According to Feynman's QED, there's no such thing as "wave-particle duality", it's just all particles. The behavior of the particles, however, is very strange, and that's what accounts for their wave-like characteristics. QED came after Dirac and Schrodinger (it was a refinement of their theories), so I'm not sure why it doesn't get acknowledged in these kinds of discussions.

QED also predicts exactly the results of things like the double slit experiment without ever resorting to the "well the wave collapses into a particle when we observer it" kind of thing.

The Duality of this video surmises the way I feel when I read kronosposeidon talking about this sort of subject. The baby whining and the dog Whining.

>> ^MycroftHomlz:

As a physicist, I am utterly confused how quantum mechanics plays a role in determining random differences between humans. I think probably chaos is more at work here.
It seems like the rest is conjecture. Even twins sometimes turn out very different. I highly doubt that two people with different genetics when subjected to the same environment and conditioning will arrive at the same end state. There are just way too many variables to assume that that is always true.
>> ^kceaton1:
...True, free will has and will always be an utter joke. People claim they would not do something in someone else's shoes, but if you impose the same biology and conditions--YOU WILL do EXACTLY the same thing (except for random quantum mechanical variations). In fact when it is said and done your mind will be indistinguishable from theirs...



Well to be honest when I wrote "quantum mechanical fluctuations" I'm talking about extremely small scale instances that get "measured" slightly differently (I explain a tad further down below). As particles have a pesky nature of doing two things at once or being measured somewhere else than expected or acting different than expected--it's even been shown to a limited degree that quantum mechanical effects like the dual slit experiment, entanglement, and superposition/duality may have some large scale implications (large scale meaning, the size of a few atoms or a molecule). Anything that would have large scale influences would have to be akin to "The Butterfly Effect". Repeating an event over ,as far as we know, can't be done "perfectly". Hence, the only reason I said fluctuations--yes, folks they would "most likely" be incredibly negligible. Give it 10 billion years then we might have something to talk about (like the small-scale setup at the big bang basically determining the layout and setup of the Universe as we see it now).

Second, what I mean by "wearing someone else's shoes", is to show that that this line of reasoning is impossible as we understand physics and neurology. In my opinion it also shows a very large lack of empathy or understanding in someone. At the least they do not have a good grasp of multiple subjects and how they interrelate; especially concerning the sciences.

I'm saying we would take whatever constitutes "the soul" and stick it in the baby. From my understanding and point of view, as I don't believe in a magical source of self that exists at any level. This would mean, literally nothing changes. Then let things go from there; this really is a time-travel experiment. This is a ludicrous idea. Experience and time, what we face and our decisions, our neurons and their connections and the chemical composition and topography of the brain IS our soul. If you switched places, you WILL be that person; as you don't exist. In your example the other twin would have to literally occupy the exact time and space as her twin--which can't happen; it's untestable. It's a thought experiment. Quantum mechanics would by definition require some changes to occur if "the test" is possible to be created by us--we would change things by interfering in any way.

Only someone religious could ever find a separate or different answer.

I'm talking of a literally switch not a philosophical attributed example (like religion) or a biological test and study of nature/nurture. It is ludicrous, as everything we know about our psyche shows that we experience reality as a type of delusion (practically the only way to describe our reality, psychologically speaking) which can be changed by a great many factors (your biology, drugs, or any interaction). When we communicate to each other (and this is what makes humans so important on Earth and different) we are able to communicate and describe across that sensory and brain created "delusional" void. What can and does get across IS also immense: our experiences, our own point-of-view, our senses, our own delusion. Then we can compare and make a determination of what constitutes reality by ourselves or in a group. Even if someone is high or I should say using anything that will change perception or alter senses, they/we can tell that there is a change through internal logic and experience a new "delusion" or perception. Some religions see this as a way to communicate divinely or likewise; i.e. examples like Native Americans and peyote. It's THE supreme attribute and ability we have as humans as well as "old world" monkeys. They seem to also, "possibly" grasp this "void" and how that barrier can be crossed too. A VERY limited version of ours, however.

We have found ape fossils that suggest that there may've been apes in the past that had I.Q.s in the 300 range. But, without the ability to teach each other, in a very complex manner, they were useless and died off. The fact we can retain old knowledge and teach and re-teach, write it down, save it to a drive, etcetera is the reason why we prosper with a smaller I.Q..

I hope that's much clearer. Or at the least helps. Some is meant for general consumption by others.

/One thing. If you're a physicist as you say, please tell me you don't think "chaos theory" or something akin to it, works on any other level than "maybe" (as we don't know yet) the quantum mechanical level. Everything that is bigger than a particle has very straightforward understandings. Otherwise, we'd have nuclear reactors blowing up everywhere, planes falling out of the sky, etc... Even people would start doing things "for no reason" except: well chaos theory made me do it. If you're talking merely about small-scale interactions still bigger than an atom, then still if you had the detectors, math, and "layout" ready beforehand you'd be able to "predict" an amazing array of things.

The only reason it seems chaotic is sensory and theory deprivation. The main forces of physics (weak/strong/electromagnetism/gravity/pluswhatwefind) describe actions very well. Especially, when we build it.

//Sorry, I think that may be a little too adversarial, but chaos to me is just a lack of "x"--whatever your dealing with.
///Lastly, (a bit more about above) the brain is amazing, but I definitely know I do not even come remotely close to being able to claim I've made a choice due to free-will; modern psychology is starting to understand that this is a fallacy of perception--The Matrix got one thing very right (as much as I hated the second and third shows, THIS was a great line that bears repeating and understanding): It's not the choices that we make that should surprise us, it's why we made the choice in the first place. Free-will is used best with LOTS of pre-planning and thinking ahead; most choices are made for you already. Understanding the way the human brain is doing the stuff it's doing is showing us that "WE" or "ourselves" have a great ability to take horrifically misunderstood or saved-sensory information and make it fit what we want it to fit. It's our rational ability that is the amazing and saving grace for us, or we would ALL be truly mad and lost in our own delusional worlds--each person seeing the world immensely different; like people with illnesses/on drugs/ or having a true mental illness do.

It should be noted that other people can also act like drugs, illnesses, senses, and other type affects on you. Hence, religions do very well at self sustaining belief and manipulation; this goes for all group-think.

A bit long, but this is a subject that I'm impassioned about and I do hope some take it to heart and understand it's implications and ramifications as they're far reaching. It has brought me great peace to know I found some truth in this life. I also have peace in what I would say is my spiritual health (psyche, but more general--including memories and thinking). Losing faith with nothing to use is an extremely disheartening event; I know. Science and understanding helped me transition immensely. I know many others that did not have this to use; I'm not kidding when I say that all sciences and math comes to me easily--many I know don't have this ability. It caused me to fight lies, fear, misunderstandings, and ignorance with patience and the ability to never give up. Truth has one great quality in that it is a lot like water. It finds every nook and cranny on a rock. It goes everywhere and ultimately will collapse and destroy anything that isn't waterproofed and all it needs is time. Ideas are the same, but truth is like water. If you find someone that is willing to at least ask a question of you, that is the half way point. Point them in the right direction and time will cause the change, but they must be curious, steadfast, and ready to question the questions.

Adults are the most lost. With my understanding of the human mind it makes perfect sense why they are the hardest to change. It may eventually be shown that it's impossible to reach everyone, physiological and psychologically speaking. Their own neural pathways and memories literally make it impossible for them to make that change or escape their own delusion, their current mind/brain has no way physically to do it--maybe with drugs or surgery--extreme, I know, but this also goes for chronic depression, mania, and SO MANY other type of conditions.

/Wow, that covered a lot of ground--heavily edited in a few spots for better clarification or expansion of a notion that needed some meat to be understood correctly. Tom Cruise is a moron who may be like what I said in the last point (unfortunately). I hope this is more informative than derisive as some points will be no matter what.

WARNING: Meant to be long and informative.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

No, he is nearly making the subtle, but logical distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. Have had this conversation here a lot on the sift. The experience of blue is a very different one than the wavelength of 475 nm (which corresponds to blue for most people). "Light" is a subjective experience not related to real properties of photons. Photons appear bright because through the course of a billion years of evolution, interrupting photons as light, and their corresponding wavelengths as colors has better aided that animal that interrupting them as something else. But that says nothing about photons themselves, only the way in which minds are translating reality.
It is the distinction between Empiricism and Intellectualism. One believing that it takes senses to understand truth, the other, that only the power of pure reason can lead knowledge. I, for one, am mostly under the school of intellectualism as it pertains to epistemology. I trust the power of reason and logic to find truth, not eyeballs and olfactories.

No, the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon would more properly apply to colours than to light itself, which was proven by Newton to be a particle (or at least particule-like, and then later a dual particle-wave thingy of course). His conclusions were accepted by Kant, who redefined the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon to not contradict Newton's findings. Goethe disagreed with Kant and Newton, but he was a fool. He thought light and colour were the same thing thus he failed. Schopenhauer rectified Goethe's theory to apply only to the perception of colour but Goethe wouldn't have it thus he failed again and it was up to psychologists to prove Schopenhauer was actually right in a limited sense.

Your distinction of empiricism and intellectualism is also very naive. As far as we know, the only way you can prove the factuality of your knowledge is through experience. That's why modern science works and idle speculation (like most Ancient Greeks did) does not. Being an empiricist doesn't mean you "trust your eyeballs", quite the contrary in fact. That's why David Hume talks a lot of the required skepticism needed to know nature from one's senses. If we could see things as they are (as noumenon), then we would not need our senses nor our reason to interpret what they sense (the phenomenon). That's in fact the basic premise of Kant's whole Critic of Pure Reason. His solution, in a word, was to view reason as recreating it's own idea, in the original Greek sense of "form", of the original noumenon (the thing-in-itself) by interpreting the filtered sense data of phenomenon that passed through the categories of understanding (like substance, causality, etc.). Some call his solution a form psychologism and I think they are right, but Kant certainly didn't think so. In fact, I think it's not psychologistic enough, though one must be wary of going as far as to try founding everything on psychology, a circular dead end if there was one.

Ultimately, it comes to the question of what kind of knowledge you want: absolute knowledge or human knowledge? I purport absolute knowledge is unknowable (irreducible) to human knowledge in the same way the noumenon is irreducible to the phenomenon, not only by its own definition but by the very way knowledge works (at least for us, meaning in a subject-object duality where the subject cannot simply copy the object it wants to know but must make an inherently reduced image of it, i.e. an idea). I think this problem to be related to the P=NP conundrum. Only if P=NP can we ever hope to achieve absolute knowledge and then that is not even guaranteed (we would need to evolve somehow to transcend the P and NP divide which factually exists in our present human knowledge). As Scott Aaronson of the MIT puts it, "If P=NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in “creative leaps,” no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it’s found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett. It’s possible to put the point in Darwinian terms: if this is the sort of universe we inhabited, why wouldn’t we already have evolved to take advantage of it?" (from his blog).

BTW, baryons aside... The fact that superposition and duality are a common theme in underlying physics really screams at me that the theories we have now are wrong purely because of how we see it.

If the Universe doesn't have an aspect of "time" as we know it (two measurements with an interval), then that solves a lot of problems. We create the mystifying part and need to somehow shift our perspective.

Don't ask me how. I have no idea how to figure out a puzzle without looking at it, unless we can get an "outside" or non-entangled view of the physics. Only problem is that as soon as you mess with something you're now entangled...

Apparently wave-particle duality is a problem?

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Am I wrong, or is Rachel's show really the only mainstream show
You are wrong on several counts.
Firstly - Maddow's show isn't 'mainstream'. It isn't even journalism. It is infotainment. She's no different than O'Rielly, Beck, Hannity, or any other politically biased pundit. To attempt to put her in a category that anyone would call 'mainstream' is laughable on its face.
Now - having established Maddow as a bought & paid for left wing partisan hack, it is possible to make a second correction. She isn't the only one. There's Olbermann, there's TDS, there's Colbert, HuffPo, Kos, and any number of left wing partisan hacks who are screaming this stuff in their particular echo chamber. Maddow is only a tiny voice in the left wing liberal chorus like Beck is a tiny voice in the Right wing's chorus.


And we're going to kick your fucking ass.

You "rich get richer, every thing's okay" bullshit fuck.

@blankfist, you said: I suppose I was having a conversation not writing a thesis. Next time I post on VS, should I do it in outline form with a definitive beginning, middle and end so you don't become confused by sidebars common with conversation?

To which I said: It's funny that you're acting like I want the sidebars.

To which you said: Was I? I don't think that's what I wrote. Go back and reread, please.

I belabor the point because I'm trying to get you to break out of your debate habits. On display are two of your staples:

1. Go onto a tangent about how people like rougy and NetRunner are evil for pretending they're liberals (and then slowly work your way into saying liberal means pro-freedom, and all left-leaning people are anti-freedom socialists)
   
   
2. Pretend that people are putting words in your mouth when your subtexts are made explicit.
   

I'm being obnoxious about this because I like debating with you, but the above are just intellectual laziness, and I expect more from you.

Let me slap down another off the shelf attack you like to level at me lately: You seem to think of the world only within your duality paradigm of "well, if he's not a Democrat, then he must be a Republican."

You're far from the only one making this or similar assertions, but you're one of the people who I think should know me better than that. I go after people who I think are either morally wrong, or factually wrong. I go after people left, right, and center, Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian (the Ron Paul kind or otherwise).

That said, this also seems to be more semantic quibbling. Everyone who thinks the solution to all of our world's problems is less taxes, and less regulation are all morons who should be kept away from the levers of government, no matter what party they do or don't claim to be a part of.

People who attack the idea that there are many unrecognized rights that government should defend (e.g. right to food, health care, decent working conditions, a living wage, etc.), deserve whatever rhetorical riposte I can muster. Again, that's no matter what party they do or don't claim to be a part of.

Look, bottom line is, knowing you as I do, I think morally your heart's in the right place, I just think you're objectively wrong on what effect your policy prescriptions would have. That separates you from the Republicans I generally go after with a vicious glee -- they seem to know exactly what their policy prescriptions will do, it's just that their twisted morals want inequality to punish the people they view as undeserving.

@NetRunner said: "It's funny that you're acting like I want the sidebars."

Was I? I don't think that's what I wrote. Go back and reread, please.

NetRunner said: "I doubt you'd have made a peep if some 2nd string conservative radio talker got the plug pulled, or even if Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly got canned."

That's where you're wrong. Egregiously so. Once again go back and reread, because I'm tired of giving you the Cliff Notes version of my posts. I wrote, "Now, if we can get the Conservative radio shows off the air, all will be better in the world." Nothing would please me more than to see those evil men sink. You seem to think of the world only within your duality paradigm of "well, if he's not a Democrat, then he must be a Republican."

The word "liberal" in its modern use doesn't even make sense. No one could deduce its meaning using the root any longer. What if in twenty years the Republicans starting claiming they were Progressives and wanted the country to go back to 1950s America? And the majority called them Progressives, and it was widely accepted. Majority doesn't make right.

In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
I'm beginning to see a pattern in your poems, Stephen.

*love *music *quality

pattern in prose?cadence?structure?
oooooor..the pattern of the poems miss julie connects with?
im teasin.
i know my pattern..well.i should..they are my poems.
dark and light.
up and down.
the abstract ambiguity of a moral relativism.
there is beauty in joy and also pain.
good cannot exist without evil..
and all good things must come to an end.
THAT the pattern you were talking about?
you will find much of my work deals with duality and moral relativism.
thanks for the quality..
joo segsy man joo!

du·al·ism (d-lzm, dy-)
n.
1. The condition of being double; duality.
2. (Philosophy) The view that the (political) world consists of or is explicable as two fundamental entities, such as mind and matter.

lullaby_lune we can also thank everyone who posts viddies whose inclination hinges upon the 2nd definition pasted above. The inanae addiction to politics in the U.S. has consistently eroded the quality of this site, and continues to do so with a fervor Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to call his own!

The television has been for 40+ years, co-opted by worthless examples of human garbage as the premier social engineering codpiece for inebriated monkeys to stare at, fondle and adjust, using the same mindless banter to be found on all 37648 channels of available mental junk food.

Would down-vote if I could, with the above sentiment as the fundamental motivation for this stated intended action. This program has been brought to you by Duncecap™®, the chapeau of choice for diligent,clueless dumb-asses everywhere!m Wear it with pride, wherever you blow!

particles don't exist though so not so strange that the equation for the standard model is so convoluted. Vibrations might seem like particles but at some point we've got to think about vibrations and the harmonics of those vibrations which cause particle and mass like observations. Plus you don't need the "forces" when you think about vibrations and their harmonic influence of each other. No matter how much I search the web I don't find people talking about not needing forces as we commonly think of them and I still see mention of the particle/wave duality as if particles actually existed. Particles and forces may be a useful way of looking at larger events in physics as kind of a shorthand like we talk about cells and chemicals in biology but when you are actually talking about what the underlying nature of the universe is it seems I should at least find one reference to harmonics instead of forces.

-Karl

Obviously the film is an analogy about the duality of man, and our irrepressible drive to seek out new life and the search for liberty.

>> ^Farhad2000:
This is one of the best war films released in recent years. Because it separates the politics away from the people fighting the war.


Isn't that what all good war films do? I agree with you, but I'm trying to think of a good war film that didn't separate the politics from the lives of individuals. "The horrors of war and the duality of man", right? (Stole that from the Platoon imdb page. )

The only ones that don't do that, to my immediate knowledge, are propaganda films like The Alamo (2004) and most of John Wayne's war films. (Love his cowboy movies, though.)

Hmm, it's a tricky question. I think it's just evolution over long periods of time creating different species that Creationists oppose, not evolution per se. I don't believe many Creationists disbelieve in selective breeding or the evolution of traits within a species (since we have incontrovertible proof of that).

Analogously, I don't think most Creationists have any solid ground upon to debate the fundamentals of QM, and most don't care to do so. However, if you try to apply it to the creation of the universe, they will oppose it.

And yes, all scientific theories are just models that grow more accurate as our knowledge expands. Newtonian mechanics is perfectly usable at small speeds and large sizes, so I don't think it's been quite abandoned just yet (I believe all it took was Newtonian mechanics to get to the moon).

Also, QM consists of several subcategories: quantization of light; wave-particle duality, etc. I think string theory is mainly concerned with adjusting and refining certain aspects of QM (and combining it with relativity!) then replacing it.

Anyway, I think we basically agree with each other on the big picture, which is a good thing