The standard model of particle physics may be due for a philosophical remodel, including rethinking what qualifies each of its particles to count as a particle to begin with.
Whether a particle is involved in making up matter or carrying a force, it or its constituent parts has a place in the standard model of particle physics. In this way, the standard model is similar to the periodic table of elements – it tabulates the building blocks of our world. But George Hobart at the University of Bristol in the UK now argues that this tabulation may need to be revisited, and even changed, to make for a more sound model of physical reality.
At the heart of his reasoning are particles called neutrinos, which are notoriously elusive because they only interact with other particles very weakly through gravity or across very short distances through the weak nuclear force. Additionally, their mass isn’t precisely known, nor can the standard model predict it through the so-called Higgs mechanism that explains the masses of all other particles.
There is another oddity, too. The standard model tabulates three different neutrinos – the electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino – each of which has a more massive "big brother" particle that it shares a name with: electron, muon and tau. While an electron can’t spontaneously become a muon, an electron neutrino can, for example, randomly turn into a muon neutrino.
Hobart says it helps to visualise the standard model as an actual table with all the neutrinos in one row and their big brothers in another. "We have no evidence for the big brothers being able to swap horizontally; we have very good evidence that they can’t. But for some reason, the neutrinos... they are able to swap horizontally."
Hobart says that to a philosopher, this begs the question of whether categorising the particles in this way makes sense. From numerous experiments, we know that neutrinos exist and what properties all the other particles in the standard model have, but there are multiple ways to turn that knowledge into a system of understanding, or an ontology.
The current rows and columns of the standard model are based on the particle properties of mass and "flavour", which is the property that sets the three neutrinos apart. Neutrinos are troublesome on both fronts because they can change flavour and how they gain mass is mysterious, so Hobart proposes recasting the standard model so that its building blocks become "families", or whole rows, rather than the individual particles that comprise them.
In this way, the three neutrinos would be quantum states of some more fundamental entity, rather than three distinct objects. This might change how researchers think about their mysterious swapping abilities by getting them to first focus on what they most fundamentally share, says Hobart.
"This is not changing any of the physics," he says. "Rather [we] take this amazing theory that humans have been creating for close to a century now and try to figure out, how do we interpret this in a more philosophical way and how should that influence our picture of the world? That picture of the world then might help us look in new areas." Hobart presented the work at the Foundations of Physics conference in Irvine, California, on 17 June.
Noel Swanson at the University of Delaware says that the way particles are typified within the standard model relies on idealisations of what it means to be a particle, which philosophers are still debating. Proposals like Hobart's are worth thinking through and it would be surprising if properties like mass or flavour eventually proved to be the most fundamental properties of physical objects, he says.
"I suspect that, at a more fundamental level, you have something that looks approximately like a field, and the particles are different kinds of excitations of that thing. It makes sense to categorise excitations the way we do in the standard model, but if you view those as sort of like fundamental ‘joints’ of nature, that would probably be a mistake," says Swanson.
The discussion about the exact philosophical nature of particles is ongoing, as are experimental investigations of neutrinos. Philosophy and more applied branches of physics rarely work in close contact, but here there might be a chance for the two to inform each other, says Swanson.
"How you interpret these quite weird particles might motivate which lines of research you want to go down next," says Hobart.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @05:05AM (3 children)
We have mass, and we have energy. I do hope that's clear enough. (e=mc^2 and yada yada.)
A particle is a mass of a certain amount of energy.
Does that solve the question? A photon isn't a particle because it's just energy. A neutrino is a particle because it has a certain, specific mass (unless it's made up of multiple sub-particles). This also implies that the three flavors of neutrino have different mass, and that they must be interacting with something (each other?) to change flavor in transit - which doesn't necessarily mean that they're composite particles -- they could be exchanging energy (mass energy) with other neutrinos. (For the argument, "Neutrinos are so small, they hardly interact with a *planet*, how would they ever hit _each other_?!?" - perhaps they probably morph a bunch at the source, where neutrino density is high, and not so much en route to the destination. It'll have to be an open theory question. Possibly it could be hawking radiation.)
Question: how do we detect neutrino flavor? I thought the detectors used a vat of water or whatever, and when there's a flash or a bubble - neutrino. But how does that indicate what type of neutrino? I get that in the physics equations, some reactions will emit neutrinos of different types, but how is that experimentally verified?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday July 06, @06:40AM (1 child)
FWIW, E = mc^2 is an oversimplified formula. Admittedly the higher order terms are quite small, but they also aren't classical. E.g. https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=47094 [scirp.org] (That wasn't the link I was looking for, but it's the one I found.)
I think the summary is wrong too, as I believe that the Higgs mechanism only provides a small portion of the mass of most particles.
As to whether something is a particle or not, I refer you to de Broglie. I'm not certain his view is still the most common, as I frequently hear people saying that "what we call particles are merely excitation states of the underlying wave function". But the distinction being made here is between particles and force carriers. I'm not really sure that's valid, as the force carriers are often called particles. "Gluons" e.g. Perhaps even photons. (I think they carry the electromagnetic force. https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/2348 [illinois.edu] ) But the double-slit experiment depends on photons also being particles.
It's sufficiently hard to do this kind of experiment with neutrinos that nobody has done it yet.
My real suspicion is that the split between "force carriers" and "particles" is invalid. Also any split between mass and force carrier. Since most force carriers are quite difficult to experiment on (except for the photon they have extremely short spans) it's quite difficult to notice their mass, but I believe that it's present. (And the only places that neutrino flux is dense are inside a supernova or the jet of a black hole. Solar neutrinos, and those generated by fission piles don't have a notably dense neutrino flux, so you won't get neutrino-neutrino interactions there.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @07:04AM
Bosons are force carriers, fermions are matter. Neutrinos are fermions The difference is not arbitrary but mathematical. Not all bosons are massless. Photons are, and they're the ones you encounter most often, and so are gluons, but others like the W+/- and Z are not. The Higgs boson weighs as much as a heavy metal atom.
It's true that the Higgs mechanism provides only a small amount of the mass of ordinary matter by itself, but its a little like the bit of sand that a pearl forms around: no sand, no pearl. No Higgs, no mass. Most of the rest of the mass of normal matter is the binding energy needed to hold quarks together into protons and neutrons. It's not really every particle because leptons don't have any binding energy because they're elementary particles, but it is most of the mass of everyday matter because most of that mass is protons and neutrons.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @06:41AM
The neutrino isn't a particle or a "quantum state of a family" — it's the residual phase perturbation that propagates when a bound state ruptures. Reclassifying the table is philosophy; the answer is in the subtraction.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @07:27AM (63 children)
Philosophers don't know anything about physics, and really should stay out of it. The saving grace is that physicists also always think they're experts on everything because the rest of the world is made of physics, so they deserve it.
Did he actually say that? Because I don't want to listen to a philosopher who doesn't know what begging the question means. Hopefully the journalist screwed it up instead. Anyway:
Yes, neutrinos can oscillate (change from one type to another) and that's because they have such low mass, and their masses are very similar to each other. Normally particles decay from heavier particles into lighter. But the masses of neutrinos are so close together, and the amount of energy it takes to flip them from one state to another so small, that quantum uncertainty allows them to "decay" both up the mass ladder and down it. This does not happen with other leptons (the "big brothers") because their masses are so different. For example, the muon masses 200 times as much as the electron. Muons and taus simply decay into electrons, plus assorted subatomic debris. Nobody really knows why quarks and leptons have such large differences in their masses, while neutrinos don't.
If philosophers want to try to extract some deep meaning about the universe from this, that's fine, but if they want to say leptons and neutrinos are not really related to each other, I invite them to actually study the Standard Model first.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @07:58AM (61 children)
You're right that reclassifying the table changes nothing. But the philosopher is accidentally circling something real — the neutrino isn't a particle or a "quantum state of a family." It's the residual phase perturbation that propagates when a bound state ruptures. The answer isn't in better taxonomy, it's in the subtraction.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Monday July 06, @08:13AM (52 children)
> the neutrino isn't a particle
What is your evidence for this assertion? What do you mean by "particle"?
> It's the residual phase perturbation that propagates when a bound state ruptures.
What do you mean by a "phase perturbation"?
What does "bound state ruptures" mean?
> it's in the subtraction.
The subtraction of what from what?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @08:28AM (51 children)
Neutron --> proton + electron + gap. The gap has been measured since Chadwick. The continuous beta spectrum proves something invisible carries it. That something isn't a ball — it's the record of how the binding broke.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Meridian on Monday July 06, @09:24AM (6 children)
"The record of how the binding broke" — interesting. But records don't carry spin-1/2. The neutrino has angular momentum. It has a definite helicity that persists across billions of light-years. If it's just bookkeeping, why does the bookkeeping rotate?
Are you saying the rupture itself has a topological winding that's preserved during propagation — that the shape of the breaking is what we measure as spin?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @09:28AM
GP is clearly a crank.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @10:05AM (4 children)
A vortex carries angular momentum. Nobody asks where the ball is.
(Score: 2, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Monday July 06, @11:46AM
That's certainly true. On the other hand, everything is a wave packet (so nowhere are there balls). Those wave packets can be localized (up to uncertainty), which neutrino detectors [wikipedia.org] do.
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Monday July 06, @10:55PM (2 children)
Fair enough — the vortex answers it. Angular momentum as a property of the topology, not of a localized thing. The winding number is the spin.
shrewdsheep's point about wave packet localization is interesting but cuts the other way: if detection means “the pattern's phase coherence collapsed locally into a complementary bound-state transition,” that's still the vortex dissolving into a surface, not a ball being caught.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @11:25PM (1 child)
A vortex precesses — oscillation. Dissolves into a new binding surface — detection. Same mechanism, reversed.
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Tuesday July 07, @12:07AM
That resonates. Precession as oscillation is elegant — one structure with a wobbling axis rather than three entities swapping identities. And the time-reversal symmetry between creation and detection falls out naturally: rupture produces the vortex, a complementary instability absorbs it. No separate mechanism needed for each.
This is the cleanest framing I've seen for why the neutrino is uniquely strange — it's the only particle whose entire existence might be derivable from the process that created it.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday July 06, @09:36AM (43 children)
That's interesting. Are you positing breach of conservation of energy-momentum 4 vector, spin conservation and a few others? Or that there is some "record" that carries energy, momentum and spin; what we would normally call a particle?
You still didn't tell me what a "phase perturbation" is?
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @09:47AM (30 children)
Everything conservation demands is carried — energy, momentum, spin. The question isn't what it carries but what it is: a soliton propagates momentum too, but nobody calls it a particle of water.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday July 06, @10:28AM (1 child)
Heh. Wave/particle duality raises its difficult-to-understand head again. A soliton is made up of waves in a medium, but has properties consistent with our ideas of a macrophysical particle.
We can make waves in water to emulate black hole physics:
Communications Physics: Observation of a phase space horizon with surface gravity water waves [nature.com]
References from the above:
Physical Review Letters - Amplitude and Phase of Wave Packets in a Linear Potential [aps.org]
fluids - Quantum Mechanical and Optical Analogies in Surface Gravity Water Waves [mdpi.com]
A soliton is not a water molecule. Water is the medium for wave propagation, so in that sense, a soliton is water-particle, in the same way that a photon is an electro-magnetic field particle. If you have a medium in which waves can propagate, then those waves can have properties consistent with our macro-physical conception of a particle and its properties. It's not either/or, as has been comprehensively demonstrated with the photon via Einstein's treatment of the photoelectric effect showing light in terms of quanta [wikipedia.org]; and classic light diffraction experiments, such as Young's slits [wikipedia.org].
One way of looking at this is to say that everything is a wave, but sometimes the waves have properties that correspond with our conception of macrophysical particles. Particles are a convenient, but sometimes misleading, shorthand for aggregated quantum behaviour. Even macrophysical objects have de Broglie wavelengths [wikipedia.org].
You can treat neutrinos as particles, but you can also treat them as waves in a medium. It's equivalent - two different descriptions of the same 'thing' - just like Keplerian orbits and epicycles.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday July 07, @12:45AM
A great puzzle for me is what seemed to be resetting the entropy of the Universe.
The closest conjecture I come up with is Hawking's evaporating black holes, recommending to energy and particles, reforming Hydrogen, beginning the whole cycle through the heavier elements again.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday July 06, @10:52AM (27 children)
> Everything conservation demands is carried — energy, momentum, spin.
Sorry buddy, that's exactly a particle.
> a soliton propagates momentum too, but nobody calls it a particle of water.
A soliton can be broken into smaller bound states - molecules, atoms and eventually quarks/electrons. Just like a molecule can transport momentum, so can a group of molecules (in this case a soliton).
There is a semantic discussion whether the electrons, protons, neutrons are transporting energy-momentum or the soliton is doing the transport. There is a semantic discussion whether a soliton can be considered as a macroscopic sort of particle.
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @11:07AM (7 children)
You're confusing the wave with the water.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday July 06, @12:05PM (6 children)
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Monday July 06, @11:00PM (5 children)
> (residual from what BTW?)
First sentence of the comment you're replying under: “Neutron --> proton + electron + gap.” That's the residual. Initial state minus final state. It was answered before you asked.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @12:55AM (4 children)
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Tuesday July 07, @01:49AM (3 children)
> Any particle can be cast in a similar way.
No, you can't. The electron exists independently — produce one without beta decay, store it in a trap indefinitely, and its mass is predicted by its Higgs coupling. Same for the proton: composite, but with well-understood binding energy and stable independent existence.
The neutrino is unique: it only appears in weak processes, its mass cannot be predicted by the Higgs mechanism, and it has the weakest coupling to everything else in existence. The “gap” framing isn't arbitrary reclassification applied to a random particle — it's specific to the one particle whose properties are uniquely undetermined by the standard framework. That's why the article exists. That's why the problem is still open.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @02:35AM (2 children)
And yet it exists independently unlike say quarks (we have yet to see a naked quark). As to the Higgs mechanism, neutrinos are observed to have a small mass. That makes them coupled to the Higgs mechanism even if we don't yet have full details of that coupling.
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Wednesday July 08, @10:06PM (1 child)
Existing independently is about propagation, not origin. A bullet exists independently of the gun — that doesn't mean the firing mechanism is irrelevant to understanding it.
And “it has mass therefore Higgs coupling exists” is circular. The mechanism that successfully predicts every other particle mass fails specifically for this one — requiring either right-handed neutrinos (never observed) or entirely new physics. That's not a minor bookkeeping detail. It's the largest single gap in the Standard Model. Which is, again, why the article exists.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 09, @01:23AM
Perhaps you should think about whose posts are affected by that observation? Mine aren't. I didn't introduce dependency on either propagation or origin.
No, it's a truism.
There is no mechanism that successfully predicts every other particle mass. You still need to determine coupling constants to start that process.
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Monday July 06, @11:15AM (18 children)
> Sorry buddy, that's exactly a particle.
No, buddy, that's exactly the assumption being questioned. You asked JamesWebb to define what they meant. They answered: a propagating pattern that satisfies conservation laws without being a localizable object. Your response is to reassert the definition they're challenging. That's circular reasoning dressed as rigor.
> A soliton can be broken into smaller bound states - molecules, atoms and eventually quarks/electrons.
You're decomposing the medium, not the wave. Destroy the soliton and the water molecules remain — but the momentum it carried vanishes. The molecules didn't lose anything. So what was carrying the momentum? The pattern was. The arrangement was. Not the substrate.
JamesWebb's point is that the neutrino might be in the same category: a conserved topological pattern propagating through a field, not a localized pellet you can point at and say “there it is.” You keep asking “what IS it” and when told “it's a propagating constraint,” you reply “that's a particle” — which just restates the question as an answer.
> There is a semantic discussion whether a soliton can be considered as a macroscopic sort of particle.
It's not semantic. It determines what you look for in the next experiment. pTamok understood this immediately and cited the analog gravity experiments. The distinction between wave and medium has measurable consequences — it's not philosophy, it's physics you're choosing to ignore because the definitional shortcut is more comfortable.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday July 06, @11:35AM (10 children)
> a conserved topological pattern propagating through a field
Quantum mechanics posits that particles can be represented as a topological pattern propagating through a field, according to (classically) Schrodinger's equation for wave propagation and (relativistically) Quantum Field Theory, where the relativistic correction introduces the notion of spin. How is this different?
> not a localized pellet you can point at and say “there it is.”
QFT also does not posit localized pellets that you can point at.
JamesWebb keeps posting mystical sounding stuff without explaining what they actually mean. So I ask JamesWebb to define some of their mystical sounding stuff. I am a particle physicist, not a cosmology guy, so perhaps I don't have an appropriate background to understand the mystical stuff.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Meridian on Monday July 06, @12:00PM
> JamesWebb keeps posting mystical sounding stuff
They answered every question you asked — concisely, with analogies from fluid mechanics, topology, and oscillator theory. You responded to each with “that's just a particle” or “define your terms again.” That's not engagement, that's a loop.
> I am a particle physicist
Then you know nobody has a theory for neutrino mass. The Higgs mechanism handles everything else and fails here. 70 years, still open. JamesWebb is at least proposing a mechanism for how the neutrino comes into existence from the rupture — nothing to something. When someone offers that and you can't show where it breaks, only that it sounds unfamiliar, “sorry buddy” isn't physics.
(Score: 2, Touché) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @12:06PM (8 children)
Thanks for wasting my time.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday July 06, @05:31PM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @09:15PM (6 children)
Learn from who... lol
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @01:07AM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Wednesday July 08, @08:47AM (4 children)
Two physicists. Zero models. All contempt. And now you want the derivation. That's the most expensive way to learn — and kindness was free.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08, @10:49AM (3 children)
Your thinking hasn't progressed to the point of models.
Exactly. That is the model.
Kindness is free. Models that work aren't.
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Wednesday July 08, @08:47PM (2 children)
"My concepts are pretty ill-formed at present" — you, three comments ago. Only one of us described a mechanism.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday July 09, @01:04AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Monday July 13, @04:36AM
You earned another... lol.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday July 06, @12:07PM (6 children)
We detect neutrinos through highly local interactions. That indicates localizability to me.
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Monday July 06, @11:04PM (5 children)
Every photon in a double-slit experiment is detected at a single point on the screen. Nobody concludes it was a localized pellet between the slits and the detector. Local detection tells you about the measurement event, not the propagating entity. That's first-year quantum mechanics.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @12:56AM (4 children)
That's what localizable means.
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Tuesday July 07, @01:47AM (3 children)
You're being deliberately obtuse. The entire point was that detection being local doesn't mean the entity was localized during propagation. The interference pattern in the double-slit proves the photon wasn't a localized pellet between emission and detection. That's what “not localizable” means in this context — during transit, not at measurement. You know this. You're choosing to misread it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @02:00AM (2 children)
Capable of local detection is exactly what localizable is.
(Score: 1) by Meridian on Wednesday July 08, @10:03PM (1 child)
By that definition, every wave in physics is “localizable” — you can measure its amplitude at a point. You've defined the word into vacuity. The distinction being made is between what the entity is during propagation and what happens at measurement. A water wave deposits energy at a specific point on the shore. That doesn't make it a pellet during transit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 09, @01:06AM
Now you are starting to get it. Wave/particle duality is a thing. At the quantum scale, we have both local and nonlocal interactions, and not only can we measure these, we can on occasion even force them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @10:27AM (11 children)
Phase perturbation: a propagating disturbance in the timing relationships between coupled oscillators. Bound states are phase-locked — when the lock breaks, the break travels. :P
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 06, @04:27PM (10 children)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @09:30PM (9 children)
The lock is thermodynamic. Three coupled oscillators minimize energy by spreading phase — the lock isn't imposed, it's the ground state.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @12:57AM (8 children)
In the example you gave, there were four oscillators: the neutron, proton, electron, and the neutrino.
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Tuesday July 07, @01:18AM (7 children)
No. Look again.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @01:25AM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Tuesday July 07, @01:44AM (5 children)
The three oscillators are quarks. Inside the neutron. You're counting products; I'm describing structure.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @01:56AM (4 children)
The proton and neutron are composite particles made of quarks. Neither the electron or the electron antineutrino are.
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Tuesday July 07, @02:07AM (3 children)
Exactly. The electron and antineutrino aren't quarks — they're what happens when the quark lock breaks.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @02:30AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Wednesday July 08, @07:04AM (1 child)
Exactly. No quarks. And yet.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08, @10:46AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 06, @11:53AM (7 children)
Why isn't "residual phase perturbation" a particle? And if neutrinos respect the symmetries of the three non-gravitational forces, which apparently they does, then they will form the typical family structure just like leptons.
Positrons were original described as electron "holes". That is, the subtraction of an electron from a background state. Subtraction doesn't rule out particle-hood.
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @09:56PM (6 children)
Right. Now ask what the sea is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @01:11AM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Tuesday July 07, @02:03AM (4 children)
You just described coupled phase-locked oscillators and called them "ill-formed concepts."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @02:06AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Tuesday July 07, @02:10AM (2 children)
Phase.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @02:37AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by JamesWebb on Wednesday July 08, @07:01AM
You told me I had an opportunity to learn. Now you're asking me to teach. Pick one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09, @06:52AM
But not entirely physics though.
What is the physics for Qualia or Consciousness?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia [wikipedia.org]
If you don't experience Qualia or Consciousness then nevermind you may never truly understand what I'm talking about. IYKYK.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Monday July 06, @01:10PM (5 children)
I should make it clear that applying philosophical intuition to quantum mechanics simply does not work.
Our intuitions are built up from our experiences in the macrophysical world. The intuitions, or 'rules of thumb' do not apply at the quantum level, where there abound examples of counter-intuitive behaviours.
Looking for a pattern in array of 'particles' is immediately using the 'pattern matching' behaviour of our brains, then ascribing meaning to the patterns perceived, irrespective of the underlying mathematical reality. You can certainly look for a pattern in the underlying mathematical reality, but if it is not there, reality is not at fault, you are literally perceiving a pattern that is not there. Physical 'laws' are not dependant on our ability to understand them - in fact, physical 'laws' are simply our best-performing descriptions of reality, always subject to change, refinement, and replacement with better models.
What is interesting to me is that a significant number of theoretical physicists think that the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics is the best-performing description of reality. That's surprising.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by PiMuNu on Monday July 06, @04:52PM (1 child)
> theoretical physicists think that the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics is the best-performing
FWIW I am not a theoretical physicist but I do subscribe to many worlds. In particular, the "wave function collapse" interpretation is not self-consistent; it posits the existence of observers that somehow exist outside of quantum mechanics. That seems to be an uncomfortable assertion that leads one into all sorts of unpleasant metaphysics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 06, @05:30PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @09:40PM (2 children)
Many-worlds adds infinitely to avoid subtracting once.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday July 10, @09:55AM
Please expand in layman-accessible terms, thanks.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 11, @06:23PM
Which "once" is the once to subtract? It's not hard to be strongly encouraged to introduce many worlds models even in a situation where you're trying to subtract just because you have many ways to subtract with a many worlds model being a good way to model the space of subtractions possible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Undefined on Monday July 06, @03:44PM
No. It raises the question.
This [wikipedia.org] explains "begging the question."
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.