This has always interested me ever since I was little, and I honestly don't think the human brain is capable of understanding something as complex and wacky as the beginning of time or the beginning of life or maybe even the re-birth of life. It frustrates me to think about it. Infinity is impossible to imagine. People can come up with as many theories as they want but there will always be holes and missing facts and maybe it's supposed to be that way.
Originally posted by PONG_MASTER
This has always interested me ever since I was little, and I honestly don't think the human brain is capable of understanding something as complex and wacky as the beginning of time or the beginning of life or maybe even the re-birth of life. It frustrates me to think about it. Infinity is impossible to imagine.
[sarcasm]Then I do not have a human brain.[/sarcasm] Infinity is easy to imagine, there are an infinite number of hyper-infinities, parallel infinites, and hypo-infinites to our present time space perception. If that is not too difficult to understand, read about continuum's in mathematics because that is more complicated.
I have several different theories that work really at explaining the universe/s. There are even more in the physics community. Some are old and have been disproved and some are being explored right now or in the near future to prove their validity. Indeed, these theories are so complicated that the vast majority of people could not even begin to understand them but that does not make me better then you or them. Let me better explain myself with examples:
I can barely understand and I never will possess the ability to ice sculpt...I do not understand how those sculptors can make that stuff so intricately detailed with just a chain saw; I do not understand how beauticians do hair colorings with such precision...doing that stuff can be just as complicated as multi-dimensional energy. (I am not joking...just ask a good beautician to describe the process.); I can barely understand women and in fact, I think that understanding women is more complicated than astrophysics.
People can come up with as many theories as they want but there will always be holes and missing facts and maybe it's supposed to be that way.
This is more accurate and I agree with this. I can poke holes in the theories and math of some of the present models and this will continue to be the case in the physics community for a long time. (THough I lack the education currently to delve into all of the theories.) However, those holes are becoming smaller and smaller as those gaps are filled with new science...eventually, these theories are going to develop enough to allow us to create some scary technologies. A perfect Grand Unified Theory is what we are all waiting on.
Originally posted by inimalist
"If you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand it"Richard Feynman
😉
nice. 🙂
i think at one point in time there were said to be something like 6 people in the world who 'understood' quantum mechanics. i'm fairly sure that was only a few years ago.
i doubt there are very many more today. 🙂
Originally posted by Alliance
Actually, no one actually understants it...still.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q264/sepyoukey/522563155_41a47fd1f7_o.jpg
Originally posted by Bardock42Maybe to truly understand it you need someone who's not so good with math. If the best minds can't grasp it maybe a simpler mind is needed.
Well, higher physics or mathematics are inaccessible to even many professors of the subject....Well, I mean, even beginnings of mathematics are inaccessible to a broad spectrum of humanity.
That's BS.
If very few people "understand" quantum mechanics, then why are there teams of people working on quantum computers? Who the hell teaches them? Why are college students working on it? It is one thing to work with a technology that is already established and improve upon it because the “mechanics” were understood already and you can go by those “givens” to develop that technology further. (Case in point, I work in IT and I do not understand everything about current electronic circuitry yet. But yet I still thrive at my job and I come up with new processes, etc.) When a new technology is developed, it has to be studied inside and out and you have to know everything there is to know: especially with quantum computing…it is just impossible to wing it.
BTW, I changed my major from Astrophysics to IT because there is a lot more money to be made in the IT world. (Check numbers online, Astrophysicists do not make that much money considering all the education they get.)
not sure how you can say it is bs. if it was TRULY 'understood' q-computers would already be in every house.
they aren't because scientists are still striving to understand. they are in the process of understanding. they teach and pass on what information they DO have, in hopes that info will lead to FURTHER understanding and experimentation.
to understand some of the math behind something (wave equations, for example) is one thing. to say one fully understands everything behind quantum mechanics is ridiculous.
serendipity and experimentation result in as many developments (more probably) as a perfect understanding of the principles does. many aspects of higher order cosmology and physics deal with multiple dimensions, things we cannot even visiualize, that are reduced to purely mathematical terms. topology is an expanding field that we are just now trying to explore. the many-universes ideas that some say will be proven by q-computers is still just theory.
ther is FAR too much left that is NOT understood to even BEGIN to claim we understand everything in this bizarre field. 😬
Originally posted by leonidas
not sure how you can say it is bs. if it was TRULY 'understood' q-computers would already be in every house.they aren't because scientists are still striving to understand. they are in the process of understanding. they teach and pass on what information they DO have, in hopes that info will lead to FURTHER understanding and experimentation.
to understand some of the math behind something (wave equations, for example) is one thing. to say one fully understands everything behind quantum mechanics is ridiculous.
serendipity and experimentation result in as many developments (more probably) as a perfect understanding of the principles does. many aspects of higher order cosmology and physics deal with multiple dimensions, things we cannot even visiualize, that are reduced to purely mathematical terms. topology is an expanding field that we are just now trying to explore. the many-universes ideas that some say will be proven by q-computers is still just theory.
ther is FAR too much left that is NOT understood to even BEGIN to claim we understand everything in this bizarre field. 😬
I never said, "They fully understood quantum mechanics". (Who the hell does? If there were someone out there that did, then there would be no need for experiments...all of the universes secrets would be known. To fully understand physics in the end, there has to be a Grand Unified Theory. (If one even exists and if the universe/s can ever be fully understood.))
I was simply using the presently discussed terminology which was 'understand". If you want to "nit pick", I meant to say or should have said "current quantum models" which are all theories to begin with. Going by your logic, just about everything is not fully undertstood so that means everyone knows nothing.
And no, "the hump" is getting the circuitry to produce results and make the circuitry efficient enough so that they can read more quanta information at a time...in other words, a better(By better, I mean wider.) quantum bus structure.
So, I just recently went to a talk about quantum computing (/w Gilles Brassard , David Cory, Anthony Leggett, Peter Shor) at the Institute for Quantum Computing (www.iqc.ca, which is down right now...) and to be honest, I got a very weird impression of the field. [/brag]
For instance, they introduced themselves and explained how they had come study q-computing, and they all had stories that revolved around the same people or each other. The community seemed, as a whole, very small and tight nit, regardless of how many labs there are world wide (which I think is a very small number). I think the sheer esoteric nature of the field does not lend itself to a thorough enough peer review process, which can be exemplified by a conversation I had with Mr Brassard after the panel about pseudo-telepathy. He explained a game experiment to me, which I understood well enough, but afterward he began talking about how quantum mechanics could be responsible for why two people get the same feeling at the same time if they had entangled stimuli input, with no direct communication being passed between the brains. There is also the Nobel prize winner in physics that said it should be possible for our brains to receive information from the future.
Seeing as I have written another really long post, I'll try to summarize. It isn't that the math wouldn't work in the theories they are proposing, it is just that, as a student of neuroscience, I know why those phenomena are impossible based on simple physical properties of the brain. Based principally on the inaccessibility of quantum science, those within the field seem to be overstepping their bounds by using quantum phenomena to explain neurological experiences.
Lastly, a very strong take home message of the show was that even the idea of a quantum computer was still untestable. We simply don't know enough, and the vast majority of quantum theory and computing is based on whiteboard equations rather than observation.
I am reminded of a prominent physicist who, at the turn of the century [lol, 1900] predicted that within 40 years physics would be a complete field and that there would be nothing left to discover, only read in textbooks. This was prior to the discovery of special relativity.
🙂
