*quality explanation of quantum something or other...

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by ChaosEngine.

Wait...so WHY can't duck buddies be used to make intergalactic phone calls?

Because you look at your duck, you see that it's feet are sticking out of the water and you say to yourself, "aha, that means the other duck's head is out of the water."

And you're right, but, that's all you know (which is neat, but not useful). Moreover, it's not until either you or your buddy with his duck in Andromeda actually looks at their duck that the ducks actually take on their state. So you unfortunately cannot attach any significance (and thus information) to the state of a couple of ducks.

And more importantly, you have no control over the state of the duck.

So you can look at 1120 ducks (enough information to encode an SMS in ascii), but you can't change them.

But I've just developed the duck flipper 2240 that can flip up to 1120 ducks at one time with a rotational speed of 1440 degrees per second, and read the orientations of the same number of receiver ducks. This should allow at least AT&T level audio.

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.

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.

I'm no expert either, but my late mother was a prominent classical physicist and what I saw from her fight against QM was that its foundations were built on unjustified assumptions going all the way back to the EPR experiments. The trouble is they've built a mountain of a theory on this precarious ground when they should be sticking to what they can prove to be true and working from there.

Quack