Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Dzhanibekov Effect: If You Are an Old-Timey Scientific American, You Will Like this Video
For years, the subtype of Homo americanus called “scientific American” was a market demographic big enough, rich enough, and loose enough with a buck to support the eponymous magazine.
(Note: Sadly, the magazine died about two decades ago, and was absorbed by the propaganda forces of the proggy church, which deceitfully maintained the name, in accordance with their doctrine.)
If you are one of those fanatically dedicated amateurs, I guarantee you will love this video, or your money back.
The unwritten Code of Conduct might require me to give you, the reader, some content, not just a link to the content.
Here, then. It involves a mysterious physical phenomenon: some spinning objects sometimes suddenly flip over and start spinning in the opposite direction!
I could also give you this content: the USSR came up with a theory about it and tried to keep it secret for years!
But that’s all I can say. If you are one of US, and not one of THEM, you will watch the video, and then share your thoughts with me, because I am one of you.
Published in General
I suggest the only satisfying way to understand any phenomenon is to follow the energy. Reasoning from conservation laws is usually the best way to calculate, but they aren’t the causal reason things happen. The axis flip surprises (those of us who are paying attention) because we can’t easily see the energy move. We are accustomed to seeing that.
You stare into the fire, Henry. It’s ok, we will keep the watch.
Are you thinking that somehow describing reality, is in itself reality? It’s not new to me, but that might be the worst kind of navel-gazing I’ve ever encountered.
And if nothing exists without description, how did anything come to exist before humans had the ability to describe it?
All of theoretical science is nothing more and nothing less than general mental models of the real world, plus specifications of operations that allow the scientist to apply the model to the real world.
Yeah, I don’t get how some people seem to think that a formula doesn’t just describe something, it somehow actually IS that thing. What nonsense.
Unless they’re just joking or something.
Well, kind of. Sort of. When it gets way down in the weeds, I don’t know that it’s as clear-cut as that.
We model an electron as a wave, a probabilistic mapping of a physical thing, a particle, into a superposition of spaces. But we may also attempt to describe the electron as precisely that: a field that may collapse into a particle.
When we’re talking only about the math, it’s easy to imagine that we’re just modeling, just creating analogues of physical reality that we can manipulate symbolically.
But when we create electronic components that deliberately exploit this duality, and when we perform physics experiments that seem to demonstrate this duality, then I think it’s fair to ask if in fact the words used to describe the model also serve to describe the underlying reality — that, in fact, the electron does exist as both a particle and a wave (a level or intensity in a field).
We have physical evidence of the existence of electrons as both particles and as waves. Given that, why should I find one more real than the other?
Richard Feynman said that the equations come second: He would first visualize the thing or phenomenon and only after he had done that would he develop equations to describe it.
???
I have miscommunicated. Give me a day to figure out how to say what I meant and what I didn’t.
(I don’t need for many to understand but I do need some to and you’re one of them :-)
What if both “wave” and “particle” are both just human conceptions of a reality that is actually neither?
There you go, mind blown, no charge. (ar ar. cuz of electrons and stuff, see?)
No, no, the mistake is mine. I misheard you, and interpreted your comment incorrectly. Say what you said again, but in a different way, and I’ll better apprehend your meaning.
Or perhaps it’s all a dream, and nothing is really what it seems. Amiright?
And a good educator would not try to teach the discoveries of the philosopher backwards, from the symbols to the mental model. He would teach by guiding the student through a recapitulation of the discovery process, in the same direction. He would teach science by teaching how to think scientifically, and teach math and logic by teaching how to think logically.
This is the problem with the second-hand dealers in ideas who control the educational institutions. They teach people how to avoid thinking by parroting, and to be convinced of their superior knowledge as a result of proving their ability to parrot.
As a matter of fact, any number of physicists will say just that.
Of course, the same question can be asked about absolutely everything. We never know anything with absolute certainty.
Yes, but the fact that we have two descriptions, neither of which seems to be definitive, strongly indicates (to me, at least) that we’re missing something.
Which was also how we got from Newton to Einstein, for example.
I think we have two descriptions because electrons have at least two distinct states of being.
We describe water as being in a liquid, solid, or gaseous state. It could be that we really don’t understand water at all: that it’s none of those things.
Or maybe we actually have it right.
It might be that the three states we think we see for water, aren’t that definitive (can gaseous water exist in a vacuum? It doesn’t seem possible, but I haven’t looked into it in detail) and neither are the two states of being we think we see for electrons.
I don’t know what the higher truth might be, but that’s not surprising if nobody has discovered it yet. And maybe nobody will as long they hold two the two-distinct-states-of-being concept.
According to the scientific way of thinking, we define what it means for water to be in a liquid, solid, or gaseous state, and if according to that definition a given sample is one of those things, then it is undeniably true that it is in that state.
You were taught a way of thinking in school, and told that it is the scientific method, but you were taught by a teacher who didn’t himself know the scientific method, only what the conventional wisdom said it is. He passed on to you what was passed on to him not by a scientific thinker, but by a second-hand dealer in ideas. In other words, an “intellectual” as Hayek disparagingly used the term. A quack, to be blunt.
Physicists will go far beyond the question of certainty, and point out that we are attempting to apply our everyday concepts of “wave” and “particle” to submicroscopic phenomena where it is entirely possible that those concepts are not precisely accurate.
Another way of putting it, yes.
It always seems a bit odd to describe the things that particles consist of, as being themselves particles.
Even if only “part-time.”
How about describing a window as a “barrier?” It pretty much is for wind, not so much for light.
When we talk about the small things having the nature of both particles and waves, we mean that at that scale we can associate momentum with (inverse) wavelength and energy with frequency. Energy and momentum are the “particle” properties; wavelength and frequency are the “wave” properties. p = h/ℷ, E = hf.
That is all that is meant by “wave-particle duality”.