand its potency) to compare religion with science. It's insulting for religion.

After all, science "only" tries to understand the Universe. Religion is about everything, and the Universe is just a part of everything, as anyone with a heart that beats and suffers and joys and feels knows very well.

So, if I understand well, some posts affirm (or imply) that science is not valid because is a new religion, based on belief. Paraphrasing Miguel, he believes that quantum physics works better than newtonian, period, that's a simple concept to grasp. He has worked is butt off on it, well, let's hear him (and his colleagues). How? Read them.

Posts that try to muddle this very reasonable concept with religion are stupid (no disrespect intended). Worse, those posts are based on bad engineering: this approach ("everything is relative", "you only have faith on science") takes you to make mistakes, and, as I said before, when I talked about the ethics code and the engineering license you have on your pocket, that's a borderline criminal attitude.

There are no shortcuts: if you want to appreciate religion in its proper dimension, surely you can use the help of other people. You have to read what they've wrote, from the Bible to the Upanishads to the The Golden Bough and try to build on top of that. In the very same way, to criticize quantum mechanics (as Miguel does) you have to work on it.



There are no shortcuts, not even for those that believe in God. Those believers have the more tortuous way, if you ask me, but its their way: I would never dare to claim it doesn't exist, as some say about atheism.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein immortally said: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

So, having settled that, to try to answer Miguel question, I say: no, most engineers do not read anything beyond basic concepts of quantum mechanics. However, many of them read on when they grow old. Some doesn't...

Now, guys, I leave you: my ass is painted red and yellow, today I'm more madrileño than ever. I have to have a Rioja. Thanks, Belatti (you know I supported Argentina, but this alternative champion has my approval!! Did you see Shakira?). Spain, world champion. People, you have a very happy mod today.