Cethin

That’s not totally true. Sure, many are military, but not all. I think all of the pilots are though, for obvious reasons.

Exact timing, including air resistance, is far more than what’s required. Sure, everything about the orbits needs to be almost exact, but the fact we can predict exactly how the craft bounces about in the atmosphere, which is turbulent, and predict the landing this accurately is insane. Landing on the moon, on the other hand, is a lot easier to predict. A high school calculus student can calculate that, and orbital information, down to the second if they have the starting conditions.

Yeah, dark in the same meaning as “the dark ages.” It’s referring to a lack of knowledge, not a lack of light. Both these terms have fallen out of favor though.

Well, it is a pretty poor indirect source. Just like the moon lighting things at night by reflecting the sun, Earth does the same.

Value indefiniteness is just solipsism. If particles do not have values when you are not looking, then any object made of particles also do not have values when you are not looking.

They do have values. Their position is just a superposition, rather than one descrete one, which can be described as a wave. Their value is effectively a wave until it’s needed to be discrete.

This was the point of Schrodinger’s “cat” thought experiment.

Sure. That doesn’t make the general understanding of the thought experiment accurate. Once the decay of the atom that triggers the poison is detected, it’s no longer in a superposition. It has to not be in order for the detection to occur. The thought experiment is a meme because it’s absurd, and it is. That’s only because the entire premise is fundamentally flawed. It can’t exist as it’s implied. Also, even if this weren’t the case, that doesn’t actually prove it wrong. The double slit experiment shows that an interaction can change the result from wave-like to particle-like behavior.

This view of “value indefiniteness” you are trying to defend is indefensible because it is literally solipsism and any attempt to promote it above solipsism will just become incoherent.

I’m literally not. My entire point is that it isn’t a solipsism. Any interaction causes the waveform to collapse. Not a person observing it. The universe doesn’t care about what we describe as consciousness (or sapience, as it’s better described). It just does physics. The fact we don’t have a model for it doesn’t change anything.

This experiment shows that behavior can change just from a measurement. How do you explain that while also not allowing superpositions? You make claims about this meaning a few things (which I don’t agree with), and yet you give no explanation of an alternative. Something is happening. How do you explain it?

It is. I just always feel the need to comment this on these posts because the mystical understanding annoys me, and is surprisingly common. This meme doesn’t do that exactly, and it even has an accurate experiment setup.

Yeah… no. There are multiple interpretations, but basically it’s when position is needed to be known that causes it. Until then, the position is in a superstate of all possible positions, but for an interaction to occur it needs to be in one position. It’s not about choice. It’s about when information is needed for a physical interaction to occur. If one occurs then the particle must be at that location.

Collapse happens when you step out of quantum picture with (mostly)linear equations and try to project the calculations onto the “classical picture”

This (at least your wording) implies that physics cares about our mathematical models. It doesn’t. Quantum mechanics and “classical” physics are just ways we organize things for education. Though we don’t have a model for it, the unvirse is not using two separate models of physics. There is no “quantum mechanics” and “classical physics”. There is only physics. When a measurement occurs the universe isn’t looking at it to see if it should use quantum rules or classical rules. The interaction just occurs.

To clarify, “observer” in the double slit experiment has nothing to do with humans, or consciousness, or anything like that. It has to do with it interacting with something on the other side of the slit. This thing, that creates (or “observes”) an interaction, collapses the waveform. A human can watch or not. It doesn’t change the results of the experiment.

Yes, that’s correct! Interacting with the barrier that creates the slits we don’t care about, but yes, that collapses it too.

Interacting with the surface we’re measuring in all the experiments. It doesn’t change, so it shouldn’t be effecting the results. It does collapse the waveform though, which is how we measure it.

Detecting it at the slit is the part that changes. If we don’t do this, we get wave-like behavior, because there’s no interaction until it hits the surface at the end. The wave can pass through both slits without any interaction. If we put in a detector, then it must interact with that to pass through, so it collapses the waveform and behaves like a particle at that point. This means it must be at one slit or the other, and not both.

I totally agree. “Observe” was a bad choice of words, but it stuck. It should have been “interacted with”, or “measured”, or something like that.

I’m aware. I just hate the mystical way things like this are treated, and there’s a lot of uninformed people. I don’t care that the meme is wrong. I care that people believe that the experiment says something other than what it says, which is already really cool.

No, not the slits. How the “observation” is done is you measure what goes through the slit with a detector just on the other side. The detector has to interact with the photons, so it collapses the waveform, making it behave like a particle, only passing through one slit. If you remove the detector then it has wave-like behavior, as the waveform only collapses once it hits the surface on the far end.

The waveform collapses any time it interacts with something. The experiment just takes advantage of this by making it collapse in a way that creates a different result than if we don’t collapse it until later, where the waves can interact.

I have to comment this every time people post it, because they don’t actually understand it. They only understand the mystical view of quantum mechanics, which isn’t real.

Observation, in the case of this experiment, has nothing to do with humans looking at it. It has to do with the particle/wave interacting with something, which causes the waveform to collapse into a single particle. The reason this happens is because any interaction requires the information to be known, so it can’t be wave-like anymore. It has nothing to do with consciousness or anything like that. It only has to do with an interaction that requires information to be discrete.

No, bulls didn’t exist then.

Well, back then there was more oxygen in the air, which allowed tornados to grow larger.

Yeah, there’s lots of takes on technology that are outlandish, but something like VR/AR HMDs becoming so unobtrusive that they become common seems perfectly viable. Not yet, but I could easily see it being capable of happening in the next century at most, if not far sooner. We aren’t there yet, but it doesn’t seem far off. The issue with current HMDs is mostly just that they’re too heavy to be comfortable, which is a solvable hardware issue.

A slippery slope isn’t always a fallacy. Yes, that is a specific name of a fallacy, which people commonly point out, but it is also the form of a valid logical argument. If there is support that this will happen, it isn’t a fallacy.

I this case, a user-entered field is useless to “protect children” (being generous and assuming this is the actual reason for the laws). Children will just lie, as they have been doing for decades. The state will point to this as the law not fulfilling its stated goals, so they’ll need to verify age through other means. Even if the goal isn’t surveillance of people, this is still likely to be the result logically. This means the slippery slope argument is valid.

Nexi S.p.A. (“Nexi”) requested access to private data, which we understood to be specifically the usernames and passwords of our supporters. …relating to a general need for risk analysis.

I think they passed the risk analysis portion. Isn’t it more risk if they hand out usernames and passwords? That’s insane. They shouldn’t even have access to passwords.

As for the exploitation, all living things have their own lives. Even plants seem to be able to communicate to some degree and can be stressed and stuff. Either you’re OK exploiting living things to some degree or you die. The level of exploitation is what should be discussed. Is beekeeping harmful to bees? I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like it.

As for it being sugar, sure. Sugar isn’t bad though. Sugar is bad when consumed in the quantities the average American consumes it. It also has other properties that make it pretty good for your health. For example, I think it’s good for preventing allergies because it contains pollen (I might be making this up, but it seems like I’ve read that somewhere).

Plus, it’s just weird to want to eat the vomit of other species anyway.

Do you realize that fruit is the ovary of a plant? Life is weird. Get over it. Weird is not a word that should come into a discussion of ethics.

It’s amazing to me that Discovery hasn’t tried to bring Mythbusters back. Instead they double down on Ancient Aliens and Pawnstars garbage.