This one is easy - yes & no. Sound is a combination of two things - the vibrations in the air that can be heard by a person or animal and the reaction of the eardrum that allows the hearing. So in one sense it does simply because the vibrations occur. But in another sense it doesn’t because there are no eardrums to hear it.
I think that’s the point of the thought experiment: to provoke this idea and point out the absurdity. But several experiments seem to disagree and nature really does seem to be absurd or at least to our minds that have been optimized for conceiving of the universe in a particular way.
Yes - Leonard explained it on Big Bang Theory. LOL
1 Like
Hum, off the top of my head, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (HUP) would apply to the quantum state that encompasses both particles, and for that state the HUP would absolutely apply. Hitting the web to find the paper you reference we find in the abstract:
While there is a rigorously proven relationship about uncertainties intrinsic to any quantum system, often referred to as “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle,” Heisenberg originally formulated his ideas in terms of a relationship between the precision of a measurement and the disturbance it must create. Although this latter relationship is not rigorously proven, it is commonly believed (and taught) as an aspect of the broader uncertainty principle. Here, we experimentally observe a violation of Heisenberg’s “measurement-disturbance relationship”, using weak measurements to characterize a quantum system before and after it interacts with a measurement apparatus.
So one must be very careful when saying the HUP has been violated.
And thanks for the pointer to this! Now to find the time to read the paper in its entirety!
2 Likes
I find that there is much confusion of HUP with the butterfly effect though there would be a bit of crossover in that with any analog system there are no limits to the amount of decimal places to which any observation can exist but there are eventually limits to how many decimal places the observation can record and thus no matter how precisely done the result is only an estimation and not the actual number. therefore any calculations will contain that error and when iterated the error can grow larger than the answer.
As for the cat, if it dies , then the time of death can be calculated and if you never open the box it will starve to death anyway (or die of thirst) and all those effects can be observed, as well as any effects of the cats breathing, so many effects can be observed during and after to show that the example is a bad one if examined too closely. but then such depth was not he point of the discussion.
And this is why I never ever open my budget statement. The cat might be dead in there!!
Are there any other doctors in the GF community doing medical prototyping? Radio silence on the west coast which surprises me…
1 Like
Your description of Chaos Theory, which uses the Butterfly Effect as an example of its results, isn’t quite right. It isn’t that you can’t measure to enough decimal places. It’s that for certain mathematical systems no matter how close two different initial conditions are, even if their coordinates are known exactly, their solutions over time will diverge exponentially. All natural phenomenon, from dripping faucets to the motion of planets in solar systems, are described by such mathematical systems and are chaotic. Gleick’s book on Chaos Theory does a nice job of describing this.
1 Like
I have the book from when it first came out. The point of the “Butterfly effect” is the impossibility of defining anything in the real world “exactly” and thus while the imaginary calculation is very repeatable as every result is “exact” in that it will keep giving the same result You can only achieve those same results by starting from the same starting point as all the calculations will be estimates after that. Starting in the middle of a weather simulation is what made the effect known.
congrats on the new gig! That sounds like a pretty awesome opportunity. I’ve been keeping tabs on the quantum computing world, pretty exciting stuff coming out of IBM. It’ll give Dwave a run for their money.
and I love the cat, nice play on reality.
Humans have a long history of “eh, close enough to be useful”. by trying, getting close, using it, iterating, learning from mistakes, then mastering, we achieve great things.
agriculture, large buildings, bridges, automated machines, cars, human flight, cures to diseases, space exploration, nuclear fission/fusion, standard computing, smart phones, etc.
We no longer have the luxury of time, we’re now in the thick of it and we need the tools to think our way out of it.
In our attempt to find faster computing, we’ll most likely find answers to things we didn’t even know we were looking for.
We still don’t really know what electrons are, even though we use them daily. don’t really know if there’s a fundamental force/particle for gravity, and don’t start on dark matter/dark energy. We are seekers, and I find that comforting.
Well some of that anyway, but time was never a luxury. Perhaps if we could deliver a moveable type printing press to ancient Athens… The Higgs is found, but they bumped into a new one that they don’t even have a theory for. Still one cannot avoid facts that are inconvenient and Chaos Theory is certainly on that list and the butterfly effect will still be there if you are measuring every centimeter in the atmosphere to a thousand decimal points. It was one of the answers we did not know we were looking for even though Xeno gave us a hint a couple thousand years ago.
1 Like