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Posts tagged with quantum mechanics

philosophy & quantum mechanics

@jtc_19 asked:

The isomorphismes links (last three tweets) might be worth sharing with everyone. (I’ve been accused that this site is hard to browse—sorry!)

@isomorphisms haha, yep.

— Clark (@jtc_19) April 15, 2013

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By the way! OCW has course notes on the standard weird phenomena and also the standard interpretation of the physics. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-111-philosophy-of-quantum-mechanics-spring-2005/lecture-notes/




Some level surfaces (isoclines) of the simplest atom’s electron position. (Electron orbitals.) Remember that electrons control chemistry i.e. why things are the way they are on Earth. (High-energy physics, like as high of energy as a star, is where the new particles and quantum gravity, QCD, and such take place.) from The Picture Book of Quantum Mechanics via heioghopp

hi-res




Nice Pictures of Hamiltonian Dynamics

I had judged The Emperor’s New Mind by the negative reviews but never actually picked it up. It has a lot of great stuff, almost like an “early draft” of The Road to Reality.




All I knew about Emperor’s New Mind before was that it invokes quantum mechanics to explain free will, which was perceived as “icky” by people who study the brain. (Despite that, like quantum nonsense, the “greats” of QM—Bohr, Schrödinger—also weighed in with QM/free-will speculations (do you hear me, Conrad&Kochen? Quantum communication folks?) — because, let’s be real here, free will is a millennia-old conundrum and I think we’d all appreciate it if the people who understand compositions of Hilbert spaces weighed in on whether and what the latest “master theory” (bringer of semiconductors = transistors, LCD’s, lasers, MRI/PET and certain polymers/piezoelectrics/other materials) would say about the age-old question)

I got a bit more of the debate whilst reading about pi-1 sentences, which is a computability/knowability/logic dealio. But again, this was the level of “What’s RP’s argument in a nutshell?” rather than “Is here anything worth reading in the 400 pages?”. It’s a lot of good.




For most people, this:
time-dependent Schrödinger equation
is indistinguishable from this:
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν
In both cases, the layperson needs an interpreter.

…[I]t takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us….

The Last Psychiatrist




Black Hole Fragmentation Image Credit: Burkhard Zink, Nikolaos Stergioulas, Ian Hawke, Christian D. Ott, Erik Schnetter, and Ewald Muller

Black Hole Fragmentation

Image Credit: Burkhard Zink, Nikolaos Stergioulas, Ian Hawke, Christian D. Ott, Erik Schnetter, and Ewald Muller


hi-res




John Baez and James Dolan, From Finite Sets to Feynman Diagrams

  • an explosion of ideas
  • equality x=x is boring
  • why is 6÷2=3 ?

(Source: arxiv.org)










What is the best interpretive program for making sense of quantum mechanics? Here is the way I would put it now. The question is completely backward. It acts as if there is this thing called quantum mechanics, displayed and available for everyone to see as they walk by it—kind of like a lump of something on a sidewalk. The job of interpretation is to find the right spray to cover up any offending smells. The usual game of interpretation is that an interpretation is always something you add to the pre-existing, universally recognized quantum theory.


What has been lost sight of is that physics [theory] is a dynamic interplay between storytelling and equation writing. Neither one stands alone, not even at the end of the day. But which has the more fatherly role? If you ask me, it’s the storytelling…. An interpretation is powerful if it gives guidance, and I would say the very best interpretation is the one whose story is so powerful it gives rise to the mathematical formalism itself (the part where nonthinking can take over)….


Take the nearly empty imagery of the many-worlds interpretation(s). Who could derive the specific structure of complex Hilbert space out of it if one didn’t already know the formalism? Most present-day philosophers of science just don’t seem to get this: If an interpretation is going to be part of physics, instead of a self-indulgent ritual to the local god, it had better have some cash value for physical practice itself.

Interview with a Quantum Bayesian, Christopher A. Fuchs  via University of David