- #36
quarknsoul said:I think brain waves probably disturbed the wave function. Human's brain can make electromagnetic field, do you think?
Hornbein said:You've got me curious. Care to start a thread about it? I bet it is those experiments where they record sound on a boundary. They then reproduce that sound at the boundary, inverting the wave and focusing the energy at the original source.
bhobba said:Then you think wrong. The EM field of the brain can't do that. It happens whether a human being is there or not.
Thanks
Bill
adfreeman said:Therefore, would it be reasonable to assume that polarization filters are interfering with the photons, or changing / modifying some of their properties; like polarization or spin?
bhobba said:Sure.
adfreeman said:Sure... it's known already that the polarization filters are interfering / modifying properties on the photons?
adfreeman said:( cos(degrees of polarized filter difference) )2
adfreeman said:Therefore, would it be reasonable to assume that polarization filters are interfering with the photons, or changing / modifying some of their properties; like polarization or spin?
It's 50% of the photons that made it past the first filter, if the angle is exactly 45 degrees. This is intuitively reasonable from the symmetry of the situation (would you expect the result to change if we turned the experimental apparatus on its side?) or you can calculate it by writing ##|H\rangle=\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}(|45\rangle+|135\rangle)## where H, 45, and 135 are the states that have 100% probability of passing through horizontal, 45-degree, and 135-degree filters respectively.adfreeman said:(don't remember the exact percentage)
adfreeman said:Therefore, would it be reasonable to assume that polarization filters are interfering with the photons, or changing / modifying some of their properties; like polarization or spin?
It is indeed Malus's law, but the history may be confusing. Early in the 19th century, Etienne Malus observed that if you passed light through two consecutive polarizing filters at an angle ##\alpha##, the fraction of light that passed the second filter would be given by ##\cos^2\alpha## and this is Malus's law. He had no explanation for this phenomenon, it was just an observed fact (and given what was known about the nature of light at the time, this is all that could be expected).bhobba said:These things are easy to look up:
http://www.physicshandbook.com/laws/maluslaw.htm
adfreeman said:Where does this formula comes from:
( cos(degrees of polarized filter difference) )2...
I'm asking, who came up with it, and how?
Nugatory said:It is indeed Malus's law, but the history may be confusing. Early in the 19th century, Etienne Malus observed that if you passed light through two consecutive polarizing filters at an angle ##\alpha##, the fraction of light that passed the second filter would be given by ##\cos^2\alpha## and this is Malus's law. He had no explanation for this phenomenon, it was just an observed fact (and given what was known about the nature of light at the time, this is all that could be expected).
In 1861 James Maxwell discovered the equations of classical electrodynamics and that light was electromagnetic radiation obeying those equations. Malus's law can be derived from these equations, so classical physics had an explanation for what had previously been an empirically observed but unexplained phenomenon.
Quantum electrodynamics, developed during the second quarter of the 20th century, introduced the notion of photons and showed that individual photons would display the same ##\cos^2\alpha## behavior. On the one hand, this result is completely unsurprising; the easiest way of explaining how a many-photon light beam would be attenuated in this way is to assume that the individual photons behave that way. On the other hand, the quantum calculations required to show that this is indeed the explanation are seriously hairy, so articles aimed at non-specialists generally just present it as a given that individual photons will display this ##\cos^2\alpha## behavior.
DrChinese said:
DrChinese said:Matches are the sum of 2 cases (when you have PBSs rather than filters, and use detectors set at each of the PBS output ports - 4 total):
HH + VV
But you must substitute per the reference's formula to make it work for any H and V selections. You end up with something like:
(cos(A)+sin(B)) (cos(A)+sin(B)) + (-sin(A)+cos(B)) (-sin(A)+cos(B))
Which eventually comes back to the cos^2(A-B) formula when you work it through. I probably have something mislabeled because the derivation doesn't jump out at me right now. Else there are cobwebs in my brain.
At any rate, they work it through for polarizers and so will get half the matches, so they end up with 1/2 cos^2(A-B) at their formula (10). So you can how they arrive at that.
Nothing. This idea of consciousness causing collapse is a popular misconception about quantum mechanics, not something that you'll find when you study the real thing.Mark Harder said:And what makes human beings so special that their minds can collapse quantum systems
You may be misunderstanding Schrodinger's thought experiment with the cat - easy enough to do, because this is another of those misconceptions widely repeated in the popular press. Neither Schrodinger nor anyone else at the time was actually suggesting that the cat might be in this superposition of half-dead/half-alive - everyone agrees that's not what happens. Instead Schrodinger was pointing out a problem in the then-current (1920s vintage) formulation of quantum mechanics, namely that the theory couldn't explain why it didn't happen.I have a story that illustrates my point...
Bruno81 said:Ever since i was a young boy, i always had deep trouble understanding the nature of motion of macroscopic objects... It has always been the most incomprehensible fact of life - the simple fact that a 3d body stops existing at x,y,z at time T and reappears at x',y',z' at time T'. Quantum mechanics and its inherent measurements/decoherence of quantum systems provided by far the best insight into the workings of Nature as far as motion is concerned. But everything comes at a price - a non classical reality can be quite hard to grasp with respect to naive realism. The question about the Moon is more about existential(philosophical) problems and the nature of reality and much less, if any, about classical human beings bringing the Moon into existence.
It is possible, but there is no particularly convincing theory or experimental evidence to lead us to believe that it is.adfreeman said:it possible that space and time could also be quantized; therefore jumping through space-time in the fashion you described?