Wednesday, April 05, 2017

Seven years later

Seven years away from this blog. The biggest change is that I've mostly reconciled myself to quantum theory, which would have been a surprise to me seven years ago but seems quite natural to me now. The name of the blog is probably not as appropriate as it was, but whatever.

Why that change? Mostly because there are so many ways to have something "under" quantum theory. "Stochastic superdeterminism" is possible, faster-than-light can't be ruled out if it has only limited effects at large scales, neither can a myriad of GRW-type or de Broglie-Bohm-type approaches (if one is generous about a few things). All of them are somewhat weird, but how are Buridan's ass and I to choose? Moreover, the statistics of the regularities of nature are the same either way, which will not kill me any faster whether they have something one might call an explanation or not.

In any case, by now I'm mostly happy to say that "quantum field theory is a signal processing formalism". Modern physics comes down to recording in a computer as much as we can fit into a reasonable amount of memory. A typical electrical signal could be recorded as an average voltage every trillionth of a second (a terabyte per second, say), but we don't do that because we don't have enough memory, so we save a very lossily compressed signal, perhaps, and quite commonly, as just the times when the signal changed from a low voltage to a high voltage (which might be only a few kilobytes per second). For that to be possible, we have to engineer the hardware so that the electrical signal does make transitions consistently from one voltage to another, and so that a timer is triggered to send the time to computer memory when the transition happens. The records in computer memory are what have to be modeled and perhaps explained by a quantum theoretical model. Where things get tricky is making those models as easy to use as possible. Specifically, we'd like to use quantum theory for reliable everyday engineering, we don't want to have to spend years figuring out how to make some new piece of apparatus work, so there's a kind of simplicity required. Physicists and engineers have all sorts of rules of thumb that work pretty well for relating new experimental apparatus to quantum theoretical models, and I've become more happy than I was to say that's OK, though knowing everything you need to know about quantum optics alone has become a lot.

Enough for now.

1 comment :

Mike Gottschalk said...

Peter, what a fantastic surprise! Truly, you've been on my mind of late; how have you been, and how is Eleanor- she must be in high school these days!

I've been hard at work developing my thinking these past years, both theologically and scientifically and I finally feel the focus that I've been looking for. I hope we can reconnect because I was very fond of your own thinking and insight.

I haven't formalized things yet but here's a link to what I'm sketching out

https://theaweandawry.blogspot.com/

The piece I'm working on now will be right up your alley-- based on your new post, and I'd love to see your insight in regard to the ideas I'll be expressing there.

I continue to work with Stu Kauffman since 13.7 in developing insight towards healing a future that today feels to be in real jeopardy-- again your insight would be most welcomed.

In case it's covered in layers of dust, my email is mike.gottschalk@gmail.com I hope to hear from you!

My very best,

Mike