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bosco
@selentelechia
oh my god I'm a moron "it changes when we measure ('observe') it bc we *have to interact with it* to do so" this never occurred to me, I just read the popsci explanations like "ha ha well I don't understand that at all, guess I'm never going to think about it again"
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Sterling Crispin 🕊️
@sterlingcrispin
¡
I'm going to be that guy: the monkey should be a light beam, everyone confuses consciousness interfering with the particle-wave duality. But to observe it we have to measure it with a photon, which causes a physical interaction, it's not consciousness doing it its a particle
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bosco
@selentelechia
pendants on twitter hopping out from behind a bush with good intuitive explanations that don't trigger any of my "lol this is too hard" defenses: bless you
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bosco
@selentelechia
"by observe, we mean 'measure,' and by 'measure,' we mean 'physically interact with,' and perhaps you can understand why it is hard to do this without kinda fucking with the thing you are measuring" nobody ever just said this to me
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
so, this is true and relevant, but it’s not a complete explanation of the uncertainty principle (which i assume is the topic under discussion), because it’s not intrinsically quantum i am not aware of a really satisfying intuitive explanation of the uncertainty principle
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
importantly, the uncertainty principle is not about measurement - a quantum particle cannot exist in a state with both perfectly definite momentum and perfectly definite position, even if no instrument ever measures it, e.g. even if the rest of the universe is empty
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
the thing about having to disturb a thing with eg a photon to measure it should really be called “the observer effect” according to my brief googling, and pretty much every use of the uncertainty principle as a metaphor you’ve ever seen is actually about the observer effect
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
well, quantum mechanics is definitely false is the thing. it uses an absolute and continuous non-relativistic spacetime background and i think in fact we have no reason to believe that space as a concept makes any sense at distances below the planck length or thereabouts
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