Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Not offering less common board thicknesses (Score 1) 127

I've noticed that a lot of these US-based PCB fabs that offer manufacturing have a limited selection of board thicknesses, such as 1.6 mm and little else. That doesn't help if you're interfacing with another device that needs a 1.2 mm thick PCB, such as a Nintendo Entertainment System Control Deck.

Comment Re:Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 93

You are correct. That's precisely how MWI is thought to work.

The premise of the argument is that, to conserve superposition information, you would necessarily need to prove that it would be grouped with information QM requires to be conserved, when viewed in a space that permitted it to be conserved. If it isn't, then there's no mechanism to preserve it, so no MWI.

Comment Re:Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 93

Not strictly correct. You would be correct for all consequences over any statistically significant timeframe, but (a) I've purposefully included things that aren't actually outcomes, and (b) over extremely short timeframes (femtoseconds and attoseconds), differences would emerge very briefly, because different mechanisms take different routes.

Remember, the maths only concerns itself with outcomes, not the path taken, so identical maths will be inevitable for non-identical paths.

Comment Re: Quantum mechanics: a mathematical description (Score 1) 93

"people don't understand what a wavefunction is. Not the interpretation of it, the actual hard mathematical "this is what it is.""

Except that doesn't exist, you have to approach quantum effects through probabilities. That makes it literally the opposite of what you said!

Comment Re: Quantum mechanics: a mathematical description (Score 1) 93

Magnets, how the fuck do they work?

Seriously though, car driving is based on things which are good for survival that we were already good at. And the controls evolved to match those skills, we didn't evolve to be better drivers. We started out with a collection of levers loosely connected to the activity and now we have mostly wheels and buttons, and the levers we operate with our feet aren't really operated like levers either.

Comment Re: I usually don't support the big guys, but damn (Score 2) 46

In this case the two companies met about making this game together, then decided not to, then one of those companies that wasn't originally already developing it made a copy of the game already under development. You might not know this from the summary, but that's why reading the fine article and also other materials about the same story is valuable.

Comment Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 93

I would contend that it should be possible to find an implication of each interpretation that only exists in that interpretation. If, for example, Many Worlds is true, then it necessitates that any sort of information cannot be destroyed and vice versa, when considering the system as a whole. If Many Worlds is false, then superposition information is lost when superposition collapses, you cannot recover from the collapsed wave a complete set of all superposition states that existed. I'm sure that someone will point out that superposition isn't information in some specific sense, but that is the whole point. Many Worlds is impossible if you can show that superposition ISN'T the sort of information that IS conserved, because Many Worlds requires, by its very nature, that it is.

This gives us a test that does not require us to look into other universes and can be done purely by theoreticians. If you regard the system as a 5D system, then is that information conserved or not? Yes or no. If yes, then that does not "prove" Many Worlds, but it does mean that only interpretations that preserve that information in some form are viable. If no, then Many Worlds, and all other interpretations that preserve that information in some form, are ergo impossible. Instead of filling out questionaires on what you think is likely, try to prove that it can't be possible and see if you succeed.

I would also argue that physicists thought that the Lorenz contraction was a neat bit of maths by mathematicians that had nothing to do with reality, until Einstein cottoned onto the fact that it actually did. You cannot trust physicists who have an innate dislike of mathematics. This doesn't mean that maths always represents reality, but it does mean that it does so unreasonably often and unreasonably well.

Slashdot Top Deals

Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work. -- John G. Pollard

Working...