Parallel Universe

Quarkmaster said:
I'm far more good-looking than is he
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If that's you in your avatar pic, I certainly agree.
Though in his younger years, he seemed to have that sort of aggressively nerdish quality about him.
 
Quarkmaster said:
Digging deeply into my old, old memories, as I mentioned in the susequent sentence, decisions tend to move in waves of quantum events, and those quantum events mostly need to tend in a direction. Now, I suppose that it might only be the majority of those events which tend in those directions, up until a decision is finally made - in the human brain. And this was from a study I only vaguely recall from perhaps 30 years ago.

As for how we post responses, I'm not sure if you're asking how MOSFETs or BJTs work (the fundamental devices that make our computers work, mostly MOSFETs, but nowadays, BJTs still play a role), but these devices are all about quantum mechanics, which is the guide to understanding their operation. If these devices are off by just a little bit, they stop working. If you get table salt on them, their quantum processes cease to exist, and they aquire new quantum properties that don't do what we would like them to do.

If I take pure Silicon and etch it into nanowires, the quantum properties are altered, from an indirect band gap of 1.12 eV to a direct band gap, with a much higher potential, up to 2.5 eV. This is the first known place where you can alter the morphology of a bulk element and actually change its quantum properties, which is why nanotechnology is so interesting. There are many examples of this.

Nevertheless, it requires a majority of quantum events in a semiconductor to go right in order for that device to work properly, for the gate to open or close, properly and in time. We engineer them so that this happens. There are a number of ways that we can manipulate those properties.

If you're still not certain about this, review the Butterfly Effect. The flutter of a butterfly's wings in south asia is sufficient to create a hurricane in the western hemisphere, and yet, were the butterfly to take a singly different quantum event and turn it differently, the effect might never take place.

Remember also that even your internal decision to respond to my post is also the result of one or many quantum events. If the majority of them tilted another way, it would not have happened. Quantum mechanics is funadamentally a study of probabilities.

The universe really is incredibly random.

I'm looking out my front window (which is where my desk is parked) at a tiny little blue bird, almost smaller than a butterfly, fluttering about in my oak tree. It's not a hummingbird. Perhaps it will create a hurricane in south asia.
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But surely what this means is that the universe, as far as we understand it, is not completely random and unpredictable, but to some extent that way. In quantum mechanics the structure of the uncertainty is tightly constrained by the mathematics, and that mathematics can lead to the most exquisitely accurate predictions in all of science. It's one of the most fascinating aspects of the world that random behaviour at the micro level can lead to deterministic physical behaviour at the macro level. Of course there are chaotic systems at the macro level, but that doesn't mean they are not deterministic systems - each state of such a system is fully determined by its previous state at anything other than quantum scales. We may not be able to express a set of analytically solvable equations for many such, but we can use numerical analysis methods to predict their behaviour pretty accurately for most practical purposes. This allows us to determine planetary positions for example, and send spacecraft to the rest of the solar system with very great accuracy, despite the solar system being intrinsically chaotic in terms of it's behaviours.

For me, one of the most fascinating things about the nature of the world is that its behaviour emerges as sufficiently stable for our own existence despite being rooted in bounded but extensive random behaviour at the micro level.

A fascinating thing for me too is the question of the rules - the laws that underlie the world. Are these simply anthropomorphisms? Do we invent them as a kind of language to express and crystallise our understanding, or do they have reality beyond human consciousness? If the latter, then where did they come from? Would they tend towards supporting Platonic philosophy about an ideal world of which ours is but flickering shadows?

If the laws are more fundamental that the substance of the world, then the world is not at all random, because the laws do not appear to be random. They do of course express those parts of randomness that are embedded in our world, but the rules themselves have no randomness in them, because that would mean that the rules would be indeterminate to that extent. But then maybe some rules really are to some extent indeterminate - and that would be even more fascinating, because it may mean that we could learn how to change aspects of reality within the limits of that uncertainty.
 
John K said:
But then maybe some rules really are to some extent indeterminate
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I can say with an indeterminate amount of probability that the rules of science will change significantly as we progress as a species. It seems like only yesterday [with respect to human development] that we thought the world was flat and that the sun revolved around us.

It's fun to imagine parallel universes and explore the depths of understanding. I've enjoyed reading what all of you have contributed to this thread.

Perhaps we will know and understand all of it at the moment we leave this world. Of course, what will be the value of it at that time?
 
TomasM said:
I can say with an indeterminate amount of probability that the rules of science will change significantly as we progress as a species. It seems like only yesterday [with respect to human development] that we thought the world was flat and that the sun revolved around us.

It's fun to imagine parallel universes and explore the depths of understanding. I've enjoyed reading what all of you have contributed to this thread.

Perhaps we will know and understand all of it at the moment we leave this world. Of course, what will be the value of it at that time?
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Of course - it’s clear that we have only a partial understanding at the moment, and maybe we never will have a full understanding.

But I meant something different - at the moment the laws seem to be fixed, determined, even if we only have partial understanding. But if the laws themselves had some degree of indeterminacy in them then they could actually change - even be open to manipulation, at least within the bounds of any indeterminacy.
 
John K said:
Of course - it’s clear that we have only a partial understanding at the moment, and maybe we never will have a full understanding.

But I meant something different - at the moment the laws seem to be fixed, determined, even if we only have partial understanding. But if the laws themselves had some degree of indeterminacy in them then they could actually change - even be open to manipulation, at least within the bounds of any indeterminacy.
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I wasn’t questioning what you said, in fact, I thought you made some excellent points.

Though I have my own ideas about how the fabric of the universe works, I’m not nearly as developed in quantum and string theory as this conversation. I prefer simplicity to chaos and random outcomes, even if that simplicity is stacked to an infinite number of layers.

Yes, “determined,” as you suggest, does seem much more likely to me.
 
TomasM said:
I wasn’t questioning what you said, in fact, I thought you made some excellent points.

Though I have my own ideas about how the fabric of the universe works, I’m not nearly as developed in quantum and string theory as this conversation. I prefer simplicity to chaos and random outcomes, even if that simplicity is stacked to an infinite number of layers.

Yes, “determined,” as you suggest, does seem much more likely to me.
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That’s ok Tomas - I didn’t read it that you were questioning what I said. I just thought I’d better clarify what I was talking about. Wondering if there might be implicit uncertainty in the physical laws rather than the obvious uncertainty in our understanding of them.
 
John K said:
at the moment the laws seem to be fixed, determined, even if we only have partial understanding. But if the laws themselves had some degree of indeterminacy in them then they could actually change - even be open to manipulation, at least within the bounds of any indeterminacy.
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The world, existence at large, should be interpreted/absorbed a bit more loosey goosey.
It'd be a more chill place.
 
John K said:
But surely what this means is that the universe, as far as we understand it, is not completely random and unpredictable, but to some extent that way. In quantum mechanics the structure of the uncertainty is tightly constrained by the mathematics, and that mathematics can lead to the most exquisitely accurate predictions in all of science. It's one of the most fascinating aspects of the world that random behaviour at the micro level can lead to deterministic physical behaviour at the macro level. Of course there are chaotic systems at the macro level, but that doesn't mean they are not deterministic systems - each state of such a system is fully determined by its previous state at anything other than quantum scales. We may not be able to express a set of analytically solvable equations for many such, but we can use numerical analysis methods to predict their behaviour pretty accurately for most practical purposes. This allows us to determine planetary positions for example, and send spacecraft to the rest of the solar system with very great accuracy, despite the solar system being intrinsically chaotic in terms of it's behaviours.

For me, one of the most fascinating things about the nature of the world is that its behaviour emerges as sufficiently stable for our own existence despite being rooted in bounded but extensive random behaviour at the micro level.

A fascinating thing for me too is the question of the rules - the laws that underlie the world. Are these simply anthropomorphisms? Do we invent them as a kind of language to express and crystallise our understanding, or do they have reality beyond human consciousness? If the latter, then where did they come from? Would they tend towards supporting Platonic philosophy about an ideal world of which ours is but flickering shadows?

If the laws are more fundamental that the substance of the world, then the world is not at all random, because the laws do not appear to be random. They do of course express those parts of randomness that are embedded in our world, but the rules themselves have no randomness in them, because that would mean that the rules would be indeterminate to that extent. But then maybe some rules really are to some extent indeterminate - and that would be even more fascinating, because it may mean that we could learn how to change aspects of reality within the limits of that uncertainty.
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There are some scientists who would like to agree with you in this, that the world is totally predictable at some level, and that, no matter our observations, the outcome would have been the same no matter how many temporal iterations (were we able to go back in time and repeat the experiment) we tried. But the laws, or theories, as we understand them today, are that we cannot predict, and if if we can go to the moon and back and get withing 30 inches of our target, there is always uncertainty.

But there is another side to this which has to do with the very psychology of ourselves. J-types tend to want to see the world as a stable, knowable, fixed quantity, whereas P-types tend to be a bit more open with our options and like to see the world as an unplanned place. So as you say, it's probably more of a mix of these two, some small piece of certainty, with a bit of uncertainty thrown in for good measure.

I suspect that anything to do with large, massive bodies tends to be more predictable, whilst things at the atomic level tend to be less so. I've heard the expression, "one of the requirements for a Ph.D. is a high tolerance for ambiguity." And that was clear to me, that no matter how much I knew about my subject, there was always some degree of uncertainty. You could not be absolutely certain, you could not be absolutely sure. It was never 100%.

There are many highly educated people who become frozen, unable to move forward just because of this. It happens to me often. It takes me a while to move past it, asking myself, 'What are the potential consequences if I'm wrong about this?' And then I find myself researching and researching more until I'm convinced that I've reduced the probability of bad consequences, if not failure, and more importantly, the level of the bad consequences, are sufficiently small in order to move forward. Otherwise, you can spend your life researching the outcomes and never move an inch. In other words, I suppose, you have to take chances.

Neil Degrasse Tyson was once presented with a common question that comes up about "intelligent design." The question sort of sneakily starts out with "intention" of the universe. That is to suggest that humans were invented by a superscientist by the way the universe was created. So when he was asked that sneaky question, he said, "We live in a shooting gallery. If there is any intention in the universe, it is to kill us."

I had to laugh when he said this, because it's true. All of life on Earth could be wiped out in a moment, or in a day. You tell yourself that 'the Sun will come up in the morning' but then you realize you were wrong, because what really happened was that the Earth rotated and the Sun appeared over the horizon. Okay, I'm just making a joke, here. But still, there's no guarantee of anything, including the Sun coming up.

Our lives are built out of approximations and guesses, and how long you survive depends on how good your approximations and guesses are. There are a million ways to die. And in the lifetime of our own planet, about 4.7 billion years, there have been no fewer than five ELEs, or Extinction Level Events, each of which wiped out all life on Earth. In at least one of those events, it was life (plants, in fact) that caused it. And here we are, tampering with the very delicate system that keeps us alive. We share the air we breathe with our gas-guzzling automobiles, we pollute the very water that we depend on to stay alive and we fill the soil in which we grow our food with toxins and heavy metals.

I think the most unpredicatable and uncontrollable things in our world are ourselves, not subatomic processes.
 
Quarkmaster said:
'What are the potential consequences if I'm wrong about this?'
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You seem to be making one big assumption about all of this and that is that death is the end of our consciousness. Maybe, in all of this predictability and uncertainty, we are simply attempting to reduce pain and slow the death of a physical form that somewhat isolates our consciousness from all other consciousness. Some scientists even believe that the universe is conscious, yet we have no idea how old the universe is with any certainty. Maybe, the purpose is about growth of the soul, and that can only be realized when pain and uncertainty are introduced into the, "equation."
 
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