titus is right though, the act of measuring does impact the system.

fun fact, everything is a wave. a particle is a very short wavelength wave.

I read this a year or two ago, had a hard time grasping some of the concepts throughout but it was definitely something interesting to consider. Will re-read soon.

heres another idea to chew on. most of us are familiar with the equation E=mc^2 this is the relationship between rest mass and energy. what it means is that mass can be annihilated into pure electromagnetic energy, aka photons.

and it was also observed in the lab that light was successful bound together to create subatomic particles.

so, mass can be broken down into light, and light can be bound into mass. it seems logical to draw from this that the most basic building block of the universe is light.

This depends entirely on your interpretation of quantum mechanics. If you accept Wigner/ Von Neumann's "Consciousness causes collapse" interpretation, which is somewhat solipsistic, then you cannot actually say the plant or the sunlight even exists there. If you detect that they grew, you localized it, and now it has collapsed to that state. Prior to that, its state was actually not defined sharply. The difference is really semantically if it's you who is required to detect the state or if objects are allowed to detect things.

You can read more about this interesting thought experiment here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend

A fun take on Schrodinger's cat where a conscious observer (your friend) is entangled with the system.

But who was unification energies? At higher energies, the fields are unified. It isn't photons, but some other particles that exist at those energies. Light is not the most basic building block of the universe. It's something way weirder. And time and space may emerge from some fundamental chit as well.

i agree...

was about to summon you to chit all over this
Fixed. Gotta sound like youunderstandit and all

but i do. i argued Schrodinger's cat is based on semantics in high school to a smart guy thats doing his phd in stem right now (and dad was a schizophrenic).

No your argument breaks down at the double slit experiment... Although, your post breaks down when you call readers "bovine" like that's some kind of high brow insult that only your enlightened intelligence can issue.


I can only assume by the fact that you linked to Spirit Science that you are A. Trolling, or B. Getting your information from Youtube cartoons like "what the bleep do we know", which are about equivalent to Harry Potter for explaining natural phenomena. I'm no particle physicist, just read a lot of Feynman. But reading the arguments in this thread makes me feel like a got damn Einstein.

And I could dive head first into this chitfest with real information but lettuce be real. It's not worth it, I'd rather search for musicals on Netflix and watch the first thing that comes up.



Oh. And fukking duh life is a giant game of Minecraft, how do you think they came up with such an idea? Subatomic particles make up everything; hmmemoji.jpeg how bout we make a game where particles (blocks) make up everything?

Schrodinger's cat itself isn't based on semantics. Wigner's friend is. Schrodinger's cat illustrates the weirdness of tying classical binary states to quantum objects. It actually demonstrates a lot about the advantages of quantum computing. And it shows that a cat can be put in a superposition of states where we lack the language to describe this in english (the cat isn't really both alive and dead because that is logically impossible), but in math terms, it is easy. The cat is certainly not "both alive or dead". In fact, the cat's state is essentially indeterminate prior to the act of measurement. Its state is simply entangled with that of the quantum system, and so the state is in a superposition of the state of being alive and that of being dead. This is not the same as the cat being both alive and dead, which is impossible.

BTW if you guys want to see something cool that strongly demonstrates that there definitely is something weird about measurement, check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect

You can delay the decay of a particle by measuring it. To put it in laymen's terms, the watched quantum pot doesn't boil. Weird chit, huh boyos?

Not sure why everyone is knocking Busta. His statements (at least in the first post) are, to a first approximation, essentially correct. Measurement does affect the system, and the phenomenon I linked above is actually one very cool way to see this. Another is the double slit experiment, where detection of a particle at a slit destroys the diffraction pattern. The double slit is also very cool because if you send a single electron (a "PARTICLE" with mass which you wouldn't think is a wave) toward the double slit without detecting it at the slit, you will see it land somewhere weird on the screen that may seem unlikely if it just went through a single hole. Ok so if you repeat this over and over and look at the intensity pattern for where the electron hit on the screen, you will see a diffraction pattern, which is super weird and implies that somehow the electron interfered with itself. This suggests the electron is "really" a wave that interferes with itself as it passes through each hole. However, more fundamental considerations about quantum mechanics, coupled with the fact that all electrons are supposedly indistinguishable from each other, along with the theory of relativity leads you to abandon the wave/particle notion for the most part and start talking about this weird quantum field defined all over the place which can chit out what you would think is a particle or a wave. And that's where conventional physics is at today. More fundamental aspects lead one to go to ideas like strings and other stuff.

Damn bro you sound as mad as all hell lmao.

How do you know they grow if you are not watching them?

You see them at one point, and then you see them later and they are bigger.

Prove that they've actually grown, and that what you're looking at is not a rendered simulation.

The whole simulation thing adds nothing to physics lol. Whether we are in a simulation or not is irrelevant. It is real to us. Now, the holographic principle does show us that what we perceive is happening, in a sense, on the boundary of some larger higher dimensional space. The "real" or more complete understanding of the universe would be the theory of this space and may be required to do correct calculations about how things act on the boundary. That's basically leading to this idea:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence, and researchers have found that higher dimensional string theories in that bulk space can be put in correspondence to quantum field theories on the boundary of that space (which is the 4d spacetime we know).

Just lol @ you people who haven't figured it out yet

thats sad

Because he's misinterpreting the science, and getting his information from new age sites. "Observation" in the physical sense has been proven to have nothing to do with either consciousness or sensors. It's just practically inconvenient and philosophically interesting that sensors are made of matter and thus are part of the system, but the reason they collapse the wave function is not that an intelligent being or even some kind of sensor is watching the system, a rock would collapse the wave function just the same.

visible light is one small spectrum of energy. fields are said to be composed of photons too, but they're called virtual photons, which i believe can be understood as being basically the same thing as regular photons although curled up in space time geometry differently than traditional photons.

nuclear weak force and nuclear strong force have both been tied to electricity and magnetism, we just havent found the link to gravity and e&m

Nothin too new its almost certain we live in a ‘simulation.’ Every new double slit variation pushes us that direction. it’s like making a robot and saying “wow humans are robots!” when robots are modeled after humans. Our computers are modeled after real life in a way.

And to whoever says that observation is interacting with the particle, that’s ruled out by measuring the particle’s entangled pair instead. So you have to explain entanglement as well btw.

Older schools of thought talked about this, Islamic theology and mysticism and even somewhere in the Soto Zen school basically says that our universe runs frame by frame almost 1000 years ago (today we understand that as a movie) – this solves all the double slit problems/entanglement probs.

if it is then my game is glitching hard who should I contact?

Both entangled particles are part of the same quantum sub-system. When the rest of the universe interacts one of the particles, the particles cease to be entangled.

I don't know what your point is.

So a tree falling in a forest with no one around, does not make a sound?

the idea is that when you send a wave through a double slit you get an interference pattern like this



if you build this set up and send multiple electrons through one at a time you get the same interference pattern, meaning the electron is a probability distribution (wave)

put a detector on the set up and the electrons are collapsed down to a particle. in physics talk, the wave distribution has been changed to a kroneker delta function

before measuring the electron basically exists as this, a probability distribution



after measuring, the wave distribution has been collapsed down to this


heres how i understand entanglement.

relativity states that no one particular reference frame is more fundamental than any other, so its equally valid to describe events in any. so observe two entangled particles from the infinite momentum reference frame. information is able to instantaneously propagate because in this reference frame the two particles are still touching eachother.

you could go further and say that if the big bang theory is correct and all matter in the universe all started out at a point of zero volume then therefore the entire universe is entangled. but if you think about it, what would that say about the past, present and future?

They are virtual particles, but I don't think they are photons.

Explain since that’s not what’s shown in the delayed choice eraser set up

fields are composed of virtual photons. what makes them "virtual" is that they can not be directly detected but they have a measurable effect

fields also exert surface pressure, which would mean that there has to be some kind of farce carying particle there

Not all fields...

The higgs field and gravitational fields have nothing to do with photons (well at least not until u unify them).

But I agree with what you are saying about virtual particles and stuff. The casimir effect is a good example to sort of show they exist although there are other possible explanations. I just disagree that light is the fundamental building block or w/e. Light emerges from the more fundamental unified field.

higgs boson is a virtual photon. the graviton is a virtual photon as well

I think we are both using the word differently then. I was under the impression that virtual photons were just short term fluctuation photons. A photon generally has a specific meaning. Massless, spin 1, representing EM field. Gravitons are spin 2, and Higgs has no spin. Are you saying a virtual photon is not distinct from a virtual graviton?

The way the erasure experiment works, is that it shows how this interaction (or "observation") is reversible. If you cut all causal links from the outcome of this wavefunction collapse to the rest of the universe, basically ensuring that the outcome of the collapse has no effect at all on other quantum systems besides the one involved in the erasure, then the collapse is reversed and the quantum system behaves like it hadn't collapsed at all.

So it's not about whether somebody saw the tree fall, it's more about the fallen tree not disturbing or influencing the rest of the forest in any way, shape or form.

these are all very abstract ideas and using words to describe it is likely going to lead to confusion. the most effective way of describing it would probably be with math.

photons do have mass though, but its not rest mass, its relativistic acquisition of mass.