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Spacetime events and objects aren't all that exists, a new quantum interpretation suggests.
[...] In the new paper, three scientists argue that including "potential things on the list of "real" things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. It is perhaps less of a full-blown interpretation than a new philosophical framework for contemplating those quantum mysteries. At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of "reality" is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum's mysteries disappear. In particular, "real" should not be restricted to "actual" objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or "potential" realities, that have not yet become "actual." These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are "ontological" — that is, real components of existence.
"This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of 'what is real' to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility," write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.
[...] In their paper, titled "Taking Heisenberg's Potentia Seriously," Kastner and colleagues elaborate on this idea, drawing a parallel to the philosophy of René Descartes. Descartes, in the 17th century, proposed a strict division between material and mental "substance." Material stuff (res extensa, or extended things) existed entirely independently of mental reality (res cogitans, things that think) except in the brain's pineal gland. There res cogitans could influence the body. Modern science has, of course, rejected res cogitans: The material world is all that reality requires. Mental activity is the outcome of material processes, such as electrical impulses and biochemical interactions.
Kastner and colleagues also reject Descartes' res cogitans. But they think reality should not be restricted to res extensa; rather it should be complemented by "res potentia" — in particular, quantum res potentia, not just any old list of possibilities. Quantum potentia can be quantitatively defined; a quantum measurement will, with certainty, always produce one of the possibilities it describes. In the large-scale world, all sorts of possibilities can be imagined (Browns win Super Bowl, Indians win 22 straight games) which may or may not ever come to pass.
This could be an amazing breakthrough - and it would also reconcile Einstein's 'Left Shoe' construction.
Somehow, reading this paper also made me think of software design!
Read the article at sciencenews.org
Read the paper at arxiv.org
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @12:43PM (13 children)
could everyone please stop saying that the laws of the universe are perfectly time reversible?
take any system of moderately realistic interacting particles.
count the amount of trajectories that lead you to more probable states, call it N.
count the amount of trajectories that lead you to less probable states, call it M.
generally N > M; furthermore, M becomes negligible as the size of the system grows.
the above is true in both classical and quantum mechanics.
therefore, even if you study an abstract universe with no people in it, you will still see that entropy increases, i.e. there will be a "past" and a "future".
even for individual particles, because they will be more likely to interact with particles in particular states at different points in time.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:00PM (9 children)
I suppose, if time runs backwards:
could everyone please stop saying that the laws of the universe are not perfectly time reversible?
take any system of moderately realistic interacting particles.
count the amount of trajectories that lead you to more probable states, call it N.
count the amount of trajectories that lead you to less probable states, call it M.
generally N M; furthermore, N becomes negligible as the size of the system grows.
the above is true in both classical and quantum mechanics.
therefore, even if you study an abstract universe with no people in it, you will still see that entropy reduces, i.e. there will be a "future" followed by a "past".
even for individual particles, because they will be less likely to interact with particles in particular states at different points in time.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:03PM
Damn HTML! That was supposed to be:
generally N < M
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:41PM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:46PM (1 child)
I wondered about that. Really, in both directions equality should be an option. I was just reversing AC's rules.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:17PM
Scratch that, the point was clear. They're talking about more probable states being arrived at with a greater frequency than less probable, as a general trend, so as I understand it N=M would be less likely to occur.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:54PM (4 children)
I'm the one who made the original NM comment.
I studied nonlinear dynamics for my PhD and I am still working actively within the field.
I don't have the time to find the references now, but you could, for instance, start from having a look at this book: http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/p036. [worldscientific.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @12:13AM
For an analogue, I recently looked at constructing minimal reversible Turing machines from irreversible ones. One way to do this is to add a second tape to a single tape Turing machine (keeping in mind that Turing machines with multiple tapes are Turing equivalent to Turing machines with one tape) where you push bits off one way to store the information needed to reverse the Turing machine's computations, possibly including its internal state. The reversible machine is equivalent to a normal quantum system with no sense of direction of time, the computation can go forward or back losslessly. But the irreversible Turing machine creates a direction of computation since information is destroyed in the natural, forward, entropy-increasing direction. When we consider the above example of the reversible Turing machine which models an irreversible Turing machine by shoving bits one way onto a second tape, that's equivalent to pushing the information lost from the irreversible Turing machine onto that tape as information.
One could think of it as an event horizon where from the point of view of the original reversible machine, the lost bits of information are pushed to and don't return. Or from a thermodynamic point of view, using the second tape as a cold sink to pump information to in order to power the irreversible Turing machine in some abstract sense.
Anyway, we have two different points of view of this computation as both reversible and irreversible. And looking at it from the irreversible point of view while on the reversible machine, means that information is lost by pushing it to a place of no return - equivalent to the information destruction of the original machine. So going back to our situation, maybe entropy isn't actually changed. It just appears that way to us because we can't see where the information lost to us goes. The future (or indeed anywhere shoved out of the past of our light cone) is one such place lost information could hide. And just like an event horizon of a black hole doesn't perfectly hold information (due to information leakage via Hawking radiation), maybe these other hiding places aren't perfect either, resulting in unexpected interactions with the otherwise lost information.
(Score: 1) by rylyeh on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:51AM (2 children)
Don't the latest discoveries in the application of entropy to time reversal prove that the inexorable move to disorganization forces the arrow of time forwards? Honestly curious - and I can dig up the articles if your're interested.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:05AM (1 child)
I thought that was exactly what I said.
any realistic multi-particle system will have a "forward in time" direction, because part of phase space is more likely to be visited than other parts.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:43PM
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:37PM
If time was running backwards, you wouldn't be surprised to see a broken vase reassembling itself into an unbroken one, because all your memories of witnessing the breakage would be unwriting themselves as the event took place (In reverse time, should that be gave place? I was going to say "event unfolded" but it would be "folded"). You would experience the consequences of your actions before the decisions you made that caused them but as khallow points out, your memories would still appear to run forwards in time from past to present which suggests that a backwards flow of time would be completely indistinguishable from a forward flow.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:54AM (1 child)
The funny thing is if you do the same argument backwards (that is, given the current state, what was the state in the past), then you get that up to now, the entropy most likely decreased. Which is exactly because the fundamental equations are time reversible.
Well, until you get to quantum field theory. The CPT symmetry together with the (experimentally confirmed!) CP violation implies a T violation. That is, at that level the laws are not symmetric under time reversal.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 05 2017, @10:51AM
I believe that's what I was trying to do by copy-pasting the original N vs M comment and flipping all the logic (suggesting decreasing entropy with time) but unlike the parent poster I don't have a degree level knowledge of the physics involved and on reflection I wasn't really qualified to comment.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?