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Pastimes : Favorite Quotes -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mr.mark who wrote (7818)	7/24/2001 1:51:59 AM
From: X Y Zebra	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13020

Satchel Paige... Well, thanks Mark, I learned something today... [I hope not to forget it]

To: mr.mark who wrote (7818)	7/27/2001 12:25:34 AM
From: HG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13020

The only way you can describe ANYTHING is to show it and say "this is it!" Because there IS NO concise description for ANYTHING! . I'm fascinated by incompleteness and I want to understand it. better. . . The idea in quantum mechanics is that randomness is fundamental, It's a basic part of the universe. ... But in the 1920s with quantum mechanics it began to look like God plays dice in the atom, because the basic equation of quantum mechanics is the Schrödinger equation, and the Schrödinger equation is an equation that talks about the probability that an electron will do something. The basic quantity is a probability and it's a wave equation saying how a probability wave interferes with itself. So it's a completely different kind of equation, because in Newtonian physics you can calculate the precise trajectory of a particle and know exactly how it's going to behave. But in quantum mechanics the fundamental equation is an equation dealing with probabilities! That's it, that's all there is! You can't know exactly where an electron is and what its velocity vector is--- exactly what direction and how fast it's going. It doesn't have a specific state that's known with infinite precision the way it is in classical physics. If you know very accurately where an electron is, then its velocity---its momentum--- turns out to be wildly uncertain. And if you know exactly in which direction and at what speed it's going, then its position becomes infinitely uncertain. That's the infamous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, there's a trade-off, that seems to be the way the physical universe works... You see, in physics there's a notion called entropy, which is how disordered a system is. And entropy is connected with some fundamental philosophical questions--- it's connected with the question of the arrow of time, which is another famous controversy - dunno.