Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Chaos: The real problem with quantum mechanics" video.

@NyscanRohid Yes, there is a problem with people like Sabine who don't read the literature and who don't care about telling you the facts about quantum mechanics. There is no problem with quantum mechanics itself. You can find papers that derive its basic structure mostly from Kolmogorov's axioms in a few pages of mostly high school level algebra. So why won't you find that on social media? Because the reality of it is about as interesting as watching paint dry. Nobody would click on these videos if these social media influencers would tell you the truth.
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@berserk9085 Compare with the stretch from the early 19th century when spectral lines were discovered and the early 20th century when we finally found a quantitative explanation for them in quantum mechanics. This is nothing new and keeps repeating. We have seen this before... there were something like 80 years between Kepler and Newton, for instance and quite a bit longer between Copernicus and Newton. Atomism took 2000 years to make a breakthrough... so what's another 100 or 150 years? Most people simply don't understand quantum mechanics. People fear what they don't understand. It's irrational caveman psychology.
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So what went wrong in school for you? ;-)
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@ Cranky old physicist. :-) The solution to the "mystery" is quite simple. The "probability" language is a leftover from the early days of quantum mechanics. We need to replace it with something else because it causes endless grief. I generally like to use the word "uncertainty" instead because that is what it is. Energy, momentum, angular momentum and charge are fully conserved, there is simply always another system out of our reach which is entangled with our local measurement. The important thing to understand is that this lack of knowledge is fundamental. It is NOT just a technical limitation of our equipment. It follows directly from special relativity.
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Yes, but the people who are trying that have a huge problem: they don't know physics and so they are trying the equivalent of the squaring of the circle. ;-)
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Reiter is an idiot who doesn't understand physics. ;-)
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Yes, but many of the claims she makes are false. Quantum chaos exists and it has been observed experimentally. There was a lot of work on it in the late 1980s and early 1990s, if I remember correctly.
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It's not even true for the Schroedinger equation, she just didn't read the literate about quantum chaos from the 1990s (and probably earlier, that's just when I saw it for the first time). :-)
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Collapse is not a physical phenomenon. It's just a really poor mental model. We don't need it and it doesn't help with understanding, either.
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Yes, it gives us a clue that neither Zurek nor Sabine understand physics. ;-)
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@atlantisvelforening Quantum chaos was experimentally confirmed in the late 1980s, early 1990s. I sat in multiple talks by people who were analyzing it both theoretically and experimentally. The main takeaway is that chaotic quantum systems have fractal spectra. Nothing to see here but intellectual laziness. These folks didn't even read the literature on the topic.
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That is correct. What you are hearing here are the desperate attempts of people who don't understand quantum mechanics to find a hole in quantum mechanics that simply doesn't exist. ;-)
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You can get the correct explanation out of every textbook on the topic. You just have to read it a couple of times. ;-)
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What's up with all the poor thinking on the internet? :-)
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@bardoface That's certainly true for almost anything you are hearing about physics around here. It's almost all total garbage. ;-)
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They didn't say anything about it because it doesn't exist. A short literature search will return plenty of theoretical and experimental literature about chaos in quantum mechanics. It was a pretty big theme in the late 1980s or 1990s, if I remember correctly. A simple example is a highly magnetized Rydberg system.
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@NyscanRohid There is no measurement problem. Every day physicists are doing trillions on trillions of quantum measurements. Every single measurement is the transfer of a small amount of energy from a quantum system (like an atom that sends out some light) to the measurement system (a photodetector). All of this is covered perfectly fine by the high school textbook definitions of energy and systems. As you can see, there are always two systems involved in a measurement. If you try to lump both systems into one (which one can, due to the definition of "system" as "a partition of nature by a physicist"), then the energy transfer process simply can't be defined and we can't talk logically about "a measurement" at all. What people call "the measurement problem" is the search for nature's equivalent of the second "measurement system". It's all around you. It's the physical vacuum. If an atom sends out light, then that light travels at the speed of light away from the location of the atom. Since nothing can be faster than the speed of light, the energy in that light is entirely lost to the local "atom system". The atom can never get it back. That irreversible loss of energy from the localized system to the infinity of space, that is the reason why nature constantly makes measurements on her own. When was this known? Very early. You can find this explanation in von Neumann's seminal book about the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. It's in chapter six, I believe. The book was published in 1932, but you can find similar language in works of Heisenberg and Bohr a couple years earlier, around 1927 to 1929 or so, if I remember correctly. Its basically contemporary knowledge with the Copenhagen interpretation. Most modern textbooks aren't discussing it because it is such a triviality, but that doesn't mean that we don't understand it. It just means that the average student never gets to hear this explanation.
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@berserk9085 It's not even wrong. So would every workable model of quantum gravity be. It's not a problem of string theory that it can't be tested. It's a simple empirical fact of life that if gravity is quantized (and why would it not be, at least in some sense), then it doesn't leave any measurable signal in any of our current instruments. There will be rapid progress in the field as soon as such a signal can be detected with better instruments. Until then the theorists will simply keep throwing black darts in a tunnel at midnight at a black target (or just an imaginary one).
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The simple explanation is that quantum theory does allow for chaos just fine. Quantum chaos has been observed on atomic systems in the lab in the 1990s, latest. It was quite a popular field back then. Sabine simply didn't read the literature on the topic. You are, of course, also correct. What the dominant effect for Hyperion's motion is won't be understood until we get there with a space mission and do some very precise measurements on its environment and interior.
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Awh, you are so cute when you are begging for attention. ;-)
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@ No offense intended, but being neurodivergent doesn't make you a physicist. Neither does a horrible school experience. Only learning physics does. You need to do something about that anger, as well. It doesn't hurt me. It only hurts you. I do agree that our education system is very flawed. We are expending $17,000 every year during K-12 on every child and what comes out are both normal and neurodivergent kids who know nothing and who are completely full of themselves. What a waste of money that is. We should send all of you into the mines and factories as soon as you can walk, instead. At least then you would have a real reason to feel sorry for yourselves. ;-)
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It's much more simple than that. The quantum mystics don't understand reality and keep coming to wrong conclusions based on their misunderstanding of the structure of the theory.
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No, that's not it. It's much worse. Neither Sabine nor Zurek understand quantum mechanics. Either that or both are lying about it. ;-)
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Bell's inequalities are intellectual nonsense. Even Bell admits that at the end of his own paper. Relativity forces physics to have the structure that it has and there are no hidden variables in there whatsoever.
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The linearity comes from the construction. Quantum mechanics is an ensemble theory, i.e. it starts with the assumption that there are an infinite number of identical copies of the same systems that we can perform the same measurement on. As we are adding up all the results to form averages we assume that none of these copies interact, i.e. that there are no correlations that would change the weight of any one of these measurements (i.e. the seventeenth measurement result does for instance not depend on the outcome of the fourth). Whether this assumption is true in an actual experiment where the theoretical ensemble is being substituted against multiple measurements on the same system has to be verified explicitly on the correlations in the data! There are trivial experiments for which it is true and equally trivial ones for which it isn't. The educational problem with quantum mechanics is that we usually do not talk about this explicitly, which makes the linearity of the theory appear somewhat "magical". It isn't magic but the result of an assumption that may or may not be valid.
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@richardchapman1592 It doesn't leave any room for anything. The assumption of independence in the theory is experimentally testable with something as simple as a Geiger-Mueller counter. You can literally do it at home on the kitchen table. Not all systems are behaving this way, either. A laser is a light source that does, for instance, NOT produce independent photons. That, too, is experimentally testable, even if it requires a bit more equipment. Neither are the quanta in a particle track independent. The theory covers that by explicitly calculating the higher order correlations. You don't get non-linearity, you simply get independence in higher dimensional Hilbert spaces. It's all covered and has been since the late 1920s. The only problem with quantum mechanics is that the majority of all people are intellectually lazy and they don't take the considerable amount of time to learn about it properly. That's not a fault of the theory. That's the fault of the people who are intellectually lazy. ;-)
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There are no probabilities in physics. Probabilities can't satisfy conservation laws. That should be obvious even with nothing more than high school physics. ;-)
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@ There are no probabilities in quantum mechanics. There are only little children who weren't paying attention in science class. ;-)
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@ I already did: "Probabilities can't satisfy conservation laws." You can play around with random numbers all day long and they will NEVER add up to conserved quantities. Did I say that YOU NEED TO PAY MORE ATTENTION? :-)
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@ But the math of the uncertain is. Keep staring at a spacetime diagram for a while. Eventually you will see why the world is fundamentally uncertain and the details of the future are unknowable. ;-)
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@ Doubtful. What you are seeing here is simply the poetry of reality. At most I am giving a dull reflection of it. Now start starting at that spacetime diagram. :-)
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I have seen talks in the 1990s by atomic physicists working on chaos in Rydberg atoms in strong magnetic fields where they were showing fractal spectra. I think there is mostly a disconnect between the atomic physics and the quantum mechanics foundation folks going on there. The foundations people haven't been reading the already existing experimental literature enough. If anything, to me this seems like a rather old hat.
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There are no particles in nature. Something that doesn't exist can not have a state. What your detectors do is to absorb a small amounts of energy, momentum, angular momentum and charges from quantum fields. If you read a typical textbook on atomic physics carefully, however, then you will notice that the absorbed system properties ARE NOT linked directly to the quantum mechanical state (of an ensemble). They are linked to state transitions. If you want to see this in theory, then I would suggest that you read Heisenberg's matrix mechanics papers. It's clearly expressed in there. These details only got lost somewhere between Schroedinger and von Neumann and they are usually not explained properly in QM 101 classes. The disconnect between wave function based theory (which only talks about the measurement process in the abstract) and the actual measurement process (spectroscopy) is typically only bridged in experimental physics textbooks which the theorists never read.
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Only in the minds of little children who haven't been paying any attention in science class. ;-)
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