I was referring to your comment below, of course, since "precision" is your word, not mine.
Hmmm...so you didn't write this:
Yeah, well, a shame that it is being challenged now... It seems Einstein was right after all, the the Copenhagen gang just thought there was uncertainty because at the time (seventy years ago) precision instruments just did not exist yet..
Seems you think removing uncertainty is a simple matter of precision. What do you mean by the use of those two words?
There is a level at which the uncertainty principle is very much in force, just as there is a level at which Newton rules. Einstein's Theory is just finer and doesn't come into play until one is dealing with quantities 8 orders beyond the usual regime, i.e. 10^-8 finer. At that scale of fineness usually the atomic level or inversely, the cosmological level, QM and GR come into play respectively, but in the between, Newton rules. Einstein wished to extend the field concept into the realm of the indefinitely finer, but that won't work in the way Einstein sought, e.g. by unifying EM and GR. So we have two regimes in physics, the very large, well-characterized by Einstein, and the very small where QM controls. They both belong to the universe so it makes sense that they must be describing the same thing and so should have a common ground.
There is a problem though and the problem is not all that subtle. You know a computer monitor screen is composed of bits, pixels, discrete entities, but the monitor presents a continuous image. How can that be? It's fuzzy. When Einstein said he didn't think god played dice, he was saying he didn't think the world could be decomposed into "bits". The current leading edge is trying to refute that position. It's difficult because discrete quantities and continuous quantities seem so distinctly different. They're from different categories altogether. We have math that handles both, but even with the math, trying to get the discrete and continuous to cooperate in a consistent way, has proven impossible so far. It's a major crisis facing theoretical physics, but I don't think so.
Consider further, in QM there are no smooth paths of particles. In QM it can only be said that a travelling particle, say, an electron, exists at one instant at one point, and then exists at another point without having existed at any points in between. How can we say this since it's so counter intuitive? Because the position of the electron is absolutely uncertain at any point: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says the error in position is inversely proportional to the error in velocity. So if we have the electron at a point, we absolutely can't know it's velocity. If we can't know it's velocity, we can't know where it will be in the next instant, and so it seems to disappear only to reappear at another point. This interpretation is completely consistent with everything we measure about electrons. Indeed, it is partially the reason why Rayleigh scattering makes a sunset red.
Well then this where we decide its ontology as opposed to epistemology. Not everything can be made discrete or perhaps it can be made discrete yet when you do that it shares none of the same properties as the whole. Life is more then the sum of its parts. Its not a matter of having a more precise observation tool or even the act of observing changing that thing, but that if the object is removed from its context it ceases to have the same existence.
All the experiment with the poor cat proves is that reality isn't "qualia-like", its not dependent on an observer. The laws of the universe operate independent of our ability to observe them. That doesn't mean that uncertainty won't hit you in the head if you happen to be sitting under that particular tree regardless of whether or not English is your first language. -g- |
