Ask A Genius 697: The Nature of Quantum Mechanics in IC
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/22
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the true nature of quantum mechanics?
Rick Rosner: There are some various aspects of IC even like some of the most central claims that are things we believe that are true that somebody could easily say. Well no, I don’t believe that’s true and I don’t buy the evidence that you’re presenting for that. I think what’s turning out to be the central assumption of IC will be seen as fairly undeniable which is that the quantum mechanics which the universe runs on is how the universe defines it, that says the universe is made out of incomplete information; quantum mechanics is the theory of this incomplete information and the information is how the universe defines itself.
I think that’s probably the primary postulate of IC; the thing you need before you go anyplace else in IC. I think anything about IC that I could argue I would think I could most persuasively or it’s the thing that I’m the most convinced of, I guess. I think I could convince other people of more that I could make a more convincing argument for that than first say that most of the gold in the universe is older than 15 billion years or the dark matter is mostly collapsed regular matter. So, it seems fairly obvious that that is the fucking deal; the primary postulate.
How could something so central and essential to the universe that really incorporates two of the tent poles of the 20th century and then into the 21st century; quantum mechanics and information, how could the relationship between those two things be over missed. And as I’ve been saying like quantum mechanics really gets going around the year 1900. You got Dirac, you got Schrödinger; you got all those guys. They’re working through the teens into the 20s, they’re putting all this stuff into matrix equations but I feel like the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, the way it’s expressed, it’s pretty pinned down by the 1920s though I should finish the Wikipedia article that I was looking at last night to really get the total handle.
Through the 20s into the 30s people were trying to get an understanding of the kind of the metaphysics of quantum mechanics like what it means, how it works. And like Einstein hated the idea of spooky action at a distance, he hated the idea of the variable there were events; physical events that happen under QM that are indeterminate. There’s no way to tell what’s going to happen in this open quantum event until it happens. It could be a number of things and it’s just a probability and there’s no information within the universe that can help you pin it down; he just hated the shit out of that. So people wrestled with that; Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation. I don’t know what year the Copenhagen conference was where they were talking about this shit but its 1920s or 1930s and I think after that people had kind of settled down and agreed to be a little boggled by quantum mechanics.
It seemed the common wisdom about quantum mechanics after the 1930s was that it’s weird, that it’s really not like the macro world and you just have to accept it. Feynman said if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don’t; shit like that, that it’s just kind of mysterious and weird. You can go ahead and you can do plenty of quantum mechanics because it’s an exact mathematical language and theory. It’s as precise as arithmetic, it generates probabilities like it says the electron is in this kind of probability cloud around a nucleus but that probability cloud is precisely defined and exactly consistent with experimental results. It’s got fuzzy shit in it but it precisely defines, it’s a very precise theory even though it deals in probabilities.
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So, even if you don’t understand the metaphysics of quantum mechanics you can go ahead and do everything with quantum mechanics without having the some kind of just a philosophical metaphysical justification for why it works, it just fucking works really well. And it’s pretty much squared away mathematically by the 1930s and then the first paper in information theory is written by Claude Shannon in 1948. Now other people had written about information mathematically with regard to codes and code breaking in early 40s I think because of World War II where people were working on code breaking. And so in the 1940s a few people started to think of information mathematically and then I looked up on Engram, on Google, where you look up the word frequency of a word and people have been using information quite a bit starting in the mid 19th century I think just kind of semi interchangeably with news as in what’s the news, what’s the information.
So, it was a not uncommon word. It was hundreds of years old by the time information theory came along. So, Claude Shannon starts thinking about it, a few other code breakers were thinking about it, the most information efficient way if you’ve got a noisy transmission band, how much information can you transmit per unit time and stuff like that and what is a unit of information. Claude Shannon, I think came up with the bit which is just a choice between one thing and another which also really constrains the field of information theory because once you have a bit which is a really sharp distinction between two possibilities. I mean you’re thinking about error which means as you’re transmitting this zero that you’ve transmitted, has a certain probability as of being received as a one in error. So, the zero you’ve transmitted when it’s received it’s like it’s a probability, its own little probability smear of being like 80 percent zero and 20 percent one.
So, the foggy entities are there but information theory is really built conceptually around sharp choices and trying to keep them sharp as you transmit information. I’m sure it takes like a half decade to really catch it. Again, it’s really being used in data transmission and computers in the 50s of course are super primitive.
Jacobsen: I think you’re talking yourself into a hole.
Rosner: Okay, but I’m just saying that that I’ll have to do more thinking about it or not but the way information theory developed kind of hand in hand with computing because you got bits and bytes and that’s all the world of computing maybe just keeps it sufficiently segregated from the world of quantum mechanics that people don’t see how they are conceptually in… I think one of the surprises about science for people who don’t do science and maybe even for people who go into science like I really kind of haven’t gone into science except for thinking about shit on my own but when people go into science I think a lot of people think well I want to be a smart person who thinks about the big scientific questions and then almost everybody in science is thinking about really small their own narrow area or they’re building shit like that new satellite that orbits the… does it orbit the sun? I don’t know.
Anyway, they’re working on something for JPL, they’re one of 10,000 scientists at CERN, they’re working in very narrow areas; they’re not thinking about what shit means, they’re not thinking cosmologically and if they are thinking cosmologically they’re maybe thinking about like the clumping problem like how do we set up these variables to get the gravitational clumps that developed in the early universe. So, most people in science are not thinking about the big questions. It’s possible that the big questions raised by the confluence of information and quantum mechanics; maybe people just haven’t been thinking about it much.
[Recording End]
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