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Comment Re:Paperwork nightmare (Score 2) 188

to give us the time to disconnect them

That's the real bad news for the US, and very good news, minus some short term pain, for the rest of the world. Bye bye soft power, exhorbitant privilege, joint operational dependency via dictating what capabilities NATO members can and can't have, etc.

And reversing the policies, tomorrow or in a few years isn't going to make a difference.

Comment Re:Human understanding of reality is limited (Score 1) 111

You experience the quantum nature of the photoelectric effect whenever you try and dim an LED bulb with an old fashioned dimmer. There are lots of people who rant on the internet about it.

What do you mean by "it takes quantum mechanics to explain lasers and magnets, but we don't experience the quantum nature of them." This statement doesn't really make sense. I suspect what you mean is that we don't normally experience specific contrived situations that are purposely chosen to seem weird. This is true. It's pretty much tautological.

It also applies to lots of other things. You don't normally experience the blind spot in your eyes. That doesn't mean you can't understand it. You routinely experience, but don't notice many of your visual and auditory systems' other hijinks until a situation is accidentally or purposely contrived to highlight them, then the internet spends six months arguing about whether the dress is white or blue, whether an Elmo doll said a bad word, or how amazing some magician's performance is. Yet you can understand those things just fine, with a bit of effort.

All those examples involve confronting, and abandoning, implicit assumptions in the lazy way your brain "understands" things in its everyday experience. Most people's "understanding" of ordinary mechanics is very cartoonish, as in, much like cartoon physics. This is not a rhetorical assertion, studies back it up. To them, Newton's first law is counterintuitive, and certainly not something they think they experience in everyday life.

Quantum physics is the same, with the interesting difference that, at least right now, we don't know which of a fairly small number of assumptions are invalid. So you can pick the subset you like and there you go. The existence of multiple workable subsets is why we have multiple equivalent interpretations, and why we argue about which one is "right."

Comment Re:Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 111

You contend incorrectly.

Interpretations are just stories. They don't make testable predictions. The math they're based on does, but for the most part they're based on the same math, so they make the same predictions. Where that's not strictly true, for example, path integrals and Feinman diagrams are often associated with many worlds, the math is equivalent, in the formally proven mathematical sense.

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