I'm gonna be a bit obnoxious here and ask people to please consider before sharing Schrödinger memes, and for two reasons:
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@miss_rodent I mean, yeah. Scientists try and make their shit sound mystical, something I fought against in the 20 years I did quantum shit, and no surprise unscrupulous "mystic" are able to piggyback off that to make pseudoscience sound real.
@xgranade Yeah, I have the... very odd perspective of having studied physics, and being involved in some witchy/neopagan/whatever communities, which ... is a perspective that makes the 'bad science communication to religious abuse' pipeline a... pretty common theme I end up yelling at people about
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Here's the trick, though: quantum mechanics isn't inherently more difficult to learn than other technical fields, such as computer graphics. The big conceptual shift is in thinking of states like "the electron is here" or "the electron is there" in the same way you might think about directions.
You can understand a map in terms of north and west, but then you also have directions like northwest that are distinct from "north and west at the same time!!1!."
You're not going to understand quantum mechanics without a little bit of work, sure, but that's not unique to quantum mechanics at all! That's kind of how learning works!
The learning required to understand quantum mechanics is not terribly out of line with other fields, but memes like Schrödinger's Cat prime us to believe that it's not understandable at *all*. Which I reject.
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@xgranade [nodding] okay got it quantum mechanics is all about moving from discrete states to continuous ones
@SnoopJ *takes psychic damage*
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@xgranade also the utter cancer that is 'quantum computing' where they claim 'ECC' will magically undo inherent fucking laws of *applied* physics. (But what do Heisenberg, Bohr, and Peres know, right?) Their potential is infinite! (Because they're too fucking stupid to understand much less fully read Wigner's friend.)
@rootwyrm I mean, that whole post is wrong? We have very good theorems that establish what conditions will allow for quantum computing, and it would take some very surprising new physics for those conditions to turn out to be impossible in practice.
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@SnoopJ *takes psychic damage*
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@SnoopJ I mean, I can't even say that that's wrong, but it sure as hell isn't *correct* either. Sigh.
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@SnoopJ I mean, I can't even say that that's wrong, but it sure as hell isn't *correct* either. Sigh.
@xgranade would you say it is both right and wrong at the same time
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@xgranade would you say it is both right and wrong at the same time
@SnoopJ god *damn* it why did I expand that cw
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@SnoopJ god *damn* it why did I expand that cw
@xgranade resisting the urge to make a sorry/not-sorry joke here
glad I didn't undercut the (extremely correct) point of the thread by stuffing my shitposting into CWs
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@rootwyrm I mean, that whole post is wrong? We have very good theorems that establish what conditions will allow for quantum computing, and it would take some very surprising new physics for those conditions to turn out to be impossible in practice.
@xgranade I didn't say it wasn't possible. However, it absolutely is not possible at any meaningful scale with current technology or our knowledge of physics. What we've got is idiots stapling an endless chain of half-baked qubits together and claiming this addresses fidelity is the height of absurdity. Much like the 'PhDs' claiming "AGI" is possible in a binary system with enough lossy 8x8 matrix math (just no.)
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@xgranade I didn't say it wasn't possible. However, it absolutely is not possible at any meaningful scale with current technology or our knowledge of physics. What we've got is idiots stapling an endless chain of half-baked qubits together and claiming this addresses fidelity is the height of absurdity. Much like the 'PhDs' claiming "AGI" is possible in a binary system with enough lossy 8x8 matrix math (just no.)
@rootwyrm I mean, again, that post is completely wrong on the merits? Please don't use my replies to spread disinformation. There's a lot to criticize about QC as a research field and an industry, but we don't need to make pseudoscientific arguments to offer that criticism.
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Here's the trick, though: quantum mechanics isn't inherently more difficult to learn than other technical fields, such as computer graphics. The big conceptual shift is in thinking of states like "the electron is here" or "the electron is there" in the same way you might think about directions.
You can understand a map in terms of north and west, but then you also have directions like northwest that are distinct from "north and west at the same time!!1!."
@xgranade I found the mathematics the hardest part, all that Eigenfunction nonsense.
I didn't know those two things, though. Shitty men in academia through time immemorial.
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I'm gonna be a bit obnoxious here and ask people to please consider before sharing Schrödinger memes, and for two reasons:
• Schrödinger was a serial pedophile, and should not be glorified.
• Schrödinger's Cat was originally posed as a thought experiment to try and make quantum mechanics more confusing, as a form of ridicule. Its use in the field today is a kind of institutionalized gatekeeping.@xgranade I didn't know that first thing about Schrödinger which is a Big Yikes
.But the cat-in-a-box "paradox" isn't even a paradox at all, because it depends on the erroneous conflation of the macro-scale system of the cat with the quantum-scale phenomenon of radioisotopic decay.
All of the particles in the cat's body are constantly interacting with, and therefore measuring, each other, so the cat is always collapsed into a state of Alive UNTIL It Is Dead.
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I'm gonna be a bit obnoxious here and ask people to please consider before sharing Schrödinger memes, and for two reasons:
• Schrödinger was a serial pedophile, and should not be glorified.
• Schrödinger's Cat was originally posed as a thought experiment to try and make quantum mechanics more confusing, as a form of ridicule. Its use in the field today is a kind of institutionalized gatekeeping.@xgranade
I did not know about his seediness, thank you for making me aware of that -
@xgranade I didn't know that first thing about Schrödinger which is a Big Yikes
.But the cat-in-a-box "paradox" isn't even a paradox at all, because it depends on the erroneous conflation of the macro-scale system of the cat with the quantum-scale phenomenon of radioisotopic decay.
All of the particles in the cat's body are constantly interacting with, and therefore measuring, each other, so the cat is always collapsed into a state of Alive UNTIL It Is Dead.
@dragonarchitect Yeah, that conflation of micro- and macroscopic properties is one of the big problems with the thought experiment, but I'm even willing to give that one a slight pass on that it's common to exaggerate the scale of things to make a narrative around them that helps with the thought experiment.
Where it goes truly awry, imho, is the "alive and dead at the same time" bit, which terminates thought in an apparent absurdity.
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@dragonarchitect Yeah, that conflation of micro- and macroscopic properties is one of the big problems with the thought experiment, but I'm even willing to give that one a slight pass on that it's common to exaggerate the scale of things to make a narrative around them that helps with the thought experiment.
Where it goes truly awry, imho, is the "alive and dead at the same time" bit, which terminates thought in an apparent absurdity.
@xgranade Ahh, yeah, that's not even how superpositions even work at all in the first place. At least as far as I understand how they work.
As far as I understand it, a superposition is simply some state that is not strictly aligned with any arbitrarily chosen measurement axis. It can be literally anywhere in between the measured states, but we only ever measure One State.
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@xgranade Ahh, yeah, that's not even how superpositions even work at all in the first place. At least as far as I understand how they work.
As far as I understand it, a superposition is simply some state that is not strictly aligned with any arbitrarily chosen measurement axis. It can be literally anywhere in between the measured states, but we only ever measure One State.
@dragonarchitect I'll mostly agree, modulo the word "only." But yeah, superposition is inherently only meaningful with respect to a given choice of axes (more generally, basis states).
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@xgranade Ahh, yeah, that's not even how superpositions even work at all in the first place. At least as far as I understand how they work.
As far as I understand it, a superposition is simply some state that is not strictly aligned with any arbitrarily chosen measurement axis. It can be literally anywhere in between the measured states, but we only ever measure One State.
@xgranade While the cat is locked in the box, there's no way of knowing whether it is still alive or finally dead.
It's not simultaneously alive AND dead.
The cat is always in just one state.
You (generic 'you', the observer) just don't know what that state is until you open the box and Observe That Cat.
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@xgranade While the cat is locked in the box, there's no way of knowing whether it is still alive or finally dead.
It's not simultaneously alive AND dead.
The cat is always in just one state.
You (generic 'you', the observer) just don't know what that state is until you open the box and Observe That Cat.
@dragonarchitect I mean, not really, no. Partly, as you point out, that's the absurdity of conflating micro- and macroscopic properties. But also, it's less that the cat is alive and dead at the same time than that "alive" and "dead" aren't the right set of directions for describing the cat.
The supposed paradox has a resolution, and it's not even that difficult a one, but the point of the thought experiment is to terminate thought at the absurdity before you get to the resolution.
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@dragonarchitect I mean, not really, no. Partly, as you point out, that's the absurdity of conflating micro- and macroscopic properties. But also, it's less that the cat is alive and dead at the same time than that "alive" and "dead" aren't the right set of directions for describing the cat.
The supposed paradox has a resolution, and it's not even that difficult a one, but the point of the thought experiment is to terminate thought at the absurdity before you get to the resolution.
@xgranade You have a more nuanced understanding of the thought experiment than I do, then.
I am now curious.
What is the resolution that you have for it?
