Gadianton wrote:Long story short for now due to time. Some good input here from others. Anyway, I think I see two issues more clearly from Tobin's angle.
1) Causality. I believe Tobin demands causality to equate to strict determinism, and since QM contradicts the strongest expressions of determinism, I'd give a pass here as distinguishing the two isn't obvious and some philosophers may even argue that they can't be distinguished. But unfortunately, he brought retro-causation into the discussion and argued passionately for it, however, misunderstanding the idea, along with all the experiments associated with the idea that he has studied, to mean "randomness", but such randomness if it undermines causality, also undermines retro-causality, and all the theoretical propositions for retro-causality "backward in time" suggestions that have been made to fill in theoretical gaps, propositions that could one day be exploited for superluminal communication, time travel, etc. In other words, Tobin must pick between belief in retrocausality and it's uses for Gods communicating etc. and QM as pure randomness, which will undermine that possibility.
2) On the macro world. Tobin's example of the cat experiment where the radioactive material kills a dog rather than a cat, I think what he's saying that "there's a tiny quantum probability that the cat disappeared from the box and a dog appeared" or that a ball rolls uphill was the other example. The waveform of a dog could be defracted through a slit, right? Well, If I recall correctly, a small, green physics book a friend of mine at college had for his QM class had a childish drawing on the first page of a guy in a car in front of his closed garage (I think) and stated that if he ran into the garage door enough times, there is a probability he'd pop right into his garage. Well, this idea doesn't have anything to do with the pros and cons for superluminal communication or people exploiting QM for the macro world, but I think is what Tobin is refering to when arguing for one consistent rules where only QM applies, and this further hooks into his ideas about QM as randomness. If others have thoughts here, i'd like to hear them. I've got to get going, but will work up a response in the back of my mind in the mean time.
sorry tobin, didn't mean to reference you as a third party, I'm pressed for time and thisi is just how it came out trying to pack it all in a couple points.
These kinds of examples used to abound (e.g. tennis balls passing through walls after enough collisions, glasses falling through table tops, etc.)
The car driving against the garage door makes a very poor example with which to illustrate the probabilistic or statistical nature of QM phenomenon. The larger the colliding cross section of the objects, and the larger the objects themselves, the lower the probability of passage (or escape).
Tunneling electrons make good objects for observing QM interactions, because they are small objects (essentially point objects) confronted by small potential wells from which to escape.
In fact, the car will never magically appear on the other side of the garage door without substantial physical interaction with it, as in a broken garage door and dented car. I doubt that you will find such examples used any more, even in elementary texts.
To see why this is, one need only look at what would be required according to any of the current QM interpretations, or models, of which there are more than half a dozen. Here are a few of them:
- The Copenhagen interpretation (the one usually taught in Physics 101);
- The Many Worlds interpretation,
- The Objective Collapse group of interpretations (which is a broader class derived from the Copenhagen interpretation and includes at least three variants),
- The Transactional Interpretation, which is the one that Tobin is probably trying to refer to when he talks about equations that work going forward or backward in time (this is also sometimes referred to as a standing wave interpretation)
- Pilot Wave or DeBroglie-Bohm Interpretation: another model based on the Schroedinger Equation, and one with some good explanatory power.
- Ensemble or Statistical interpretation. This is not a very philosophical interpretation; it just lets one calculate the probabilities of the outcomes for systems as ensembles. (In this interpretation the probability of a dead cat when one opens the box is simply the probability of finding a dead cat in any given box if the outcomes of many Schroedinger cat experiments - an ensemble - were observed and recorded.)
Have to get back to work but will do a ROM calculation and post it later of the probability that a car will pass though a garage door without damage to the car or the door. The chances against will be exceedingly high.
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ETA: If Tobin likes quantum mechanics to describe what he believes God can do, he might be interested in what a statistical mechanics kind of approach yields in terms of the probability that God, as described by Christianity and especially Mormonism, actually exists. Again, the probability is exceedingly low.
