No Subject (Part 2)

Brilliant stuff, you mathematicians! Now I have a new assignment for you:

Explain quantum mechanics. In layman's terms, please.

I'll wait.

2019Guy--

Do you want the Copenhagen interpretation, the DeBroglie-Bohm interpretation, or Bayseianist interpretation?

“Explain quantum mechanics. In layman's terms, please.”

You never know where an electron may be. As for quarks, some are charming but there’s some strange ones too.

That’s all the help I have 2019guy.

At the subatomic level, everything is random. Which leads to the apparently highly ordered universe we can see.

For more information, Steven Hawkings "A brief history of Time" is a pretty good lay explanation. Don't even think about doing the math until you can solve partial differential equations. Whatever they are. Quarks come in 4 flavors: up, down, charmed, and strange. It takes 3 quarks to form a particle, such as a proton or neutron.

halbert said...
At the subatomic level, everything is random. Which leads to the apparently highly ordered universe we can see.

For more information, Steven Hawkings "A brief history of Time" is a pretty good lay explanation. Don't even think about doing the math until you can solve partial differential equations. Whatever they are. Quarks come in 4 flavors: up, down, charmed, and strange. It takes 3 quarks to form a particle, such as a proton or neutron.

Thank you, Halbert. In fact some years back I read it. That is, my eyes went across the pages as I spoke the words silently to myself. But that's all I say about my comprehension. I have no aptitude for math or physics (musician and writer by trade) but the stuff fascinates me. I read these layman's books by guys like Sean Carroll, Max Tegmark, Brian Greene, Lee Smolin, etc. and understand (more or less) the title page. It goes downhill from there. But it's enough to keep my mind spinning for days!

After posting the above, just for fun I googled:

"quantum mechanics" "prostate cancer"

just to see if such an odd combination would pull up anything at all.

Interestingly, some articles about QM and cancer in general did come up, such as the one below.

It's a bit technical, and definitely beyond my pay grade as they say, but the point of it seems to be that some of the principles behind QM can be adapted for use in the modification of certain molecules to better them in attacking cancer cells.

Quantum mechanics as a cancer fighter? Who knew?

https://news.psu.edu/story/140818/1995/09/01/research/cancer-and-quantum-mechanics

I'll have to ask my brother--he's the physicist. However, Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle states that you can either know where a particle is, or how fast it's moving and in which direction, the reason being that the act of making the measurement of location (for example) affects the motion in some undetermined way. In classical physics, you can know on a macro level location, speed, and direction (say you're in your car and driving down the highway).

That is the fundamental randomness of it all. When a radioactive nucleus emits a neutron through decay, we cannot know WHICH one of several neutrons it will be, we don't know which direction it will move, and which other nucleus it will hit and cause to split in two. We know that it's happening, it will happen, and what the effect (a chain reaction) will be.

It's not that it's random so much as that quantum actions/interactions operate under a completely different set of rules than big stuff does. Those rules can be expressed in algebraic equation form. Once you know the parameters and the variables, you can move things around on paper and come up with more information. Sometimes you can then contrive an experiment in the lab to check that result.

One partial differential equation tells you how long a cup of coffee takes to cool down enough to safely sip.

I thought this post was about nothing. Quantum mechanics is something. I could talk for hours about quantum mechanics. But since I know nothing about it, my talking could bring us back to nothing.

Its all good.How about this?.This thread is more about RAP= random acts of posting, no particular subject, but a mash of many!! I am enjoying it and it is building up my reply total.
Winging it!

Redwing,
Well, basically because infinity isn't really a number. It's a concept, not a number.

I agree it's confusing. We need someone with a PhD in Mathematics to answer. Anyone, Buhler, Buhler, ...

Someone asked a physicist about nothing:

“Just truly nothingness—not a quantum theory vacuum—just the absence of anything,” Carroll said. “Given that we’re in a post-general relativity world, we know that space and time are not fixed and absolute; they are dynamical. Einstein said that space and time are warped by energy, so it’s probably better to think of nothing as the absence of even space and time, rather than space and time without anything in them. There’s a big difference between empty space and nothing.”

While it’s important to keep this definition of nothing in mind, Carroll added, it’s not really of any service to the field of physics. “‘Something’ is interesting; nothingness is interesting only insofar as it's the absence of something.”

The same someone asked a philosopher about nothing:

“I’ve never been able to understand nothingness completely, but I can get close to it when I watch professional bowling on television"


Well guys, I think we have come as close to figuring it out as have the physicist and the philosopher.