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Owen Maroney worries that physicists have spent the better part of a century engaging in fraud.
Ever since they invented quantum theory in the early 1900s, explains Maroney, who is himself a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, they have been talking about how strange it is — how it allows particles and atoms to move in many directions at once, for example, or to spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously. But talk is not proof, says Maroney. “If we tell the public that quantum theory is weird, we better go out and test that's actually true,” he says. “Otherwise we're not doing science, we're just explaining some funny squiggles on a blackboard.”
It is this sentiment that has led Maroney and others to develop a new series of experiments to uncover the nature of the wavefunction — the mysterious entity that lies at the heart of quantum weirdness. On paper, the wavefunction is simply a mathematical object that physicists denote with the Greek letter psi (Ψ) — one of Maroney's funny squiggles — and use to describe a particle's quantum behaviour. Depending on the experiment, the wavefunction allows them to calculate the probability of observing an electron at any particular location, or the chances that its spin is oriented up or down. But the mathematics shed no light on what a wavefunction truly is. Is it a physical thing ? Or just a calculating tool for handling an observer's ignorance about the world ?
http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-physics-what-is-really-real-1.17585
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @10:34AM
It is impossible to decide whether one of the integers is an under-watered hydrangea, since there is no meaning to the claim. Of course possibility/probability can only be applied to well-defined statements.
That doesn't mean that the original statement is true, however:
To make a meaningful counterexample: In the infinite set of integers it is neither possible nor probable that there are three primes of the form p, p+2, p+4.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Dogeball on Friday May 22 2015, @11:21AM
To make a meaningful counterexample: In the infinite set of integers it is neither possible nor probable that there are three primes of the form p, p+2, p+4.
Like 3,5 and 7?
How is that a counter-example?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @11:53AM
Well, OK, I fucked up the specific example. But then, the point should be obvious anyway. Just take p, p+1, p+2 instead.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 22 2015, @02:17PM
3,5,7 is the only set that satisfies that condition, and the proof is easy. For all sets of 3 natural numbers of the form n, n+2, and n+4, one of those is divisible by 3. Mod 3 of such a set always yields 0,1,2. Not much different than the observation that 2 is the only even prime number.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday May 23 2015, @12:37AM
I get what you're saying, but you're playing a game with numbers and our definitions of subsets of numbers.
When people say everything is probable in an infinite universe, what they generally mean is that every conceivable arrangement of matter and energy is going to spontaneously occur. Yes, you can still come up with a definition of some abstract-something that is definitionally impossible, but that's not really what we're talking about. We're talking about matter and energy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @01:36AM
In which case the original statement has lost its original meaning of having no bounds and the new meaning is being derived from the subset that which could make the statement itself correct.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 23 2015, @03:10AM
It is impossible to decide whether one of the integers is an under-watered hydrangea, since there is no meaning to the claim.
Except that the sentence has meaning. A hydrangea is a plant while an integer is a abstract concept. Since abstract concepts aren't plants, the truth of the statement is readily determined. Further, the statement has meaning because it says something non-trivial. If we replaced integers and under-watered hydrangea with other nouns, we could end up with a sentence that was false or even had an indeterminate truth value.