Reality Definition and 435 Threads

It so hard to predict the future but are there any technologies from sci-fi movies or books that can’t happen in real life because it’s just completely impossible to create them? For now and even when we have more advanced science knowledge?

Ancient knowledge is more scientific than politically whitewashed ideas of our present era. People often decide for themselves what is real based on who told them. Real science most come from experimental methods and vast research which only postulates but rarely proves anything and only...

I was reading an article on scientists claiming an illusionary nature of time: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61021621/is-time-just-an-illusion/. These sorts of speculations really bother me. Time is a measurement of motion. As long as motion exists, time can be used to measure it...

I want to construct an experiment similar to that described by Einstein in his thought experiment: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Relativity:_The_Special_and_General_Theory/Part_I#Section_9_-_The_Relativity_of_Simultaneity How would I design it to ensure the light from the flashes at the back...

Boltzmann's brain, entropy reduction, Poincaré's recursion theorem, the probability of oxygen molecules in a room gathering in one place, the probability of quantum tunneling of macroscopic objects, etc. are theoretically possible. But the probability of these events is very low. Additionally...

Is Quantum Mechanics a Probabilistic Forecast of nature?Someone I know told me their interpretation of QM is that QM only a probabilistic forecast of systems like electrons around atoms. I would like someone to analyse this interpretation and say if its valid or not. According to this person we...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/02/has-quantum-mechanics-proved-that.html It is unclear for me, why from these experiments the tabloids made the conclusion that "the reality does not exist"? Does the essence of this experiment lie in the fact that it confirmed the Wigner's friend...

or even a percentage of it. i know this is more of a philosophy question but could it be like a holodeck, where the gravity, floor and walls are real but the rest of it is a simulation? (this is a metaphor of course.) so space and gravity as an example are a simulation but consciousness and...

According to the dictionary, a "heuristic" is a tool to allow someone to figure out on her own the full explanation. If I say that explanation A is a heuristic for a complicated concept B, shouldn't B be at least a close, even if incorrect, explanation? Specifically, I have read (sorry about...

As per title and the TL;DR, I'm curious if there could be some truth in these statements of the headlines I had read recently or are they just sensationalist fluff. Personally, I find these statements very hard to believe. In fact, impossible to believe. But I'm not a QM expert, not even an...

Does anyone know of any groups who discuss this from a scientific or even experimental standpoint? Yes I am talking about a Matrix type virtual world. I have many ideas and with the state of the world in the way it is, from my perspective - could perhaps be a very important thing to consider.

What does Gödel’s theorem say about physical reality? Does Gödel’s theorem imply that no finite mathematical model can capture physical reality? Does the nondeterminism found in quantum and chaos physics - it’s impossible to predict (prove) the future from the present and the laws of physics -...

Here is a paper on a wind power system and the paper is based on simulation. i just want to know if something in real is built based on the simulation, how close that will be in reality in comparison to the simulation results. And anybody here has experience in building things based on...

I realize that it is impossible to know both the speed and position of a particle because of the uncertainty principle. I also know that this is because if you send a photon at the particle to detect its position you alter its momentum. But does that mean that when you measure position it has no...

Summary:: Curious whether this story about this kid could be real, and if yes, is there any explanations? I just came across this reddit thread. I know, it could be fake. But I've seen a similar story before about a little girl who openly talked about wanting to kill her adoptive parents and...

The below comment by @vanhees71 is an interesting one and I would be interested in exploring its implications. I am inclined to think that we can draw certain inferences about nature based on how we interpret the probability function and what it tells us about the elements of reality of the...

What do you guys think of this soberly elegant proposal by Sean Carroll? Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space Fundamental reality lives in Hilbert space and everything else (space, fields, particles...) is emergent. Seems to me a step in the right conceptual direction.

The paper I refer to, I found on the Big Think blog titled "Is human consciousness creating reality? And here is the actual link to the paper. Unfortunately, this paper is too technical for me, hence the request for a review for such a big claim.

I read somewhere in Quanta magazine that (if I understood correctly): When A and B watch C, then C in A's reality may be different than C in B's reality (as B is seen by A?) What if A and B watch each other? We could make chain: A in A's reality, B in A's reality, A in B's reality in A's...

Hello, i live in the US and decided to get this book off of amazon i was wondering if anyone has read, or atleast skimmed (its pretty big) through it and would mind telling me if its a good buy(although if it isnt, its a little late now :-p). also, I am pretty new to most of the theories. all...

Hi everyone, I have a quick question about Aleph numbers. Are they even possible? By containing infinity to a finite set, isn’t that essentially disproving the infinity in the first place? Can they be used in an actual scenario’s, or are they just purely hypothetical? Can they be used to...

Someone mentioned this book to me, and when I searched for it I saw some people describing it as a 'pop-sci' sort of book. But looking at the contents would suggest it's definitely not introductory, and in fact, quite the opposite (I don't know of any 'pop-sci books' that decide to launch into...

Who are the people that work on the ground breaking theories and the major discoveries, the big stuff! Why aren't most physicists the next Einstein or "Insert famous scientist here" and what do they work on for their day to day work? I wonder this because a lot of people who don't know much...

Following Clarke's thinking “Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.”, I am quite switched off with today's sci-fi it is basically 'magic' but dressed up to be technological. It seems to me (maybe just my POV) that decades ago there was a more balanced mix of stuff that was at the...

For example, measurements and how we have set points of measurements, and an infinite amount of increments in between them. Do you this measuring system exists in reality? What is an alternative way of looking at the world in a quantified way (or non quantified way) other than the current...

I am obsessed with the development of the Full Dive Virtual Reality (transporting your consciousness to a virtual world, such as Sword Art Online). I believe this technology may be available at around 200 to 300 years. How long do you think it will take us, if at all?

I learned that solar panels have their maximal power output at a particular voltage and current level. If we want to get the max power, we have to connect a load with a specific resistance. However, in reality, how does the solar plants solve this problem? I guess they won't allow the power...

We can often hear that centrifugal force don't exist in reality...Helicopter mi-26 can lift 56tons ,it has 8 blades,so each blade hold 7 tons of force! Do you know if you put 7tons at blade when blade is not rotating(static) ,bending moment will be way too much and blade will broke at root...

There is a paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/5/188 And a lengthy article here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-theory-of-reality-as-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-20170601/ The general argument concerns causal emergence and whether all causal agency arises directly from the micro...

In detail, I came up with 424m for the stretched length of a spring in order to change the mass of an object by 10^-9kg which originally was 1 kg. Problem said, "is it feasible?" In my opinion, there is no spring that can be stretched for this long, so it is not feasible. However, I'm not sure...

In my latest 10th grade physics lesson, we were learning about the refraction of light. I decided to share what I knew about why light slows down in a vacuum, which is, in short, because the electric field of the electromagnetic wave exerts a force on the charged electrons of a medium, which in...

Please help. Thank you.

Where can I learn more about this conception of reality?

Where and how could a layperson begin to understand algorithmic information theory and its proposed version of reality? I just read some "bits" (pun intended) about its strings of events and how it proposes algorithms can predicts how subjective timelines will continue, and I want to learn more!

I've been reading about Quantum Field Theory and what it says about subatomic particles. I've read that QFT regards particles as excited states of underlying quantum fields. If this is the case, how can particles be regarded as objective? It seems to me that this also removes some of the...

In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger was looking at a concept called a "superposition." Superposition is when two waves meet and overlap and interact, which can lead to different results based on the circumstances. The concept can be seen in the regular-sized world as well, in...

Did Schrödinger believe that contradictory or inconsistent things could exist in reality?

If MWI and collapse-theory are both possible interpretations of QM, then both of them are not a fact, right? If MWI is a fact then collapse isn't and vice versa, you could say the least. So, shut up and calculate, i.e. the minimal interpretation, makes no inference about the realness of these...

Could MWI signify that there are not necessarily a (near) infinite number of real worlds, but rather that officially we can't tell if, or to what degree, the world we are in is real?

I recently acquired the tome of Penrose's Road to Reality. I'm trying to figure who this book is intended for. It has a mix of deep mathematical physics concepts with light explanatory diagrams. I have a little bit of a mathematical background, bachelors in math, so I can follow it pretty...

I don't know how to make that question better, to not seem as if I'm asking why is time relative (that's not what I'm looking, I think). When we say that time is relative, we look at how many time takes light to go from one point to another, in order to be seen from another perspective. So...

Hi, everyone! I read an online article, some time ago, on the Holographic Universe, and how it might operate. According to the author, quantum bits, or"qubits"of information exist on the surface of a cosmological horizon. Complex interactions between these qubits result in them becoming...

Can we suppose that a quantum property (like spin, polarisation, velocity, position) becomes a potential, a probability, when we are going to measure it? Can we say that this property does not exist while remaining unmeasured, and that when measured takes on a value that depends on both the...

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I am a physicist wannabe but have come full circle to the realisation that average marks in physics isn't going to cut it in this field. My laziness in my critical thinking and life in general, my focus on marks (which haven't produced marks anyway), and lack of engagement with anything but...

A large portion of physicists thinks that Bell's theorem shows that reality does not exist. Another large portion of physicists thinks that reality is not an assumption of Bell's theorem, so that Bell's theorem just proves nonlocality, period. A third large portion of physicists thinks that both...

If we have solution of an equation as x=1, it may be expressing, depending on context, 1 apple, 1 excess certain thing, etc. And, if we have solution of an equation as x=-1, it may be expressing, depending on context, 1 deficient apple, 1 deficient certain thing, etc. Is there any experience...

From what I understand, the most reasonable explanation of the violation of the Bell inequalities is that nature is non local. If we accept this, is there a reasonable argument that nature is not deterministic? I.e. could it be that the probabilistic predictions from QM are just averaging --...

This is not a technical question. I'd like to have a more conceptual discussion about what - if anything - gauge invariance tells us about reality. If we could, please try to keep the discussion at the level of undergrad or beginning grad. To focus my questions and keep things elementary, I'd...

It seems like we keep chasing "reality", and by "reality" I think Physicists would mean the apparent rules of quantum physics which we hope would (if applied) lead to all the apparent known rules of macro-physics. However ... It seems like we have had to create a few things to do that: 1. Ideas...