SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: koan who wrote (776152)3/23/2014 2:28:13 AM
From: Bilow  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1573866
 
Hi koan; Re: "Did you smoke a joint before you posted that?";

No. You're the dope smoking liberal. I'm the conservative physicist.

Re: "QM is all about probability and even low probability is probability.";

I realize you're quite stupid and will have difficulty understanding this, but there are probabilities that are excluded in QM. A good example of these are "superselection rules". Here, I'll give you the wikipedia article on it:

A superselection sector is a concept used in quantum mechanics when a representation of a *-algebra is decomposed into irreducible components. It formalizes the idea that not all self-adjoint operators are observables because the relative phase of a superposition of nonzero states from different irreducible components is not observable (the expectation values of the observables can't distinguish between them).
...
A big system often has superselection sectors. In a solid, different rotations and translations which are not lattice symmetries define superselection sectors. In general, a superselection rule is a quantity that can never change through local fluctuations. Aside from order parameters like the magnetization of a magnet, there are also topological quantities, like the winding number. If a string is wound around a circular wire, the total number of times it winds around never changes under local fluctuations. This is an ordinary conservation law. If the wire is an infinite line, under conditions that the vacuum does not have winding number fluctuations which are coherent throughout the system, the conservation law is a superselection rule --- the probability that the winding will unwind is zero
.
...
In the standard model of particle physics, in the electroweak sector, the low energy model is SU(2) and U(1) broken to U(1) by a Higgs doublet. The only superselection rule determining the configuration is the total electric charge.
en.wikipedia.org

Thus, for example, there is no quantum fluctuation that can change the total electric charge. The probability of such a fluctuation is computed in QM as zero.

-- Carl

P.S. The wikipedia article has citations to the literature which is beyond your comprehension, but any competent physicist can tell you that the quantum fluctuations have to obey charge conservation.