Less
670 posts
@lessaxwrong
He who looks outside dreams, He who looks inside awakens ~ C.G Jung. The world is a place worth understanding | Just for fun
He still hasn’t delivered Unsupervised Full Self-Driving to the more than 400,000 Tesla customers who paid up to $15,000 for it, some waiting four years, others as long as eight. 🚗💸 Scammers are gonna scam.
Chad Moron: Tesla has no moat. Common sense dude: Tesla owns the cars, gigafactories & FSD. Vertical integration = huge edge. Chad Moron: What specific advantage does that give them? Common sense dude: Holy fuck you’re retarded. Chad Moron: 😫😭😭😤🤡💩
Things get strange when you shoot a single photon through the double slit. It deflects when passing through the slit, and when a string of distinct photons are sent, they accumulate in places where you’d expect in an interference pattern, but there is only one photon, and only one of two slits it could have passed through; yet it behaves as if it is interfering with itself. Here's my summary of a recent history of quantum physics: Anil Ananthaswamy’s Through Two Doors at Once. It uses the classic two-slit interference experiment as the common thread across generations of theories that try to explain its peculiar properties. Richard Feynman calls it the “one experiment which has been designed to contain all of the mystery of quantum mechanics.” With more complicated setups involving beam splitters, the photon will behave as a wave, as expected with multi-photon interference patterns, but if observed in its trajectory, it will act as a particle as one would expect, with nothing to interfere with its path. With more complex setups and long light paths, this bifurcation of behavior (wave or particle) can even be made to occur after the fact, warping our sense of time and causality. And it not just photons. Similar results have been achieved with neon atoms, C60 Buckyballs, and even a custom molecule of 810 atoms. The notion of superposition, required to explain this quantum interference, “is the most unsettling story perhaps to have emerged from any of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century.” Prof. David Albert, p.80. And then it gets really strange, when you consider the entanglement of photons that can collapse simultaneously when one is observed, even at a great distance away. This nonlocal behavior is a subject of much debate, including Einstein’s objections to quantum physics. Einstein’s most cited paper is not on relativity, it is his 1935 paper identifying the property of entanglement, which he called “spooky action at a distance.” The critical role that an observer plays in the experimental results (specifically, the collapse of the wavefunction in the Copenhagen interpretation) is a bit unsettling and anti-realist and reflective of the philosophical correctness of the day — with literary modernism questioning the ambiguities inherent to any one perspective of the world. In quantum physics and literary modernism, “there is no true world, since everything is but a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us.” Prof. Albert p.183. The theory that I favor is the one that modifies neither philosophy nor physics and explains the two-slit experiment without resorting to an observer or the particle-wave duality; it solves determinism and non-locality, but… it is a psychological bender — the many interacting worlds interpretation. Each discrete photon is interfering with its sister particle in a parallel universe, and each quantum transition event spawns a copy of each universe, one for each path the particle could take. “The idea that 10^100 slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting into further copies is not easy to reconcile with common sense. Here is schizophrenia with a vengeance.” Prof. DeWitt p.227. Thanks @anilananth for the good read. And this brings us to the Universe Splitter app on my iPhone. Each time I use it to make a decision, it directs a single photon through a beam splitter in Geneva, Switzerland, and there is subsequently one universe where the photon goes left and one where it goes straight. We happen to be in the one that observes one of those outcomes. When I read Feynman’s QED (Quantum Electrodynamics), I was struck by the peculiar squiggles that helped him visualize the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics. “The insight that Feynman had was to realize that what’s interfering are two different states of the universe. And those two states may only differ by where a single particle is.” Prof. Aephraim Steinberg, p.232. It was David Deutsch’s exploration of the two-slit experiment with single photons that guided him to parallel universes and the intuition behind quantum computers and their capacity to out-compute anything we could build that leveraged just one universe! And that brings us to the Entanglion game, published by IBM Research. I have yet to play that, in this universe at least, but hope to soon.
When Copernicus proposed heliocentrism in 1543, it was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model - a system refined over 1,400 years with epicycles precisely tuned to match observed planetary positions. It took another 70 years before Kepler, working from Tycho Brahe's unprecedentedly precise observations, replaced Copernicus’s circles with ellipses - finally making heliocentrism empirically superior. Terence Tao's point is that science needs a high temperature setting. If we only fund and follow what's most state of the art today, we kill the ideas that might need decades of work to surpass some overall plateau.
I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country
Reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy or introspection is a recipe for misery. Don’t cut a rut in the road.
This 84-year-old Tesla owner breaks down why EV resale value isn’t something to stress about.
Chibi Optimus and Cybercab 😆
