#quantam mechanics

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I do not like it, and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

- Erwin Schrödinger on quantam mechanics

[instantvoid---microwaveable]

Currently thinking bout quantum mechanics... I read that a principle of quantum mechanics is that a particle, like an electron, can pass through two holes at the same time. Tryna visualize and I wonder, is it two holes side by side and the electrons somehow phasing through both? Like this:

It's supposed to be one electron somehow going through both... Or if both the holes were one in front of the other:

The electron can therefore be in the middle of the two. Ofcourse that raises the question which way did it come in from? Because that would be the hole it passes through first. Okay trust none of the info on here, ik nothing about quantam mechanics.

[liskantope]

[Content warning: weird and possibly harmful trains of thought; I’m mostly okay and don’t feel too engulfed by them and just think they’d be interesting to examine in writing but this might be an ideahazard for someone I guess?]

Lately I’ve been unable to stop thinking of all the ways that this situation could be much worse for me personally. For example, the home I’m stuck spending most of my time in now is nicer than pretty much anywhere else I’ve lived in most of the last decade. In particular, my living situation 4 years ago, which involved a very poorly-thought-out set-up in an oppressive studio apartment with only 1G of internet a day, would have made this a several times greater nightmare. (That’s not even considering that when I was living in that place, I was in the exact part of Europe that became a hotspot for the disease six months after I eventually left it!)

On the one hand, considering how fortunate one is in the grand scheme of things seems like a healthy endeavor. On the other hand, it often has a negative effect on my emotions. Part of this is due to the knowledge that if my circumstances were X this would be a lot tougher points to the fact that for someone else (in fact, for thousands of other people!), circumstances are X and they are having to suffer somewhere.

But another reason I don’t take comfort in noting how things could be worse -- as weird as this sounds when I stop to think about it -- is that my awareness of why I’m lucky my circumstances aren’t X sort of implies that in an alternate universe my circumstances are X and I’m suffering right now. It’s like, realizing that things could be different and it’s only by pure lucky chance that they aren’t makes me feel in my gut that somehow the other shoe has to drop, and since I’m not going to go back in time the only way for the universe to do that would be to create an alternate version of myself which is experiencing circumstances being X. This virus could very well have broken out 4 years ago and locked me in that awful, internet-deprived studio apartment, that was just as likely as what is happening now, so it feels just as real, which part of my brain somehow translates into it being an alternate reality.

It’s like I’m wired on some level to alieve in a many-worlds hypothesis over pure randomness or something. I’ve vaguely noticed this about myself before, but I don’t think it’s ever reared its head this strongly prior to our current crisis.

[i-am-kira]

Decided to finally be productive...

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.

- Werner Heisenberg

By 1924, the 23 year old Werner Heisenberg was already a brilliant physicist and so he went to research with Niels Bohr, the director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen. His paper, “Quantum Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations” was published a year later. After his return to Gottingen, he developed the matrix mechanics formulation of quantum mechanics. He was around 27 years old when in 1927, Heisenberg developed his famed Uncertainty Principal while in Copenhagen. That same year, he became a professor of theoretical physics and head of the physics department at the University of Leipzig. Werner Heisenberg received the Novel Prize in Physics in 1932 for his Uncertainty Principle, though he had been previously nominated in 1928 by Albert Einstein.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

- Werner Heisenberg, physicist (not the crystal meth chemist king pin)

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence. And yet it moved.

- Cormac McCarthy

[liskantope]

My reaction to Rationality: from AI to Zombies

My reaction to Rationality: from AI to Zombies

[Content note: The title pretty much says it all.  Like with my last “reaction” post, I prefer to think of this more as a smattering of stray thoughts on the book than as a thorough review.] Around a month ago, I finally managed to finish Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Sequences”, compiled by Rob Bensinger into a book called Rationality: from AI to Zombies, after slowly plowing through it over the course…

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