I think there are aspects of this that fall into the realm of philosophy.

I personally don't think we can ever have "The Truth" in that ultimate sense. Pretend for a minute that the SUVAT equations (the equations of motion) are completely accurate. I can drop a ball from a certain height and you can time it and we'll find to some degree of accuracy that the equations were right.

The ball and the floor didn't need to calculate anything. Whilst me and you sit there with a stopwatch technical manual, assorted tape measures to find the distance, expensive cameras to figure out when i dropped the ball..... Whilst we are tying down an uncertainty, the ball and floor have already done it.

When you get right down to it, we simply cannot know an exact time. We can never know an 'exact' anything, because now we need to discuss where the "ball" ends and where the "floor" begins on a molecular level. And no matter how much we agree, the uncertainty principle gets us in the end - we don't and can't know the exact location of fundamental particles. An "exact" anything ends up being a conceptual thing that we can't ever test.

But where i'm going with this is that we're kind of talking about the nature of understanding. We know the volume of a sphere if we know its radius, but how do we create the same sphere accurately? Our brains don't have a resolution, but the tools we use in reality do - reality itself quite possibly has a resolution. We think of minecraft as a blocky, low resolution simulation of an analogue reality. Similarly, i think maths is an 'analogue' (in that it can be "exact") simulation of a limited resolution reality - reality only looks analogue when you don't look very closely.

All that is to say, we DO understand the ball dropping and hitting the floor, but "exactness" is a thing that only exists in the act itself. The only thing left for us to decide is what we consider accurate enough.

Perhaps "god" wanted to know what would happen if he set off a big bang. He sat down, calculated it all out in the language of the gods (the language of perfection; maths) and realised that due to uncertainty, the only way to know exactly what would happen was for it to actually happen. (Douglas Adams?)

Except that you can't know all the properties of those atoms all at once. The Uncertainty Principle shows there is a fundamental limit to what we can know about particles. An exact replication would be impossible.

Now it would take a while longer to explain the implications, like wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle, but what do you expect from 60 seconds?

Degeneracy is really, really cool. It's all about squashing things into as tight a region of space as you can. It's an observable justification of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the Pauli exclusion principle (the one that says you can accurately measure the position or the velocity of an object but not both and the one that says that two neutrons -in this case- can't both occupy the same very small region of space).

To be a neutron star, the remnant core after an unstable giant blows its outer layers away has to be more massive than 1.44 solar masses, but anything bigger than about 2.5 solar masses probably becomes a black hole. On the less massive end you get white dwarfs which are prevented from shrinking any more by electron degeneracy pressure - electrons won't let the star get any denser. But if you throw more mass on it, even electron degeneracy pressure can't resist the gravitational force and you get a neutron star, supported by neutron degeneracy - the neutrons won't let the star get any denser now. And then finally more and more mass and it becomes a black hole, which is where even the neutron degeneracy pressure can't sustain the gravitational force.

I mean, that's fucking cool - there is so much gravitational force that the electrons have to team up with the protons to become neutrons, because neutrons can get slightly closer together. And then if the neutrons aren't happy, you've got a singularity which is a fancy way of saying we don't know what the hell just happened but stay away from it if you like being in the part of the physical universe that kinda makes sense to us.

There's also speculation of a quark degeneracy state beyond neutron degeneracy.

That has to be the most comprehensible explanation/demonstration of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle I've ever seen.

There are 2 ways to understand the uncertainty principle, and which ever one you are currently investigating is always the correct one.

>> ^messenger:

...I thought that it was an absolute fact that you cannot determine both the speed/direction and position of anything, no matter how it's measured by definition of the measurement of speed/direction requiring more than one position. That's to say, I'm under the impression that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has nothing to do with technology and will always be true under any conditions with any equipment in the areas where it applies, world without end, Amen. Am I wrong?

That is a combined 'yes' and 'no' answer.

Yes: Measuring exact values of electron is really hard. They don't even show up as precise values when we look at them, simply because they are so small and move so fast. We see that as a sort of 'smear'. (A Fourier transform.)

Heisenberg's equations for determining more precise values don't commute. (i.e. You cannot shuffle the variables around and still have it work.) This implies that it should be mathematically impossible to determine the velocity and position at the same instant.

No: Because all of the above is still based on the assumption that that our current method of measuring particles is all there is. If they could be measured more accurately or without adding energy to the system, the Uncertainty Principle should no longer be relevant.

Of course, science is pretty sure that's impossible. (Hell, they didn't even have that in Star Trek.) But we've proved ourselves wrong a lot of times in the past.

Soulmonarch, first, thanks for the excellent answers above. They were just enough for me to understand that something real was being measured and why I didn't understand the rest of the concept.

Now, you clearly know oodles more than I do about this stuff, but I thought that it was an absolute fact that you cannot determine both the speed/direction and position of anything, no matter how it's measured by definition of the measurement of speed/direction requiring more than one position. That's to say, I'm under the impression that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has nothing to do with technology and will always be true under any conditions with any equipment in the areas where it applies, world without end, Amen. Am I wrong?>> ^soulmonarch:

>> ^Payback:
When "they" talk about being able to see velocity or position, but not both... that's just a failure of technology right? There's not some weird universal law making it impossible?

You refer to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (The more accurately you measure a particle's position, the less accurate you are regarding momentum. And vice-versa.)
And yes, the problem is primarily technological. If someone ever invents a way to peer in and measure tiny particles without some kind of energy exchange with the particle (via light or electron scatter), the whole argument pretty much becomes a moot point.
And man would THAT ever screw with quantum physics.

>> ^Payback:

When "they" talk about being able to see velocity or position, but not both... that's just a failure of technology right? There's not some weird universal law making it impossible?


You refer to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (The more accurately you measure a particle's position, the less accurate you are regarding momentum. And vice-versa.)

And yes, the problem is primarily technological. If someone ever invents a way to peer in and measure tiny particles without some kind of energy exchange with the particle (via light or electron scatter), the whole argument pretty much becomes a moot point.

And man would THAT ever screw with quantum physics.

I think lots of people believe "high level science" consists of 3 or 4 ideas:

1. In Schrodinger's thought experiment, a cat in a box could be seen as both alive and dead until an observer collapses the waveform
2. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says you can't know both the exact position and momentum of a particle
3. General relativity states time slows and mass increases for objects at relative high velocity
4. Light's behavior exhibits a wave/particle duality, as demonstrated by interference experiments

Know those 4 things? Have you watched Star Wars once? Good, you're now equipped to understand pretty much all "oh wow that guy's a crazy brainiac nerd" humor. Somehow if you reference things like that, you get a pass to do a comedy routine without any jokes. You're stroking people's ego enough that they don't care you're not funny.

I think people would just get pissed off if he left the "nerd humor" script, though. People don't want to be challenged, or hear pop culture references they don't know. Anyone who's the tiniest, tiniest bit interested in Greek mythology knows Pandora opened a jar, not a box - but nobody wants to hear a joke involving Pandora's jar. They want the same reference that 1000 previous pop cultural references have prepared them for. They want affirmation that they're part of the special club that knows about stuff.

So, to do "nerd" humor the plan is to avoid anything actually nerdy. Stick to the most often recycled bits of pop culture and pop science, mix in some clumsy, senseless double entendres so that people know when to laugh, and you're good to go.

I wanted to say "uncertainty principle, we can never know where your atoms are" to him at the start.

I think i might have got a physics laugh.

I seem to read too much mathematical theory and then apply that to life...


Examples: Gödel's first theorem of incompleteness, Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle. Stew on it and get back to me.

Whilst I thought I understand the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, I'm not sure how it applies to whale populations, but clearly the Japanese are trying to prove that it does apply. In order to know the size and rate of increase of the whale population you must kill off the pregnant females. Or something. Presumably somewhere its possible to find out the scientific theory they're trying to prove by their research whaling, possibly some preliminary results too?

Unfortunately, i think this either went over my head, or i simply didn't see any real conviction towards an answer of "do we have free will in a morally relevant sense?"

So i almost feel like he has been telling me things that i knew were true (assuming determinism is true) and have decided or theorised these things independantly and on my own - but without giving me the information that he seems to be presenting as new. Which i believe is that we may have free will even under determinism in a morally relevant sense.

Free will in a morally relevant sense, in my head, is translated to "Are we responsible for our actions given a deterministic universe?" And the argument never seems to get into swing. I feel i have been presented with no new information or argument to sway my opinion.

But it may have gone over my head. When discussing or listening to things like these, i have no formal education on them, but i have thought about them in my own mind for as long as i can remember. This obviously leaves me behind on terminology and such.

I don't know if i should feel proud of myself that i was pondering all this when i was 6 years old. I used to ride a bike, and wonder whether God (i wasn't religious, God was simply my all-knowing observer with infinite calculating power) would know if i was going to turn left or right. And i would wiggle the handle bars but ultimately know that, if God DID know what i was going to do (ie. if the universe was deterministic) then he would even know that i was going to make an attempt to trick him. Not because he could see the future, but because he knew the culmination of all my life experiences and that this is the decision i would make. And i even used to argue with my sister that just because she could hit a target i couldn't didn't mean that she was better, because she may have had a favourable wind, or it was fractionally warmer than when i took the shot, etc.

Or was the purpose of this to make me ask the question "Am i morally responsible in a deterministic universe?"

I think i'm a little too tired to even get out what i want to say. I also want to know why we're to assume we're in a deterministic universe when the uncertainty principle shows us that we CANNOT accurately predict a future snapshot of the universe from a snapshot of it. And if we're to also assume that the uncertainty principle is determined (if you know the right variables), then why did he actually state that the snapshot example was proven to be false when he mentioned it!?

I'd love to discuss it, if anyone knows what happened here and has the patience.

"more likely" raises the question "when is it more likely?" or "is it more likely in some markets and less in others?" and those questions are constantly trying to be discovered by market researchers, who are always one step behind consumer opinion ... also they have the problem that people lie in market research tests, consciously and subconsciously.

i remain suspicious that however much you refine a model of economic activity, humans by their nature have this thing called (i guess) "fashion", which constantly fucks up the rules of what is and isn't economically viable. I think if you managed to somehow model fashion and use that model to sell stuff, the very nature of fashion would change, and your model would be broken.

it's like the uncertainty principle... you can know what a consumer wants but not when he wants it, or you can know when he wants it but not what it is