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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the dual argument about zero, for which the impossibility of a completely empty region of spacetime is given as an example. That may be so, but a region empty of countable things like atoms seems physically conceivable. I am writing from a room containing zero elephants.

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Rules of the macroscopic world do not apply to the subatomic (or even molecular) world. There are no two identical elephants in the world. On the other hand, you will have a hard time to tell two electrons or even two molecules of the same configuration apart from another.

A total empty region, void of any atoms etc., still contains 'quantum noise' and thus virtual particles. The world, the universe as we know it so far has become inconceivable without this observation, known as the uncertainty principle.

I find the argument quite convincing.

> The world, the universe as we know it so far has become inconceivable without this observation, known as the uncertainty principle.

Not really, deterministic interpretations of QM don't require such mental contortions.

I'm far from an expert but any deterministic interpretation of QM (including the popular De Broglie–Bohm) is required to still maintain the uncertainty principle - otherwise it would be falsified by showing it conflicts with the results of hundreds of known experiments.

Yes, but it violates the original claim that rules of the macroscopic world don't apply in this realm. de Broglie-Bohm is a classical theory with a extra term to account for quantum behaviour.

The field theory covering "quantum noise", the existence of virtual particles, and the vacuum is also completely different.

Old shaky hands aiming a looking glass at one of two moving elephants standing close by each other would tell a different story, perhaps.

I'm not sure how well established Virtual Quantum Noise is, but saying that an empty place contains this is just wrong. If it has an effect in the propagation of a real particle in to said space, it wouldn't be empty anymore. That's confusing, and it might be helpful to note that these quantum fluctuations happen on the boundaries of the space, not just everywhere (and if they did, they wouldn't matter any more than my imaginary friend the pink elephant Safr riding the fluctuations).

You are talking of black holes, by the way, aren't you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

I did say "on the boundaries", though

The complete wave function of your room contains some elephant-like fluctuations in the distant decimal places.

A functioning brain is posited to spontaneously appear in about 10^10^50 years due to random fluctuations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

I'm not sure if a functioning elephant is more or less likely to be honest....

I have met the Queen of England exactly zero times.

To piggyback, and inflect on, whatshisface's point, the number of times you've met the Queen of England is not a physical thing. You can't describe the Queen of England with a physical function either, even if you could describe her physical body, you can't capture what she means to the United Kingdom, which is at least 40% of the context being dealt with here.

Okay... I meant Elisabeth Alexandra Mary, of House Windsor, born 21 April 1926 at 17 Burton Street, London.

Those are all socially-agreed truths, as opposed to physically demonstrable truths.

And the QoE isn't a discrete entity. Her molecules are constantly reacting and atoms are entering and leaving her. One h2o is some distant decimal place percentage of the QoE

The complete wavefunction of you and the Queen of England involves a handshake-like fluctuation in the distant decimal places.

But once either of us dies there won't. Zero can be meaningful in describing the world. I agree infinity, in its truest sense, can't... but zero definitely can.

No, no, null is not meaningful. That's the whole point. It is meaningful as neutral element of a ring, as center of a coordinate system or as limit of some function, sure, but only in comparison to other values and the other values are all that matters. Not having the other values, having literally nothing, the word ''having'' would be meaningless. There is always something.

There's something about nihilism. It's being a self defeating argument, but educating. Then there's constructivism in various senses.

There's something about finitism, too, computable numbers and what not. Infinity is rather ... monotonous.

but how is 0 any different from any other number then?

If you're going to look at more than just integers, infinity is everywhere, in between every number you can count, and then some! 0 is as meaningless but so is every other number!

If you limit to integers or even just whole numbers, 0 is meaningful, just like all the numbers...

0 is a symbol, but that symbol has quite literally no value. It is special that way.

What's the rest mass of a photon? What's the electric charge of a neutrino? What's the spin of a Higgs boson?

> region empty of countable things like atoms seems physically conceivable

As far as I know this is not physically conceivable, if physically conceivable means physical laws as we understand them.

Quantum vacuum state, or zero-point field is not completely void empty.

My [lay] understanding is that a portion of spacetime has yet to be found that has 0 countable things. I also believe 'countable' gets tricky the more you zoom in, as it were.

I think that's the craziest thing, every time we get smaller, we find more stuff. "Atom" means "indivisible". It was supposed to be the smallest unit of matter.

Then we found things smaller. Sub-atomic particles. Literally makes no sense because it literally means smaller than the smallest thing.

The universe is apparently fractal af.

Your room and elephants are different objects. Your room has some size and it is not empty but it has zero elephants or a finite number of zero size elephants.

0 = nothing = non-existence.

How would you eliminate electromagnetic fields or inconceivably small particles like neutrinos from entering?

Somewhere in an infinite number of multiverses there is a room with both you and an elephant.

There are even those in which you are the elephant.

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