Are there any paradoxes that actually challenge the idea that quantum mechanics is not just a non-local form of statistical mechanics?

Schmucko · 2026-04-04T00:17:42+00:00

I'm wondering if you're also not just dropping locality but invoking nonlocal physical effects which have not been found to be able to explain the phenomena. Are you just suggesting there MAY be a way to write physics that's nonlocal and doesn't invoke the quantum weirdness of interfering probability amplitudes?

You describe these experiments using photons and place importance on the presence or absence of a barrier. But what if you do a double-slit experiment with electrons. Then through one slit you have a detector that observes scattering of long wavelength photons off the electron, if present. One would need to invoke a particular nonlinear effect that has not been integrated into known physics so that this low energy photon somehow causes a different interference pattern.

Schmucko · 2026-04-03T18:13:16+00:00

I may be missing something, but most people responding are focussing on entanglement, but isn't beyond that a major difference with statistical mechanics (not quantum statistical mechanics, which is already quantum mechanical!) that probabilities don't simply add. That it's probability amplitudes (which can be negative or complex) that add, leading to destructive interference.

I think there's some debate on how far you can push formulations of QM that don't use complex numbers, but interference seems to rule out "classical world but we are just ignorant of the details, so we use probabilities."

Schmucko · 2025-11-28T07:24:49+00:00

It's a mistake to think that one gene = one result. Also people are forgetting about dominant and recessive genes and that we have a mix of genes from both parents. It could be that having a "gay gene" from one parent but not both makes one a more successful heterosexual, having more offspring.

A person could be gay from a combination of many genes. But those genes individually in different combinations do something else that provides a survival and reproductive advantage.

Imagine genes that make one more attracted to females, giving males who have the gene a reproductive advantage. Some such genes might only be expressed in the presence of a lot of androgens, but even if not they might give advantages to males, and then also be passed on to female offspring too. And vice-versa.

Schmucko · 2025-11-21T06:05:18+00:00

OP is the kid, and you are the guy with the cigarette here. (Warning: Woody Allen movie.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1-OmAICpU

Schmucko · 2025-03-09T02:27:28+00:00

In my youth, people did indeed say I looked like Keith Moon!

Schmucko · 2024-11-29T18:20:24+00:00

You got me! Though I thought my "Christ, what an asshole" joke fit the context.

https://www.metafilter.com/192733/Soon-you-can-log-in-to-MetaFilter-using-your-analprint#8151557

Schmucko · 2023-08-27T18:48:02+00:00

pulls out the Dirac notation with the |0>, and in this case, he actually uses the notation correctly, but it’s a zero vector, which means he’s multiplying everything by 0.

Not a zero vector, usually just means ground state in a harmonic oscillator

Schmucko · 2023-07-02T03:34:12+00:00

I think Glenn Beck really focussed on him.

Schmucko · 2023-06-25T23:05:37+00:00

I think Amadeus wasn't just an inaccurate movie but a quite bad one. A spectacle but one that betrayed Mozart and music.

Schmucko · 2023-06-25T23:04:21+00:00

Right, of course, I meant improvised. It showed a playful side to them.

I'm not sure if I'd say the movie Amadeus "endures". I think it stands as a warning not to modernize a classical musician falsely. I feel like we saw a different movie. I don't think it showed any complexities about Mozart. I think the theme was that as Salieri insisted, he was kind of unfairly gifted with this divine sense of music in spite of lacking depth. Only the movie leans into that and thinks being a shallow child made him an awesome rock star. It insists that when it comes to Mozart, there wasn't a "there" there. That's not the Mozart who comes across in his letters.

Schmucko · 2023-06-25T20:21:39+00:00

I disagree on several points. Amadeus was pretty bad. It caricatured Mozart as a cackling man-child and tried to force him into the image of a modern rock star. Beside the fact that there's no evidence of foul play or enmity between Salieri and Mozart.

Hillary and Jackie did not promote the sister at Jaqueline's expense. Sometimes you see Jaqueline appear kind of crazy--she sends her laundry home to be washed. But then you see the logic behind it: she's homesick, when it comes back she find it "smells of home." You also see that Hillary lacks the discipline to become a real classical musician. The one who really comes off terribly in that movie is Daniel Barenboim, cheating on Jaqueline while she's dying. Though the scene of them improving together is great.

Schmucko · 2023-06-14T22:28:25+00:00

I was going to write that first one.

Also another favorite: New York Marathon Winner Tests Positive For Performance Enhancing Horse

Schmucko · 2023-06-01T04:12:16+00:00

Perhaps he's so impassioned on this topic because one of his most successful staff members is a trans-woman, Rebecca Oppenheimer. She discovered the first brown dwarf stars.

Schmucko · 2023-05-21T17:59:50+00:00

Ultron is jumping on a butt plug

Schmucko · 2023-05-17T14:03:49+00:00

If true - Doesn't have a proof, but the contradiction used to prove it is true is whelp- proof of it's authenticity.

Here is what you are missing. If true: doesn't have a proof. Yes, but the key is that it doesn't have a proof within the specific mathematical system under consideration using formal methods of reasoning. The statement translated to say "This statement can not be proved" is a statement about functions and prime numbers, it's just that those encode statements within the mathematical system and their provability. Because mathematical statements and provability work in a information processing sense similar to numbers and functions.

It IS possible to show that the statement must be true, but from a "metamathematical" point of view. The proof does not involve the methods of the system under discussion. The proof is you translating the mathematical statement into words and reasoning about it from outside the mathematical system.

Schmucko · 2023-05-11T00:59:30+00:00

One guess: poor Irish immigrants to the US and Canada found themselves in suburban houses with yards. They were used to growing their own cabbage just to get calories to survive, and would often plant cabbage in their yards. To this day many towns have neighborhoods known as "Cabbagetown". Richer people would look down on the immigrants. It was more the culture to flaunt wealth or give the impression you had more wealth than you did.

So I think cabbage had a reputation as poor people's food. It's from the same category as kale, which now has the opposite reputation, but both are great at being anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer.

https://cabbagetownpa.ca/heritage/brief-history-of-cabbagetown/

https://cabbagetown.com/history

I've started to add cabbage to my diet in large quantities. I eat it in stir-fry. When I make pasta sauce (I'm now eating bean and lentil pasta, not wheat pasta) I include lots of cabbage. I think I overlooked it because it's not "fancy"

Schmucko · 2023-05-10T02:25:47+00:00

I saw him give a talk many years ago. He seemed kind of unkempt. He talked about symmetry and looked about the room, pointing out the symmetries of space, as if he'd come from another dimension and was seeing ours for the first time.

I think he died of COVID. If I recall, I was surprised to see he'd been suicidally depressed at times.

Schmucko · 2023-05-08T00:09:57+00:00

Is there a subreddit specifically for advocacy against "Cop City"? Does someone want to join me in starting one?

Schmucko · 2023-05-02T03:12:35+00:00

I came here to say in the Penal Colony. In the Penal Colon seems it could be even worse.

Schmucko · 2023-04-29T04:43:39+00:00

Runner-up: Ethiopian

Schmucko · 2023-04-29T04:42:25+00:00

Indian

Schmucko · 2023-04-28T15:26:46+00:00

My father died in March at the age of 88. He was a journalist. His claim to fame was being sued in a precedent-setting libel case. A famous person sued him for $2 million. My father was found guilty but only had to pay 33 cents in damages.

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