Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "TED-Ed" channel.

  1. That's why the folks in the physics department are looking down on the folks in the philosophy department. ;-)
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  2. Awh, it's so cute when a high school dropout dresses up as a high school dropout. ;-)
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  3. Schroedinger's cat doesn't teach anything about quantum mechanics. Schroedinger got pretty much everything wrong in his original article and people have been repeating it even worse in a chain of Chinese whispers since.
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  4. Light is not a wave, you were simply over-trained on classical mechanics.
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  5.  @GregValentine  In what way? Please explain in detail. This physicist is always eager to make fun of philosophy. ;-)
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  6.  @GregValentine  And the kid takes his ball and runs home to Mommy. ;-)
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  7. Yes, they were all science illiterate back then. Why are you still science illiterate? Unlike them you don't have an excuse. ;-)
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  8. If that is what you want to study, then you have to go to the psychology department. The physics department is not the right place to ask why an otherwise very intelligent man blanked out when it came to a relatively simple problem like this.
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  9. What a bunch of bollocks. Light is the excitation of a quantum field and quanta are simply small amounts of energy. There are no particles, waves, packets, wavicles, and no angels are dancing on the tips of needles, either.
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  10. You are not allowed to access the contents of the box. That is what "isolated" means in physics. Chemistry is also of no use here because it is always focused on the statistical mechanics average, which is a short term approximation (short compared to the age of the universe, but long compared to the molecular vibration and collision time scale). The actual physics here happens on the Poincare recurrence time scale, which is much, much, much longer than the age of the universe.
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  11. @ Learning would have been useful, but that's probably too late for you. ;-)
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  12. Superposition is what makes quantum computers potentially faster than ordinary computers. Why? Because superposition is the description of what we don't know about systems and what we don't know can grow exponentially with system size, whereas what we know only grows in a linear fashion.
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  13. TED ed is nonsense. You might as well listen to Trump explaining germ theory. ;-)
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  14. He may not have been high, but he was highly confused.
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  15. A cat in a completely isolated box is always dead, but only on the intermediate time scale. On the Poincare recurrence time scales it gets periodically resurrected. Of course so do two kittens and a turtle that were never in the box to begin with. ;-)
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  16. It wasn't supposed to. It was meant to invalidate the Copenhagen interpretation by giving a nonsensical counterexample. What it actually does is to give us a flawed analysis, i.e. it is at most a paradox, which is a teaching tool to demonstrate how not to think about something. Since it never comes with a resolution it doesn't do that, either.
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  17. Schroedinger was confused and he made the mistake of airing his confusion publicly.
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  18. It's not the simulation that suffers from that, it's the system. As soon as we have an almost periodic system that has bifurcation points this is bound to happen. It's not that much different from a Galton board (or a pinball machine): the trajectory has to pass the equivalent of a nail or obstacle, which creates a hard decision point. The effective "gain" in such a system is infinite and the system can not be stable.
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  19.  @eatYoself  Oops, I forgot to give you attention. My bad. ;-)
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  20. For all the wrong reasons. ;-)
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  21.  @yeslinsequeira4612  Because it's entertainment that people are searching for, not science. ;-)
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  22.  @yeslinsequeira4612  Because it's entertainment that people are searching for, not science. ;-)
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  23. Basically all simulations so far indicate far less stability than has actually been observed. If we take numerical problems out, this indicates that we aren't simulation reality but only an oversimplified version of it. We either have to include additional bodies like asteroids and Oort cloud objects or we have to conclude that there is a dissipative influence, e.g. from dark matter streams within the Milky Way.
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  24. An observation in physics is an irreversible energy transfer.
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  25. Where did you see a scientist in this video? ;-)
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  26. You are correct. It was devised like that, but all it proved was that Schroedinger didn't understand quantum mechanics.
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  27. @ You can do the calculations and you will see that he was wrong. Oh, wait... you don't know how to do the calculations. Now that is a problem, isn't it? :-)
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  28. So when did this delusion of yours start, that you are speaking for god? ;-)
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  29. Less god juice drinking, more science learning! ;-)
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  30. The wave function isn't "provable" at all. The wave function was always a mathematical abstract. Nature doesn't know anything about it. There are systems to which it applies and then there are systems to which it doesn't. The trick is to learn about the pre-requirements for when a wave function can be used to describe nature. We rarely teach those, which makes it seem that it's a universal description. It isn't.
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  31. @ You won't find Schroedinger's cat discussed in a well organized class on quantum mechanics. At most you could make a lesson titled "Poor thinking patterns in quantum mechanics- Schroedinger's cat, Wigner's friend and the EPR paper", but it's not good practice to overwhelm beginners with historical false ideas. It's bad enough that we are teaching the Bohr model and de Broglie waves, but they are historical precursors to the real theory, so one has to mention them in the same way as one would teach Aristotelian physics or the Ptolemaic model of the solar system in passing. Schroedinger's cat, Wigner's friend and the EPR paper, however, are scientific strugglers that were muddying the otherwise crystal clear waters of von Neumann's work.
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  32. Not much. The problem will probably be just as hard on a quantum computer as on a classical one, if not harder. The great myth about quantum computing is that it can speed up all calculations. That's principally false. QC can perform better on some problems, but it can not perform better on all problems and the reverse is also true: there are some problems for which classical computation is actually more powerful. The universe uses both methods.
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  33. Because that is not what we measure in the lab and that is not what the theory says. You need to stop imagining things and you need to start learning real physics. :-)
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  34. Schroedinger's cat came years after von Neumann had clarified all of this in his textbook. Schroedinger simply couldn't keep up. Neither could Einstein, by the way.
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  35. That's not what the EPR paper argues. You should read it in detail when you have the time. The main problem with the paper is not how it uses quantum mechanics but how it defines "completeness". Here is the original language: "Whatever the meaning assigned to the term complete, the following requirement for a complete theory seems to be a necessary one: every element of the physical reality must have a counterpart in the physical theory. We shall call this the condition of completeness." It requires that elements of physical reality are mapped to elements of the theory. Copenhagen does that just fine. The actual "problem" with Copenhagen is that it has a theoretical element that DOES NOT exist in physical reality: the wave function. A wave function is an ensemble average, i.e. it's a mathematical abstract. Nature only has exactly one copy of each physical quantum system, while in the theory we postulate an infinite ensemble of statistically independent but otherwise identical copies. That is exactly the same procedure that we use to define probabilities and one can, indeed, derive the structure of quantum mechanics from Kolmogorov's axioms without much difficulty. So it's not that the theory isn't "complete". It's actually more than complete by this definition. It requires something on paper that nature doesn't provide itself in experiments and observations. So while the paper is technically correct (it shuts up and calculates correctly), it completely missed to identify the source of the ontological problems with non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
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  36. They tried that. Neural networks seem to make actually pretty good educated guesses, at least statistically speaking. It doesn't solve the predictability problem (that's mathematically impossible) but it might lead to numerical techniques that are more powerful than the conventional brute force algorithms.
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  37. It is a completely isolated box. Nothing can get in or out. And by nothing we mean "absolutely nothing".
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  38. Why is is to important to you to tell the entire world that you weren't paying any attention in school? ;-)
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  39. The correct answer would have been "neither". No points for you. ;-)
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  40. Einstein was wrong about the properties of quanta already. In his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect he writes that quanta have to have a position property. That does not follow from either the experimental facts not from his theoretical arguments. It does not follow from Planck's work. It does not follow from de Broglie or even the full Copenhagen interpretation. Quanta having position has, indeed, never been observed.
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  41. I wasted eight episodes of my life on the show. It's horrible.
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  42. Nobody can point you to a source of information about things that don't exist. Unless, of course, you think that Harry Potter is an entry level textbook about magic... ;-)
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