Quantum Mechanics. This will completely blow your mind away

[Thunder_86]

Some/most of you probably saw that already, but for the rest of you:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBrsWPCp_rs

Its absolutely amazing. How much of those phenomenas really exists and can be harnessed, I don't know, but it still blew my mind up!

[Kaos]

There was nothing new for me. But the display of the effects is quite good, better than usual. Of course, it is at some points not totally precise, but you cannot describe the effects more precise and still understandable, so there has to be some compromise.

For how much of these phenomena can be harnessed, lets just say: All can somehow be harnessed and are harnessed. On the other hand, some of these phenomena also get in your way when you want to build certain kind of machines. For example your computer is full of stuff that needs quantum mechanic effects to work: From the laser in the DVD-player to the transistors in the processor to the magnetic sensor reading your hard disc or the transistors in your solid state disc. It's everywhere (at not only in the computer).

And of course this still blows my mind every time I think about it

[Camacha]

Since normal matter is probably an emergent phenomena based on quantum behaviour, absolutely everything relies on it to function and behave in the ways we know. Change quantum mechanics and everything changes, remove it and there will probably be little left.

[Thunder_86]

There was nothing new for me. But the display of the effects is quite good, better than usual. Of course, it is at some points not totally precise, but you cannot describe the effects more precise and still understandable, so there has to be some compromise.

For how much of these phenomena can be harnessed, lets just say: All can somehow be harnessed and are harnessed. On the other hand, some of these phenomena also get in your way when you want to build certain kind of machines. For example your computer is full of stuff that needs quantum mechanic effects to work: From the laser in the DVD-player to the transistors in the processor to the magnetic sensor reading your hard disc or the transistors in your solid state disc. It's everywhere (at not only in the computer).

And of course this still blows my mind every time I think about it

Yeah like you said, they do have to simplify it if they want the average Joe to get what they actually say haha. Not everything was new to me either, but at least half of the documentary was educative to me! Can't wait to see if they'll pull off some next level quantum processors one day. they look pretty freaking amazing. The ones they created already are very basic and pretty huge (just like the computers we have now, they used to be huge, inneficient and very expensive... One day those quantum processors might get affordable enough, small enough and veratile enough to be used by everybody!).

[RainDreamer]

Well, a quantum computer may not actually more efficient than a computer we have now, except for certain type of complex computation that require access to quantum states. For normal use like watching video/gaming/browsing internet/etc, it won't make much of a difference.

Further more, how can we make a computation system that has its process completely incapable to be observed (for observing a quantum state locks it in place) but still have the final observable result?

But well, we will see.

[Thunder_86]

thanks for the video, I'll watch that tonight!

I know it won't help for video, but I wonder about games tho. If I understood right from the video I posted the processing power for games might be improved a lot. Even tho nowadays, games are demanding on the GPU, not so much on the CPU, with some games in exception. Minecraft for example, isn't so demanding on the GPU, but real heavy on the CPU... for those kind of games I think it may help. Maybe your video will prove my theory wrong tho I'll see tonight!

[AngelLestat]

For normal use like watching video/gaming/browsing internet/etc, it won't make much of a difference.

If is not coded to get the advantage of quamtum logic then not.. of course.

The same that an app coded for 32 bits will not get the memory advantages of 64 bits systems with more than 4gb.

But if the game is designed under quantum logic then it can be much faster. The problem is that everyone is still very inmature with quantum logic.

To understand binary logic and algorithms to exploit that, may take you at least 5 years of study (for a basic level), but to understand the new possibilities and algorithms for quantum computers (in case you just need to read them and not invent them) in may take your life time or more.

Further more, how can we make a computation system that has its process completely incapable to be observed (for observing a quantum state locks it in place) but still have the final observable result?

Because that is how quantum computers work. But this does not mean that you dont know what it will be the outcome when you make the software.. this only means that you can not intercept/observe that process without change the outcome. Edited August 5, 2015 by AngelLestat

[Thunder_86]

If is not coded to get the advantage of quamtum logic then not.. of course.

The same that an app coded for 32 bits will not get the memory advantages of 64 bits systems with more than 4gb.

But if the game is designed under quantum logic then it can be much faster. The problem is that everyone is still very inmature with quantum logic.

To understand binary logic and algorithms to exploit that, may take you at least 5 years of study (for a basic level), but to understand the new possibilities and algorithms for quantum computers (in case you just need to read them and not invent them) in may take your life time or more.

Because that is how quantum computers work. But this does not mean that you dont know what it will be the outcome when you make the software.. this only means that you can not intercept/observe that process without change the outcome.

Thats pretty much how I see those things too. In any case, just the principle behind this and the fact we are able, at the moment I'm writing this, to harness even just a little tiny weeny little portion of what quantum mechanics can do is absolutely mind blowing in my opinion! To the point where if I had learnt about those kindof things earlier in my life, I would probably work in that field instead of being a programmer...

Another super interesting video about physics (not quantum physics, but still very interesting) is the video "For the love of science". Its the last lecture from professor Walter Lewin at MIT. It is NOT the most exhaustive class, you probably won't learn much, apart maybe from a few formulas that you'll never use. I didn't learn much in that video(I was not so familiar with the light scattering effect, I knew about how it works a bit, but I did learn a few things about that in the video), BUT, it is still interesting as hell!

[lajoswinkler]

Just be careful not to infect your mind with quantum mysticism. Most of the material Youtube spits at you when you type it in the search form is complete, utterly antiscientific crap and lies. I'll take a look at this documentary, thanks for linking it.

[YNM]

Once I did contemplated about the fact that, when I walk from my bedroom to the bathroom maybe I already go around the world once or twice. Just that their probability are low, so you don't have (observe) them.

I should say that the video kinda heard like some quack, notably for the opening, but the farther it goes the less quack-feel it is.

[lajoswinkler]

The opening does seem to be in accorance with the rules of modern, quacky documentaries made for attention difficient people. I have to watch it whole to form an opinion.

[RainDreamer]

I

Because that is how quantum computers work. But this does not mean that you dont know what it will be the outcome when you make the software.. this only means that you can not intercept/observe that process without change the outcome.

I wasn't meaning that "how" to be "how can it be possible?" but more like "how are we going to do this?"

Also, imagine being the customer service for quantum computer. Oh the pain. "Is your Qbit processor in a proper superposition state?"

[Thunder_86]

Just be careful not to infect your mind with quantum mysticism. Most of the material Youtube spits at you when you type it in the search form is complete, utterly antiscientific crap and lies. I'll take a look at this documentary, thanks for linking it.

Well professor Walter Lewin is in this video... I think its fair to say its a pretty serious documentary. Not the most exhaustive like we said, its made for the average Joe on youtube after all, but still.

[lajoswinkler]

Well professor Walter Lewin is in this video... I think its fair to say its a pretty serious documentary. Not the most exhaustive like we said, its made for the average Joe on youtube after all, but still.

We had at least one example where physicists were tricked into giving interviews which were manipulated. Their sentences would be taken out of context to make a profitable franchise for the gullible and ignorant people.

So I've finished watching this documentary from the opening post and sadly, it still makes one huge mistake. Popular science educators, especially if they are physicists, seem to forget how the average Joe thinks and what's more disturbing, aren't aware of the fact this average Joe's mind has been contaminated with quantum mysticism lies which have turned into a meme that has been spread everywhere by the ever growing Internet.

To specify - the observer effect. The key misunderstanding that quacks exploit for explaining their miracle cures, prayers, chants, pendulums, etc., is that the observer means a living person, a consciousness. If it takes that, then there's a "soul". Woo woo, cue the mysterious music... or Enya. That is a huge, fat, greasy lie.

Observing means taking a measurement, and not only machines can do it, but they actually do it. They must do it because we're too big, clumsy, massive, unresposive and with pathetic receptor units.

The act of measurement is just that. It does not require a person. Just an interference with the system done by just about anything used.

Quacks use those greasy fat lies to back up their claims about "souls" and "claivoyance", "levitation" and whatnot. This single thing is the power source of a global confusion which has enormous negative consequences on the modern society which, if wants to go forward, simply must be educated about the basis of the artificial world it has built. It powers "The Secret", it powers the whole New Age movement. So much damage has been done by essentially producing a new global cult that stomps over science.

Sadly, this hasn't been tackled in this documentary, only barely hinted in one sentence. That only makes it more fuzzy and opens more possibilities for unsuspecting laymen to get fooled and their brains cemented with pseudoscience.

Scientists simply must start acknowledging these problems. After all, it's that pile of laymen that brings in the cash and might one day barge into the lab like an angry mob.

[ZetaX]

Also, imagine being the customer service for quantum computer. Oh the pain. "Is your Qbit processor in a proper superposition state?"

That's about as likely as a scenario as "is your CPU's input register properly flushed after each cycle" is now.

[Thunder_86]

We had at least one example where physicists were tricked into giving interviews which were manipulated. Their sentences would be taken out of context to make a profitable franchise for the gullible and ignorant people.

So I've finished watching this documentary from the opening post and sadly, it still makes one huge mistake. Popular science educators, especially if they are physicists, seem to forget how the average Joe thinks and what's more disturbing, aren't aware of the fact this average Joe's mind has been contaminated with quantum mysticism lies which have turned into a meme that has been spread everywhere by the ever growing Internet.

To specify - the observer effect. The key misunderstanding that quacks exploit for explaining their miracle cures, prayers, chants, pendulums, etc., is that the observer means a living person, a consciousness. If it takes that, then there's a "soul". Woo woo, cue the mysterious music... or Enya. That is a huge, fat, greasy lie.

Observing means taking a measurement, and not only machines can do it, but they actually do it. They must do it because we're too big, clumsy, massive, unresposive and with pathetic receptor units.

The act of measurement is just that. It does not require a person. Just an interference with the system done by just about anything used.

Quacks use those greasy fat lies to back up their claims about "souls" and "claivoyance", "levitation" and whatnot. This single thing is the power source of a global confusion which has enormous negative consequences on the modern society which, if wants to go forward, simply must be educated about the basis of the artificial world it has built. It powers "The Secret", it powers the whole New Age movement. So much damage has been done by essentially producing a new global cult that stomps over science.

Sadly, this hasn't been tackled in this documentary, only barely hinted in one sentence. That only makes it more fuzzy and opens more possibilities for unsuspecting laymen to get fooled and their brains cemented with pseudoscience.

Scientists simply must start acknowledging these problems. After all, it's that pile of laymen that brings in the cash and might one day barge into the lab like an angry mob.

Well I don't know, I didn't assume the "observer" had to be a living being. I took it like you said, anytime anything, living or not, can "measure" it (English ain't my primary language I may be expressing myself wrong here). But I got what you said and agree with you lol. Thats what I'm trying to say haha. I didn't make the error of thinking a human is somehow needed here to measure it!

Edited August 5, 2015 by Thunder_86

[PB666]

Well, a quantum computer may not actually more efficient than a computer we have now, except for certain type of complex computation that require access to quantum states. For normal use like watching video/gaming/browsing internet/etc, it won't make much of a difference.

Further more, how can we make a computation system that has its process completely incapable to be observed (for observing a quantum state locks it in place) but still have the final observable result?

But well, we will see.

I see many instances in these videos were they are ascribing widely held hypothesis as dogmatic theories.

The one truth is that quantum mechanical universe really revolves around probabilities, and this is the truth that trumps all other truths, because in means what we define as reality can always be described in a set of confidence ranges from the smallest scales of the universe to the largest. As the one video portrays dXdP_x = h/4pi, basically defines that particles can behave like waves until they arrive, in which then the become like particles, even the largest particles have a frequency. Simple math becomes immensely more complicated when using probabilities. As the quantum computer denotes Nbits = 2^N . Which of course if you are familiar with the binomial probability distribution, the basis for doing things like Fisher Exact Test, the test becomes more math intensive as N increases, the quantum computer would greatly speed up the calculation. People don't realize that most statistics are not perfect, Chi2 for instance is an approximation. Fisher Exact Test works well for comparing groups, but the problem is how do you compare an expected value to an observed distribution. In that case Group 2 in FET is infinity, and cannot be done with FET, but with a quantum computer, you can do it. Even when you have a perfect thing, like a binomial probability distribution, applying it to complicated real world circumstances can be quite computer intensive.

An example is the Student's T test, doing this test again is an approximate probability, it assumes in the standard form that there is no variation in the distribution, and in the Welsh form it may overcompensate the effect of variation (I do normalization to fix problems), but we often don't know if there is differential variation and the Fisher test for variation is even more unreliable than the Student's T-test. But there is a way to calculate p-value exactly, its an infinite repetitions of Monte-Carlo (the limit as number the number of times the Monte carlo analysis is performed that any possible outcome will reflect its exact probability of being greater or less than other outcomes) series and the end result is a concatentated. The problem is that with large groups of numbers then number of possible outcomes is also equal to 2^f(n) (where f(n) depends on the type of analysis being done). A quantum computer would not need to do that, it could exactly calculate the probability of all possible outcomes at once and all you would have to do is select the accumulated probability from a series that corresponds to a given observation.

So the thing is that a "state", for example the state of glucose in a solution we see in the lab as the consequence of the laws of mass action, but that is only true when N is so great that the relative deviation becomes tiny. But as the volume of a solution decreases at some point that stops being true (and this is true for just about any system where there are 2 or more alternative states, an example would be Floridian ballots in the 2000 presidential election). And it is in these circumstance the quantum computing can define the probability that something is true or false (credible, or not credible) much more precisely than the typical computer. The answer is not yes or no, 1, 2 or 3, the answer becomes a credible range of outcomes, outside of which we would say that glucose is not behaving as expected in this solution, but not necessarily knowing why.

The problem with quantum mechanics is the above, in a system where there are possibilities of more than one event (or type of event) occurring in a given timeframe (lets say for simplicities sake a time greater than Planck's time, and in some otherwise empty unit of space) then the quantum system needs to calculate all the probabilities at once (and where in the Universe is this not true?) and yet we are still discovering fields that can be added to the complexity of the system, this is the reason the full characterization of quantum mechanics cannot be done at present, IMO, they may be 99.9% correct, but not precisely 100%. Even if they cannot find an clear example of something that contradicts quantum mechanics, because we need to know what feeds we might not be certain of what comes out. Certainly as we accumulate things over time, the results settle into the expected (exhibit the discussion of EM drive and momentum), but when you get down to widely spread quantum events, things may still remain unclear.

For the most part and for the great share of scientific history we have been measuring only the effect of accumulated events, even when we have the ability to measure singular events such as in the LHC, we accumulate the results of those events and come up with a statistic. If we had perfect understanding of quantum mechanics we could have perfect observations, and one atomic collision might suffice to say a given Higgs particle was detected (albeit this is an self-contradictory argument given Heisenberg uncertainty). Evolution itself, a product of quantum effects visible on the macroscale, has basically evolved to a state to optimize the benefit it gets from quantum fluctuations, as a consequence living-things control their DNA damage and repair to an extent that they allow mutations to occur at a certain managable level that allows creation of raw materials for future evolution and tolerating the more abundant negative effects. The point is there is a considerable amount of possibilities with potent quantum effects that we really don't understand.

These videos make it sound like - we know. Remember one thing, the universe to us ends at CMBR, that's it, that is the finite end, we cannot see before it or beyond it to other parts of the Universe that expanded away from us in time. The quantum entanglement issue is another, it makes it seem like the quantum state can be pushed to a certain outcome, but is that true or are they simply sorting outcomes that present one direction and ignoring (or allowing to pass-by) other outcomes that don't.

[monstah]

Just be careful not to infect your mind with quantum mysticism. Most of the material Youtube spits at you when you type it in the search form is complete, utterly antiscientific crap and lies. I'll take a look at this documentary, thanks for linking it.

Well professor Walter Lewin is in this video... I think its fair to say its a pretty serious documentary.

We had at least one example where physicists were tricked into giving interviews which were manipulated. Their sentences would be taken out of context to make a profitable franchise for the gullible and ignorant people.

Haven't watched the video yet due to work firewall, but that's the very first thing that crosses my mind when I hear anything "Quantum" that's not a linear algebra article. I will give it a go when I get home, anyway. Thanks for sharing!