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What Was Happening Before the Big Bang?

newtboy says...

Many aspects of quantum mechanics are observational evidence (not proof) of somewhere outside our observable "universe". I gave an example. Matter springing out of nothing, and returning to nowhere are indicators of "somewhere" else....conservation of mass demands it.

Yes, that's one definition of the word, (edit: The Universe (Latin: universus) is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. There may be more than spacetime, or something that's not matter or energy, or something outside the limits of our expanding but finite "universe" .) ...that doesn't make the concept correct anymore than saying "God is omniscient" makes it true or proves God's existence.

If there is a universe, it contains all. That statement doesn't prove there is one, neither does our inability to prove it one way or the other....yet. "Universe" might turn out to be a narcissistic concept born of ignorance...we just don't know. Your opinion/best guess/assumption stated as unassailable fact shows me you aren't (being) particularly scientifically minded. You may be correct, but there's no way to know with our current understanding of physics.

robdot said:

There is no observational evidence for any multiverse. The universe is the totality of existence. The universe,contains all that exists. That is actually the definition of the universe.

Quantum Mechanics (Now with Added Ducks) - exurb1a

AeroMechanical says...

I dunno about that. There's lots of scientific evidence for quantum mechanics. It was disagreement between experimental results and theory which lead to the development of quantum mechanics in the first place. There have definitely been repeatable experiments demonstrating quantum entanglement, for instance.

String Theory, now, that's where you've got your unprovable assumptions. Whereas quantum mechanics at least has a big "we don't know why this is" hole in the middle, the string theory guys would just posit the existence of a bunch more dimensions to make the equations work.

Not that I actually understand the mathematics of any of it, mind you.

Spacedog79 said:

Quantum physics makes extraordinary claims and at the same time asks us to lower our standards of scientific rigour by accepting unprovable assumptions. You can have one or the other but never both.

Ricky Gervais And Colbert Go Head-To-Head On Religion

newtboy says...

No. To everything said.....no.
You need to learn way more about physics, theoretical physics, and quantum mechanics before asking and self answering questions that require a high level of understanding to answer.
You also need to realise, "I don't know" doesn't equal "God".

EDIT: Consider the circumstance you think He was in before creation, time, space, and energy (as we know it)....now just get rid of Him and you're there.

shinyblurry said:

Well, we can deduce the qualities of what is eternal by the fact that the Universe had a beginning. Since time matter space and energy had a beginning, it necessarily means that the cause of the Universe is timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful, and immaterial..already you have two of the primary attributes of God..omnipotence, and omnipresence. You can also deduce a few more from there.

Basically what I am saying is that God is a rational explanation for the existence of the Universe since He is better explanation for the evidence. It makes less sense for a Universe to spontaneously be caused by either nothing or something eternal without a mind behind it.

Smarter Every Day: The Walking Water Mystery

Is This What Quantum Mechanics Looks Like? - Veritasium

dannym3141 says...

To be fair, you were taught this in school if you were taught wave particle duality and the double slit experiment. Look at this. Now imagine a particle bouncing along in very small steps (quantum leaps if you will), and the direction it goes depends on the strength and orientation of the wave where it lands. You may never have been told to think about it like that, but that's what makes physics so amazing that sometimes all it takes is for someone to think about it slightly differently. The information was there all along, but who would imagine the 'particle' bit of an electron interacting with the 'wave' bit - the electron interacts with itself?

I absolutely love it, it's amazing, and simple and beautiful. It may provide insights into new ways we can model quantum behaviour, it might open up new questions to ask.

There's things I'd like to know. First, if the standing waves generated at each step in the droplet's progression interact with each other, the droplet is reacting according to waves it made in the past - what implications does that have for the notion of real particles in a spacetime continuum? For the double slits experiment to work in that model - in the ball on a rubber sheet sense - the sheet would have to stay warped to some extent after the ball had passed. In the quantum sense of the real double slits experiment, we would say it IS a wave, passes through both slits and appears according to statistical probability (the diffraction pattern).

Presumably several droplets released along the same path would go on to take a different route through the slits, to create a diffraction pattern as it must. Perhaps because of fluctuations in the temperature or density of the water at different locations? Is that a limitation of the model or an indicator about the nature of the fabric of spacetime? Perhaps even due to quantum fluctuations in the water particles - the water is never the same twice even if its perfectly still each time - which would potentially mean we're cyclically using quantum mechanics to explain quantum mechanics and we actually haven't explained very much.

The philosophy bit: But this reaches to the heart of the issue with quantum mechanics and perhaps science in general. How accurately can we model reality? The reality is beyond our ability to see, so we can only recreate simpler versions that are always wrong in some way... our idea of what happens - our models - can never be 100% because only a particle in spacetime can perfectly represent a particle in spacetime.

Scientific results and definitions are always defined with limits - "it works like this, within these confines, under these conditions, with these assumptions." There are always error margins. We are always only ever communicating an idea between different consciousnesses, and that idea will never be as true to life as life itself.

Sorry for the wall of text, it's a great and provocative experiment.

TheFreak said:

I hate quantum mechanics and the absurd implications that extrapolate from it. I always believed that one day we would look back and laugh at how wrong it was. Turns out a more reasonable competing theory has been there all along. Why was I not taught this in school.

I get that it's just another theory and that quantum mechanics can't be judged based on intuition that comes from our interaction with the macro world. Still...fuck quantum mechanics.

Is This What Quantum Mechanics Looks Like? - Veritasium

TheFreak says...

I hate quantum mechanics and the absurd implications that extrapolate from it. I always believed that one day we would look back and laugh at how wrong it was. Turns out a more reasonable competing theory has been there all along. Why was I not taught this in school.

I get that it's just another theory and that quantum mechanics can't be judged based on intuition that comes from our interaction with the macro world. Still...fuck quantum mechanics.

Are You Ready To Be Outpaced By Machines? Quantum Computing

moonsammy says...

I was hoping for more meat to his presentation, and was disappointed. I feel that he said absolutely nothing to help anyone in the audience understand what quantum computers actually DO or what sort of problems they'll help to solve. They'll absolutely not increase your FPS, as that's not what they're well-suited to do. What they are quite excellent at is taking a problem with many possible solutions and finding the correct (or best) one at an extremely high speed.

One example would be the Traveling Salesman problem. In brief, find the optimum route for traversing a number of points on a map. This is useful for things like scheduling package delivery routes, airline flights, etc. With a classic / current computer we write software that cleverly chugs through the possible solutions, throws out any that prove to be poor, and eventually gets to what appears to be the best or is at least a "good enough" solution. As the number of necessary points to be visited increases this problem scales in complexity quickly, so eventually a current computer would just choke on the problem and at best return an ok-ish solution in a reasonable period of time.

A quantum computer is a totally different beast. If it's "big" enough (IE, is comprised of a sufficient number of qubits), it takes the entire set of all possible solutions to the problem, and rather than iterate through them to find the best one, it checks them all simultaneously and immediately returns the optimum solution. It does this by using properties of quantum mechanics, and I think this is where the speaker was drawing his talk of parallel universes. If there are 3 qubits, they would exist as 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111 simultaneously. The software would then define what the best answer would look like, and the computer returns the answer.

You can hopefully see how this totally breaks encryption. With a current computer and a long enough encryption key, an encoded message would take the fastest machines a huge number of years to decipher. With a quantum computer you hand it a gibberish encrypted message, it loads all possible transformations of that message simultaneously, and it then returns the transformation which looks most like a coherent message.

I'm excited to see what these machines can do for us, but they're going to necessitate some significant structural changes in how we handle sensitive data.

Are You Ready To Be Outpaced By Machines? Quantum Computing

Payback says...

The more I listen to quantum mechanics the more it sounds like religious nuts. "Oh, we don't know what the qubit is, so that means it's everything, and like 4 or 5 parallel universes too!" it's perpetual motion machines all over again.

Teenager wins $400,000 for video explaining Relativity

spawnflagger says...

I liked the video too, but when he got to this part of the explanation, I wondered why I never heard it before.

Also remember that Einstein came up with special theory of relativity without the advent of quantum mechanics (btw, he didn't like Q.M. and couldn't believe that "God rolls the dice", and was later proven wrong (decades after he died though)).

dannym3141 said:

My only criticism - and some youtubers have already pointed this out - is that the explanation of time dilation "..the same bodily change that happens on earth takes much longer to occur when you are moving so fast.." is wrong.

Teenager wins $400,000 for video explaining Relativity

dannym3141 says...

This is an excellent explanation for someone of his age and his skill with video editing obviously helps a lot. It held my interest, the world needs more entertaining and educating videos like these.

My only criticism - and some youtubers have already pointed this out - is that the explanation of time dilation "..the same bodily change that happens on earth takes much longer to occur when you are moving so fast.." is wrong.

Signals sent within the body can be analogous to a clock - any fixed duration measured between two ~lightspeed reference frames will be different, including seconds measured by an atomic clock - but time dilation specifically has nothing to do with the mechanics behind how you measure the time or the time it takes a signal to travel. It's a property of the nature of spacetime. Time itself actually slows down. There's no 'trick' to understanding how or why, it's just a property that it has. We can forgive him because he'd already demonstrated that physics is the same in any inertial reference frame and there is no "preferential" reference frame; therefore the motion of the reference frame can't be responsible for the observed difference, so he obviously already really knew all this.

There's no shame in getting that wrong, because he'll be taught more and better about it as he progresses through school. Generally the arbitrary subjects are the hardest to live with because you just have to accept them as they are rather than 'understand'. Quantum mechanics is the same - you just have to accept the rules and apply the maths. Everyone struggles with it, even Feynman said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

How to DMT

newtboy says...

Yes, my teenage years were irresponsible, and a main reason I often chime in to suggest at least having serious knowledge about what you're doing and safety precautions before going this route.

Yes, because it is different for different people, and even different for the same person dependent on their mindset when they take it, it's impossible to be totally 'safe' when taking it, even with full knowledge. You can't know for sure how it will react with you, or how you'll react to it until it's too late.

Making your own, if you're a decent chemist, at least gives you a good idea of WHAT you're taking, but without spectral analysis, you can't know the strength of the psychoactives for certain. Also, that probably leaves you open to more legal trouble for manufacturing a schedule 1 narcotic...more reason to not go in public and take it and get caught.

The fear is that, when someone is having a bad trip, they aren't likely to think straight enough to take something to counter act the effects...even if they're smart enough to have that handy. Unfortunately, a clinical setting is probably also not conducive to a great experience, so 'under a doctor's supervision' isn't really totally helpful or practical.

The quantum mechanics part can be understood, he seemed to have just miss-stated/miss-understood what the experiment was about in his wish to find some science that explains his experience, which may not be understandable.

How to DMT

shagen454 says...

We arrive at the same conversation, have you actually done it? I seem to remember you saying that you did something but you did not even know what it was but you *thought* it was DMT. That is horrendously irresponsible - and I feel for you, for real

No one can say anything about this experience until they have done it. Just like ayahuasca that contains DMT - I did it for the first time a couple of months ago and it was nothing like smoked DMT, I could hardly tell they were similar substances. Except, it taught me what I was supposed to know and not what I anticipated - and yes, I would say it was awesome/scary but I was able to deal. Some people lost their shit, but that is also a part of the experience, for experience, for personal growth.

Which leads into - it can be a black market drug but that is exactly why he suggested - research and extract your own. The government can not make DMT plants completely illegal because those plants are everywhere, so this is a "drug" that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going away - or at least until the Earth goes through some sort of cataclysm. I'm pretty sure nature had a reason for it being so prevalent throughout it.

DMT is not dangerous. If you have a bad episode make sure you have a benzo on hand. But, if you are a studious psychedelic user you would already know this.

As to quantum mechanics and shit - yeah he probably should have stopped there. It's beyond anything anyone could possibly imagine so what's the point in describing something no one understands and can only be experienced at this point? Well, at least I've learned that trying to describe it to closed-minded manimals

Just for good measure though - I would say that, yes it is indeed more extreme than anything else you're likely to experience while you're alive. So, be fucking careful and do lot's of research.

newtboy said:

The best way to reduce risk from taking, or getting caught with DMT is to not do it.

What is Dark Energy and Dark Matter?

Stormsinger says...

I had a theory too, that our theory of gravity is just wrong, at least at extreme scales. In other words, the law of gravity is still at the Newtonian motion stage, it's close enough for day-to-day and mid-range observations, but fails to provide accurate predictions at larger (and smaller) scales. This also explains why quantum mechanics and gravitation theory still have not been reconciled.

There is no observational evidence of dark matter (or dark energy) for that matter. They are the equivalent of fudge-factors...no, not the equivalent, they -are- fudge-factors, created out of thin air to try and make the numbers add up to the observations.

The Secrets of Quantum Physics - Einstein's Nightmare

speechless says...

I thought it was presented pretty well as an overview of the concept. It's a BBC doc, not a course at a university.

Is this a field of study for you? I'm curious to hear what exactly you think was wrong. I'm not a fan of quantum mechanics in general either btw.

Spacedog79 said:

He talks in unjustifiably certain terms about a lot of theses things. Science is not religion, the experiments are very imperfect and the interpretations are still all debated. He does qualify his statements a bit but we still have infinitely more to learn than we know now, we cannot make conclusions yet.

kulpims (Member Profile)



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