My mum took part in this trial after finishing her chemo and radiotherapy for breast cancer a few years ago.
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Looks promising
I know someone that’s been put on it as they have a BRCA gene. It also means they get increased check-ups as part of the monitoring process, which they’re happy for.
Physical reality is an illusion and what underlies it is very very strange indeed.
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Watched that earlier.
Sort of made sense. We just see what we see, not what is…
Brain melted… The laser experiment was excellent.
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I’ll watch that tomorrow my brain is fried enough for today.
I was taught most of the practical stuff in that as a physics undergraduate in the late 1970’s. But, as Geraint Lewis says right at the very end, the underlying ‘Principle Of Least Action’ wasn’t used to tie it all together.
To be fair I still remember one lecturer going off-piste in a lecture and running through the basics of it for 10 minutes or so, then explaining it wasn’t on the syllabus and we wouldn’t be examined on it. It appeared more in graduate student classes, but my doctorate was very experimental (as opposed to theoretical) so it wasn’t what I needed right then.
Part of the problem is that while the principle is straightforward the maths gets pretty heavy pretty quickly and making the step from physical reality (there’s a provocative word) to the correct mathematical representation (the Lagrangian) was never intuitive for me. The theory guys and gals seemed fine with it though.
Long story short: quantum mechanics - it’s true, but weird.
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Everything everywhere all at once.
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Basically, yes.
What tickles me is that what we perceive is just an interpretation of something far stranger.
It’s this kind of thing that makes me go
You’d have to be an evil genius to come up with something like that is. Maybe god does exist and he’s messing with us to blow our minds!
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I’m not sure the mind can contain all the ramifications here so I’m going with - ‘there is a place where everyone gets Pâté’
Can you let me know where please? PM?
The only bit my brain didn’t get was why the indirect waves cancel each other out. Spinning arrows in all direction = cancel. Arrows in one way = visible.
Apart from that the whole thing made sense in a way that you can’t really fathom.
Yes, everything (including time?) exists as a superposition and the most likely outcomes are ‘selected’ as ‘reality’.
Maybe evolution did that ? In a fight with a predator you just need to know the overwhelmingly likely path that its claws will take. Any paths that deviate significantly from that will, while they do exist in (strange) reality, effectively be cancelled by their equally implausible neighbours.
So we’ve never evolved the (mostly intellectual ?) capacity that would allow us to be comfortable with those paths, because that capacity doesn’t improve our chances of passing our genes on.
Maybe things are changing now though - see Sheldon/Amy.
I watched half of it, but that is the same as watching all of it, or not watching it at all, isn’t it?
I dunno, it kind of feels like that’s just the way the world works.
Maybe animals interpret it differently?
You are saying that the US president misgendering a cartoon mouse is the most likely outcome?
Good question. It does come out of the maths, but the leap from physical reality into the maths does take some getting used to (maybe I’ll manage it one day).
The maths includes a quantity called the ‘phase’. As the thing we’re interested in (particle, photon, tiger’s claw) travels along a path its phase steadily increases. The rate at which it increases depends on its size. For small things (e.g. an electron) the phase only increases quite slowly as the thing travels down the path. For macroscopic things, on the other hand, the phase increases really quickly.
The critical step is that before we come to add all the possible paths together to establish where the thing ends up, we first have to take the sine of all the different paths’ phases. (Why ? you might ask. Well, that’s just the way waves work. Sorry.)
Remember what the sine of something looks like ? Here are some sine waves
Each one has peaks, where its value is large and positive, and troughs where it’s equally large but negative. If we look at the bottom wave, the pink one, maybe it’s clear that if we were to extend its length just a little bit to the right, the value would go pretty quickly upwards. In the video the phase was represented by a rotating clock hand, which is just a different way of trying to say the same thing. A clock hand which spins quickly is like a wave with closely spaced peaks and troughs (the pink one).
The fact is that as the possible paths move away from the familiar (least action) one their total phases from one end to the other start to increase more and more quickly. The paths right alongside the least action one are almost exactly the same length as it is. So if it happened to end with its phase at a positive peak then they will also end with their phases pretty close to the positive peak and all those paths will add up to contribute a lot of ‘positive’ to the total.
By the time we’re looking at paths far from the least action one, even a small change in the path will cause a significant change in its length. The wave will go up and down quite a few times and could almost as easily end up on the negative part of the sine wave as on the positive part. Adding a lot of paths like that (as likely to be positive as negative) together will result in zero. So paths far from the least action one tend to contribute little to the final outcome.
The difference between the rate at which the phase changes along the path (slow for small things, like the red sine wave, fast for large things, like the pink one) explains why small things seem to exhibit weird quantum behaviour but large things don’t. It’s just that when the phase is only changing slowly as the path length varies, we can still get values which are much the same even though we’ve changed the path length quite a bit.
Sorry if I’ve lost you. If we select bright physics undergraduates and try to teach this to them it can take weeks or more before all this stuff starts to feel comfortable. Once you’re familiar with it it can be hard to remember how tough it was to take on board when it was a new idea.
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Maybe some elaboration over a fine wine, at a selected bunkhouse, sometime soon?
I’m getting there.
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You’ll probably need some of @A_Touch_of_Cloth’s Novicello rather than wine.
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