A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics

http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0007254

Science like this has to be slow and careful. Sudden magical breakthroughs are vanishingly rare, and this probably isn't one; but it is interesting, and worth getting excited about.

.. just don't go throwing your Standard Model quite yet. :)

Why aren't you asking them for their qualifications, then? Serious question, think about what your choice implies. Is it that "you want to believe", perhaps?

You don't need a PhD in quantum physics to detect the hype in this article. The comment I responded to was reacting more to the unsupported claims and hype than any actual discovery.

"yet you dismiss it"

I'm not dismissing that the work could have value, but the article makes claims that go far beyond anything that's been demonstrated.

Of course, I love Tegmark's speculative work. But that's all it is, speculative. It's like reading science fiction, one shouldn't confuse it with reality, at least not without evidence to justify that.

> It's the idea that every mathematical structure just 'exists', like 'poof magic', and the simpler ones would, like, have greater weight.

There's no evidence that this is how reality works, and there's no particular reason to think that it should work this way.

> A corollary is, the simpler the laws of physics are, the more probable the above hypothesis is. And suddenly we learn that the true laws of physics might be much simpler than we anticipated? This is huge. Or not.

All current evidence is that it's a fantasy, one which happens to be so attractive to some people that they're willing to suspend critical thinking to favor it, much as people do with belief in supernatural beings.

There are certainly cases where basic mathematical principles are expressed in a very direct way in the universe. Probability in quantum mechanics is one example, Noether's Theorem is another. But even in these cases, saying that some property of the universe arises from pure mathematics is misleading.

To boil down the objection, mathematics is a way to describe and model these phenomena, and shouldn't be confused with the phenomena themselves. Doing so is a map/territory style confusion.

If you want to say that the universe arises from pure mathematics, you then have to explain what sort of phenomenon pure mathematics is, that it is capable of producing such effects. To use my analogy, it would be a bit like saying "The topography of Earth arises from a pure map."

> The idea of a timeless universe, where our subjective notion of time just arise from its structure has been around for quite some… time.

That's a little different from the idea that reality is an incarnation of pure mathematics. In case, the fact that ideas have been around for some time has little bearing on their validity. Consider astrology.

> Likewise, Occam's Razor itself suggests that the true laws of physics are simpler than we think.

It does not actually suggest that in general. It can mean that in cases where an explanation contains unnecessary elements, but it says nothing about explanations necessarily being simple, or simpler than they already are.

> Plus, current human laws of physics are either false or incomplete.

I prefer to think in terms of models than laws, and models are always incomplete. The only complete model is the thing being modeled itself.

> I fully expect future physics to be further simplified. Claims of massive simplification are therefore not that surprising.

By your premise, actual simplification would not be surprising, but claims have no necessary correlation to actual simplifications.

Sorry to be picky!

We can have a classical analogy to this. Put a blue ball and a red ball in a black box. Shake the box. Without looking, take a ball from the box and put it in a black safe. That way, you should have no idea which ball in in the safe.

Now send the black box to your colleagues on Mars, along with a copy of your experimental protocol. Let them open the box. And, lo and behold, the instant they see the ball, they know which colour your ball is, despite the fact you're separated by several light-minutes. As if information travelled faster than light —no, scrap that, instantaneously.

Quite underwhelming, isn't it? Well, the EPR though (and actual) experiments work on similar principles: there is a common cause. When 2 particles are entangled, it means they share information. When you send those particles away in opposite directions, they carry this information with them, at Slower Than Light speed. Then we perform some experiment on one of the two particles, and we know instantly how some other experiment is likely to turn out with the other particle.

It's that mundane. It only gets confusing when you talk of "probabilities", instead of talking of the square of complex amplitudes… which are a bit different from actual probabilities. In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, we tend to think of the universe as unique, and the laws of physics have some fundamental randomness in them. The Many World interpretation is simpler: no randomness, just a universe that splits in multiple blobs that eventually cease to interact with each other (The split is not instantaneous: it propagates at the speed of light at most).

So, when you perform that experiment with the first particle, you're not telling the second one how to behave. You merely learn which universe you are living in.

---

Now, find a reliably replicated experiment where information was transmitted faster than light, and I will be choking through sheer astonishment.

What Bell experiments disprove is local realism. In the conventional formulation of quantum physics (quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, etc.) it's realism that takes the fall. Locality is still crucial in the conventional perspective.

There's no continuum because some things are harder, others are easy.

Computers have evolved pretty much "continually" since the personal computer era, but they took some time to be invented.

Quantum mechanics evolved "quickly" once we found out there was such a thing as quantum mechanics, up until them it was a lot of "banging heads" and freewheeling.

Not to mention delays because of other constraints: wars, political instabilities, etc

However, you do not need start with a time dependent wave function to justify the time-independent wave function.

Outside of that there really isn't a 'reason'. This isn't how physics works, although it's certainly in our nature to create and expect meaning and cause everywhere. Brain is bound to think in hierarchies, because that's how it's built to operate, but the universe doesn't have that limitation.