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Is Reality All a Big (or Very Little) Misunderstanding?

New findings supporting old premises, I guess.

Heck, Einstein (dead in 1955) famously asked fellow physicist Abraham Pais, "Do you really believe that the moon only exists when you are looking at it?"

It's an interesting idea, and one of several reasons I tend to dig Zen Buddhism.

Still, I tend to approach things at the pragmatic level, so whereas I embrace zen and quantum physics (and my limited understanding of both) for their poetry and mystery, should a piano be mistakenly dropped from a five storey building and no one is watching as it plunges toward the sidewalk below where I stand, unwittingly awaiting my fate, I imagine all the debate in the world over whether I change the status of its existence by seeing it or not seeing it will make little difference to the piano...

...perhaps because it sees me. :illogical
 
There are really only 100,000 people in the entire universe;

The rest are all just bad special effects.

Trust me on this.
 
I suppose all this proves is that reality is relative. It's like saying "the sun only rises because we believe it will always rise and time moves forward only because we all universally believe it does." It kinda makes sense... say you put a cheesecake in your fridge (i like to eat, guys, i allude to owning cheesecakes alot). It's not real to someone who never opens my fridge, yet if you tell a person it's there, is it really there, or is the idea that it's there the true reality. Applying this strictly philosophical scenario to science and mathematics i think would not get anyone any closer to understanding reality. In order to prove reality, someone out there has to prove in a definite,concrete manner what reality is. Has that really been done yet?
 
The cheesecake is not really there;

Saeria said:
I suppose all this proves is that reality is relative. It's like saying "the sun only rises because we believe it will always rise and time moves forward only because we all universally believe it does." It kinda makes sense... say you put a cheesecake in your fridge (i like to eat, guys, i allude to owning cheesecakes alot). It's not real to someone who never opens my fridge, yet if you tell a person it's there, is it really there, or is the idea that it's there the true reality. Applying this strictly philosophical scenario to science and mathematics i think would not get anyone any closer to understanding reality. In order to prove reality, someone out there has to prove in a definite,concrete manner what reality is. Has that really been done yet?
Click to expand...
I just ate it.
I LOVE cheesecake!
So, if I eat a cheesecake in the forest and no one hears, does it still make me gain five pounds?
 
Mastertank1 said:
So, if I eat a cheesecake in the forest and no one hears, does it still make me gain five pounds?
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's the ticket. Yet, i think i could silently eat a cheesecake and still gain 5 lbs. But does a cheesecake really exist? There's the bigger question.
 
Even the "anti-reality" folks in quantum mechanics do have to deal with certain facts. Clearly, there are things that we observe or experience that are caused by things that we did not observe. If the effects are real, then it seems that the causes must be just as real, even if we did not see it.

Take just one example: disease. Humans got sick for thousands upon thousands of years before we were able to observe the microbes that caused the illnesses.

Now, technically this idea of observation creating reality applies only at the atomic and subatomic level. Even things as small as bacteria are far, far larger than that. The qualities that we might "create" by observation are on a much smaller scale. So at the level at which most of us experience reality all of this doesn't matter. On the other hand the things that we can experience are made up of these quantum features, so physics needs to address that transition from subatomic to macroscopic.
 
A question about Schroedinger's cat;

Redmage said:
Even the "anti-reality" folks in quantum mechanics do have to deal with certain facts. Clearly, there are things that we observe or experience that are caused by things that we did not observe. If the effects are real, then it seems that the causes must be just as real, even if we did not see it.

Take just one example: disease. Humans got sick for thousands upon thousands of years before we were able to observe the microbes that caused the illnesses.

Now, technically this idea of observation creating reality applies only at the atomic and subatomic level. Even things as small as bacteria are far, far larger than that. The qualities that we might "create" by observation are on a much smaller scale. So at the level at which most of us experience reality all of this doesn't matter. On the other hand the things that we can experience are made up of these quantum features, so physics needs to address that transition from subatomic to macroscopic.
Click to expand...
If we keep dithering about opening the box until the poor cat starves, does that effect the experiment?
 
Capnmad said:
New findings supporting old premises, I guess.

Heck, Einstein (dead in 1955) famously asked fellow physicist Abraham Pais, "Do you really believe that the moon only exists when you are looking at it?"

It's an interesting idea, and one of several reasons I tend to dig Zen Buddhism.

Still, I tend to approach things at the pragmatic level, so whereas I embrace zen and quantum physics (and my limited understanding of both) for their poetry and mystery, should a piano be mistakenly dropped from a five storey building and no one is watching as it plunges toward the sidewalk below where I stand, unwittingly awaiting my fate, I imagine all the debate in the world over whether I change the status of its existence by seeing it or not seeing it will make little difference to the piano...

...perhaps because it sees me. :illogical
Click to expand...
Einstein also, rather famously, decried the notion of a random or indefinite reality, stating that God "does not play with dice."
 
Saeria said:
I suppose all this proves is that reality is relative. It's like saying "the sun only rises because we believe it will always rise and time moves forward only because we all universally believe it does." It kinda makes sense... say you put a cheesecake in your fridge (i like to eat, guys, i allude to owning cheesecakes alot). It's not real to someone who never opens my fridge, yet if you tell a person it's there, is it really there, or is the idea that it's there the true reality. Applying this strictly philosophical scenario to science and mathematics i think would not get anyone any closer to understanding reality. In order to prove reality, someone out there has to prove in a definite,concrete manner what reality is. Has that really been done yet?
Click to expand...
No, it hasn't; that's part of what they're working on. Your idea sounds a lot like a theoretical experiment involving a cat, in a box, with a beaker of acid (hopefully, it's never beeon done in actuality; I can't see why it would need to be, as it's a thought experiment). The idea behind the experiment is simple: As long as the lid of this soundproof, acid-proof box is closed and locked, there are essentially two realities present simultaneously, because the outside world is not affecting, or affected by, and is completely unaware of, what is going on inside the box. Thus, the cat might be alive, or it might be a puddle, and as either one is equally likely, for the purposes of reality being based upon what we perceive, both realities are true.
 
Mastertank1 said:
If we keep dithering about opening the box until the poor cat starves, does that effect the experiment?
Click to expand...
No, because you're not supposedly to actually -do- the experiment. Just think about it.

(I want this job)
 
There are many fascinating theories coming up these days from both the realm of quantum mechanics and cosmology. I have heard theories that even time itself is an illusion and does not really exist and that we all sort of fall from one realtiy into the next like some sort of giant cosmic Pachinko machine. Such theories are easy to propose but hard to check by experiments. Alternate Universes also tend to be popular these days and are currently involved in coming up with a Unified Field Theory.

As for quantum mechanics I think Feynman said something quite true in that if anyone tells you they have an intuitive feel for Quantum Mechanics they are lying or actually know nothing of the field. 😀
 
Well, that can't possibly be true, for two reasons.

1) I have an intuitive feel for quantum mechanics. Yep. Yup.

2) Nothing is real, erego nothing is true.
 
Azrael said:
Einstein also, rather famously, decried the notion of a random or indefinite reality, stating that God "does not play with dice."
Click to expand...

Actually, there was no "with", but close enough. :upsidedow And until someone's got the GUTs to show otherwise, it's all very much speculation. There may yet be an undiscovered determinism underlying the universe. Hawking leaves the door open for such:

"These quantum theories are deterministic in the sense that they give laws for the evolution of the wave with time. Thus if one knows the wave at one time, one can calculate it at any other time. The unpredictable, random element comes in only when we try to interpret the wave in terms of the positions and velocities of particles. But maybe this is our mistake: maybe there are no positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability."

--from "A Brief History of Time"
 
When Einstein declared "God does not play dice" I think Bohr respondend "Einstein quit telling God what to do." LOL 😛
 
I find it facinating that if these postulated parallel universes (possibly an infinite number) exist at all, they don't exist in far-flung provinces but they exist within a tiny fraction of an rch away from the atoms that make up our bodies and everything else. These universes are 'insiders', but undetectable.

As for reality, I think that string theory kinda says that reality is nothing more than the frequency with which teeny tiny strings vibrate.

As for REAL reality, those greasy fried chicken nuggets I had for dinner tasted awful damn good, I could reach out and touch them, and they wern't stringy at all. That's good enough reality for me, for now.
 
Another interesting outcome is uncertainties do not just invovle velocity and position but also energy and time. It is possible for a suffciently small particle to borrow the energy it needs to exist and pop into existence for a short time. Course we are talking for brief periods of time and small particles. Other wise we might have a few elephants poppin in and out of nowhere. 😀 😛
 
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