Oh, I forgot the best part:



I have had some very smart new-agey type friends. We've had many conversations in which we've been loose with the word 'energy' - never confusing this metaphoric shorthand for the definitive way that physicists use the word. I thought the only crime we committed was one of deliberately lessened precision in speech...

...but this ridiculous confusion between different uses of this word just has to end. The juxtaposition of the two quoted phrases using the same word (energy) leads me to wonder if I've been wrong. As long as there are people out there who are stupid enough to confuse 'the soul as energy' with the laws of thermodynamics - maybe I ought to never have endorsed the idea that is okay to abuse these terms, as long as it is kept in proper context.

The Two-Slit Experiment

According to Richard Feynman, the two-slit experiment for electrons is (Feynman et al. 1963, p. 37-2) "a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality it contains the only mystery." This experiment (Feynman 1967, p. 130) "has been designed to contain all of the mystery of quantum mechanics, to put you up against the paradoxes and mysteries and peculiarities of nature one hundred per cent." As to the question (Feynman 1967, p. 145), "How does it really work? What machinery is actually producing this thing? Nobody knows any machinery. Nobody can give you a deeper explanation of this phenomenon than I have given; that is, a description of it."

But Bohmian mechanics is just such a deeper explanation. It resolves the dilemma of the appearance, in one and the same phenomenon, of both particle and wave properties in a rather straightforward manner: Bohmian mechanics is a theory of motion describing a particle (or particles) guided by a wave. Here we have a family of Bohmian trajectories for the two-slit experiment.

While each trajectory passes through but one of the slits, the wave passes through both; the interference profile that therefore develops in the wave generates a similar pattern in the trajectories guided by this wave.

Compare Feynman's presentation with Bell's (Bell 1987, p. 191):

Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.

The most puzzling aspect of the two-slit experiment is perhaps the following: If, by any means whatsoever, one is able to determine through which slit the particle passes, the interference pattern will be destroyed. This dramatic effect of observation is, in fact, a simple consequence of Bohmian mechanics. To see this one need only carefully consider what determining the slit through which the particle passes should mean. In particular, one must recognize that this must involve interaction with another system that must also be included in the Bohmian mechanical analysis. This destruction of interference is related, naturally enough, to the Bohmian mechanical analysis of quantum measurement (Bohm 1952), and it occurs via the mechanism that leads, in Bohmian mechanics, to the "collapse of the wave function."

"Why can't we accept and understand that they are everywhere they can be at once?"

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the highest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

You asked for it, redonkulous!

Now, forget going to work -- get ready to siff through pages and pages of definite (although possibly conflicting) answers...

You might, as well, request the site-management for a fee -- for introducing the most-answered topig that will become the source of the most heated arguments!!!

In quantum mechanics, the double-slit experiment (often referred to as Young's experiment) demonstrates the inseparability of the wave and particle natures of light and other quantum particles. A coherent light source illuminates a thin plate with two parallel slits cut in it, and the light passing through the slits strikes a screen behind them. The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through both slits to interfere, creating an interference pattern of bright and dark bands on the screen. However, at the screen, the light is always found to be absorbed as though it were made of discrete particles, called photons.[1][2]

If the light travels from the source to the screen as particles, then on the basis of a classical reasoning the number that strike any particular point on the screen is expected to be equal to the sum of those that go through the left slit and those that go through the right slit. In other words, according to classical particle physics the brightness at any point should be the sum of the brightness when the right slit is blocked and the brightness when the left slit is blocked. However, it is found that unblocking both slits makes some points on the screen brighter, and other points darker. This can only be explained by the alternately additive and subtractive interference of waves, not the exclusively additive nature of particles, so we know that light must have some particle-wave duality.[3]

Any modification of the apparatus that can determine which slit a photon passes through destroys the interference pattern,[3] illustrating the complementarity principle; that the light can demonstrate both particle and wave characteristics, but not both at the same time.[4][5][6]. However, an experiment performed in 1987[7] produced results that demonstrated that which-path information could be obtained without destroying the possibility of interference. This showed the effect of measurements that disturbed the particles in transit to a lesser degree and thereby influenced the interference pattern only to a comparable extent.

The double slit experiment can also be performed (using different apparatus) with particles of matter such as electrons with the same results, demonstrating that they also show particle-wave duality.

At the Second Solvay Conference, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein had a series of contests about this very question. Einstein proposed though-experiments that purported to show the existence of "hidden variables". Bohr defeated Einstein at every turn by solving the thought-experiments in a way that didn't depend on hidden variables. It may well be that there is no answer to your question. It may be that things just happen the way they happen without any underlying explanation. Not everything in nature seems to have an explanation. Why does a pair of particles suddenly pop out of the vacuum at a particular time and place? Statistics offers a description of the phenomenon, but there may be no deeper reality than statistics itself. This is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum weirdness.

Hugh Everett proposed that reality divides every time a particle is fired at the slit. An electron from one reality goes through one slit and an electron from another reality goes through the other slit, and the two interfere with each other on the other side. This explanation totally solves the quantum weirdness problem, but it requires you to believe that the entire universe divides into two realities an an inconceivable rate (since equivalents of the two-slit experiment are occurring constantly throughout the universe).

Let’s run the vaccine risk/benefit numbers!
March 12th, 2010

While reading another ‘blog, I found - in the comments - one of the worst examples of “bad epidemiology” I have ever seen. I won’t embarass the commenter by name or by quoting, but the gist of their “argument” was that (in the US) the risk of vaccination exceeds the risk of the vaccine-preventable disease.

I think we’ve all heard that before.

There were many problems with their math, not the least of which was being too lazy to look up the actual numbers, but I realised that this was the tip of a much larger iceberg of innumeracy, especially as it pertains to understanding prevalence and risk.

So, to begin at the beginning, let us start with fractions.

Most of the time, risk or prevalence is expressed as a fraction, although it may not always look like a fraction (e.g. 1 in 100 is the same as the fraction 1/100). And - harkening back to our elementary school days - the two components of a fraction are the numerator (the top number) and the denominator (bottom number).

I bring up these apparently irrelevant mathematical issues because, in the world of risk and prevalence, there are two major types of errors: numerator errors and denominator errors (although, sometimes, there are errors of both).

In the example I mentioned above (the ‘blog comment), the risk of contracting a certain vaccine-preventable disease was calculated (wrongly, I must add) by dividing the number of people in the US who contracted that disease in a year by the population of the US. This was then stated - indirectly - to be the risk of an unvaccinated person contracting the disease.

Perhaps you’ve already noticed the error - it’s a denominator error. Since most people in the US are already immune to this disease (mostly by vaccination), the proper denominator would have been the number of unvaccinated people in the US. Let’s see how this changes the numbers:

If we use measles as an example, there were 140 cases of measles reported in 2008 (still compiling and verifying 2009 reports). At the end of 2008, according to the US Census Bureau, there were 300,459,786 people in the US. If we use the incorrect method from the example, that would give a “risk” of contracting measles of 0.47 per million per year (1 in 2,146,141 per year).

That seems a pretty low risk, doesn’t it? It’s a bit higher than your “risk” of winning the Powerball lottery, but still quite low.

But is it accurate? [Hint: No]

The correct way to calculate your risk of contracting measles is to divide the number of reported cases in the US by the number of vulnerable people in the US. By “vulnerable”, I mean those people who haven’t been vaccinated and haven’t had measles. That is a bit harder number to find.

The CDC’s NIS shows that, in 2008, 92.1% of children ages 19-35 months had received at least one MMR vaccination. Going back as far as 1994, that number seems fairly steady - about 90 - 92%. By the age of school entry, that percentage (in the 2007 - 2008 school year) was up to 94.9%. Even if we assume that this percentage doesn’t change, it would mean that - at most - 5% of the population is vulnerable to measles.

But even that isn’t an accurate number, because people born before the measles vaccine was available (1963) - and even the years immediately after the vaccine was introduced - would have gotten the disease if they weren’t vaccinated (it is highly contagious).

By 1968, the incidence of measles had dropped low enough to assume that anyone born after 1968 who was not vaccinated is not immune. So, that means that 5% of the US population age 41 or less is vulnerable to measles. This estimate compares with the value found by Hutchins et al (2004) for measles immunity in 1999, which supports the estimate.

According to the US Census Bureau, there are about 172 million people in the US age 41 years or less, so that gives us - at most - 8.6 million vulnerable people. Now the risk of contracting measles is 140 divided by 8.6 million or 16.3 per million per year (1 in 61,428).

After calculating the risk of contracting measles, we need to calculate the risk of death or serious complications. Measles has a case-fatality rate of 2 per thousand, so the risk of contracting measles and dying of it is about 0.03 per million per year - in the current situation, where 95% of the population is immune.

Other serious complications of measles include pneumonia (about 6% of cases) and encephalitis (1 per 1000 cases). Adding these to the risk of dying brings the total risk of serious complications to 0.8 per million per year. If we exclude pneumonia as a “serious” complication, the combined risk of contracting measles and having a permanent, life-altering (or life-ending) complication is 0.05 per million per year.

The risk of serious complications (i.e. death or permanent disability) from the MMR vaccine (discounting the as-yet-undemonstrated “autism connection”) is less than 1 per ten million doses (1 per million allergic reaction, less than 10% of which are “life threatening” = less than 1 per ten million), which (because the recommendation is two doses) works out to less than 0.2 per million per lifetime. With an average lifespan of 75 years, that works out to less than 0.003 per million per year, so the risk from the disease is over ten times greater than the risk of the vaccine even with 95% of the population immune.

Oh, and by the way - the MMR vaccine protects against three diseases, not just measles. We’ll just ignore that for right now.

And even this approximation doesn’t show the true risk of forgoing just the measles vaccine (let alone the MMR) because we haven’t considered how having a large immune population prevents spreading and how that has limited the number of measles cases reported.

Measles is transmitted from person-to-person, a single infection provides life-long immunity and it has no non-human reservoir and no known long-term carrier or dormant state. In this respect, it is similar to smallpox, polio, mumps, rubella, and many other vaccine-preventable diseases. If it is not transmitted, the measles virus “dies out”. It doesn’t “hang out” in the environment. That is why measles could be eradicated, just as smallpox was.

Currently (since 2000), measles is not endemic in the US, largely because there aren’t enough susceptible (non-immune) people in close enough contact to keep the virus going. Measles in the US is an imported disease that, until 2008, was rarely transmitted beyond the person importing it and any under-age (i.e. less than 2 years old) or immune-compromised people they came in contact with.

Starting in about 2008, the percentage of immune people in the US had slipped far enough that imported cases were able to spread locally in pockets of non-immune people. The August 22, 2008 edition of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) details two outbreaks of measles that occured in the US that year. In both cases, the outbreaks occured within groups that did not vaccinate for religious or philosophical reasons and were home-schooled.

This latter point is worth noting - even though these children did not attend a public or private school, they still contracted measles from one another.

Here is a telling statement from the MMWR report:

The number of measles cases reported during January 1–July 31, 2008, is the highest year-to-date since 1996. This increase was not the result of a greater number of imported cases, but was the result of greater viral transmission after importation into the United States, leading to a greater number of importation-associated cases. These importation-associated cases have occurred largely among school-aged children who were eligible for vaccination but whose parents chose not to have them vaccinated. [emphasis added]

As the percentage of non-immune people in the country rises, imported measles cases will spread to more people, further raising the risk of infection to non-immune people and increasing the already large benefit to risk ratio of vaccines.

What this shows is that those people who choose to not vaccinate should - at the least - take precautions against associating with other people who don’t vaccinate. This would help reduce their risk of infection to the levels I calculated above.

Perhaps they should wear some sort of lapel pin, similar to what many fraternal organisations (e.g. Masons, Rotarians, etc.) have. Except, of course, that instead of stepping forward and embracing when they see a fellow member (with or without secret handshake), they should immediately turn about and walk briskly in opposite directions, to avoid transmitting vaccine-preventable diseases.

As the events of 2008 showed us, there will not be a gradual increase in measles spread as vaccine coverage declines - there will most likely be an abrupt increase as the percentage of non-immune people (and their proximity to one another) crosses a critical threshold.

And it is important to note that non-immune people are not just the children of parents who choose not to have them vaccinated. They include children too young to be vaccinated and people who are immune-suppressed due to disease, cancer or genetic disorders. They include the elderly, whose immune systems are weaker, and those people who - for one reason or another - did not develop an adequate immune response to vaccination.

Those who choose to not vaccinate and think they are letting others take the risks for them are fooling themselves; they are taking the greater risk - even now.

Prometheus



Non-hyperlinked References:

Hutchins SS, Bellini WJ, Coronado V, et al. Population immunity to measles in the United States, 1999. J. Infec. Dis.. 2004; 189(Suppl 1):S91–7

In other words, QM actually supports the mystical philosophies of the Easter Mysticism.

logic works only within a closed system

Logic without observation to back it up is utterly useless.

Science moves forward via observation. Period. In fact, it cannot do otherwise, because that is the very basis of the scientific method.

Take away the ability to observe and the scientific method is no longer applicable.

So it's not a matter of "throwing ones hands up and saying well that's that. It's truly a matter of recognizing the limitations of the method of inquiry itself.

It doesn't matter whether you agree with me or not. That doesn't change the fact that the scientific method of inquiry is totally founded on, and dependent upon and ability to observer and take experimental measurements.

It is one of the great pillars of modern science itself, (i.e. quantum mechanics) that demands that certain aspects of reality are necessarily beyond observation and measurement.

Therefore, science has come to a dead-end. At least in terms of its original basis of observation and experiment.

You can deny it all you want. That doesn't make it go away. Science as we know it has necessarily reached the limit of it's capability (at least in the quest to know the true nature of reality).

This doesn't mean that we know everything there is to know about the physical world. There may be quite a bit we can yet learn about the physical realm. So science itself is far from being "finished".

But as far as a means of investigation into the true nature of what give rise to this physical reality, it's dead in the water by it's very own observational results.

Science has shown us that the scientific method of inquiry cannot penetrate the quantum barrier, and it has also shown us that all of the physical world ultimately arises from that quantum realm.

So why fight it?

Why not just accept what science has shown to be true?

Why is that so hard to do?

You seem to be viewing it as a negative thing. You seem to be totally uncomforable and unable to accept that science can't ultimately be used to reveal all truth of creation. But it is science itself that has revealed its own limitations in this matter.

In fact, for you to hold out "FAITH" that science might not be dead in the water on this point is genuinely nothing more than an act of "FAITH". In fact, it's a totally unwarranted faith because there is nothing you can point to that would suggest that your hopes and dreams should be true. Science has shown just the opposite.

In order for your dreams to be true, our current scientific understands must be WRONG.

So all you're truly doing is hoping that what science has reveal thus far somehow turns out to be a mistake and we can evntually go back to the pipe dream that there is nothing that cannot be determined using the scientific method of observation and experiment.

You're apparently just unwilling to accept the current state of affairs. Either that, or you genuinely don't fully understand just what it is that science has indeed discovered.

There's just no scientific basis to beleive that the scientific method can go beyond the quantum realm. To believe that it might be able to do that is a faith-based dream no different from a belief in fairies. It's just a totally ungrounded dream.

You may as well believe in fairies.

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there."

-Richard Feynman

"Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get "down the drain," into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

-Richard Feynman

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

-Richard Feynman

No, baby boy, YOU will need to get your head out. I have given you ALL the information I intend to. Your specious 'data' on which you base your worship of 'The Gorbacle' and his 'AGW' fraud is busted. Goodbye.

But Averoes is clearly wrong. I've already shown this to be the case.

Logic is not the tool to distinguish truth. And has never been.

At one time we believe that the universe was eternal. That's perfectly logical. Untill, we make observations that conflict with that conclusion. Then we must rethink what might actually be true.

So it's not logic that provides us with truth, but observation.

And that's was my whole point.

The modern science of quantum mechanics has shown us that the fundamental fabric of reality is unobservable in any direct fashion. This has been proven mathematically and verified experimentally.

Therefore the real tool for determining truth has been proven to be out of our grasp. Logic is utterly useless if the logical hypotheses can't be confirmed via observation.

Logic without observational evidence to back it up, is meaningless.

And now we have 'evidence' that such observational 'evidence' is beyond our reach as inhabitants of this physical universe.

So what good is logical hypotheses if they can't be determined to be true or false via 'observation'?

If we weren't able to have actually observed that the universe is expanding, we'd probably still think it's eternal. The only way we can make a determination is via observation, not via pure logic. Logic is meaningless without the observational evidence to back it up.

So if observation has been removed from the equation (which it has), then logic becomes utterly useless.

That's my whole point.

It's only "defeatism" if you feel a need to cling to the hope and dream that someday every imaginable question can be answered via logical analysis.

Averroes defined logic as "the tool for distinguishing between the true and the false"

I just saw an interesting show about Germany. The German government decided some years ago that the country needed to start moving away from fossil fuels towards nonrenewables like solar. They issued a program with the power companies that said everyone has to pay $0.20 a kilowatt-hr for electricity (a little more that we pay in the states) but anyone who produced solar power would be paid $0.50 a kilowatt-hr. The goal was to have the country 20% solar. Many at the time said that goal was impossible.

Germany is now approaching 30% solar powered and has also developed a large profitable solar panel industry.

The population who is paying more for their electricity accept it knowing it is good for their health, county, and the planet.

yes

long after the point where we would die from it

Regarding the merits of ID as a theory, what is the theory?

A basic problem in these conversations is that some of us may have very different idea of what ID means. I'd rather not talk about whether ID might be 'true' - I'd rather talk about whether some very specific claim might be true.

Your very demands are unwarranted.

You say, "use mathematics to explain yourself, please show your work."

But where's your "evidence" that anything should adhere to the formal constructs of mathematics? Mathematics itself stands upon unprovable and questionable axioms.

You're placing all your faith in a manmade construct that may have absolutely no application to anything "real". You belief in mathematics is no different from someone else's belief in a god. All you saying is that you put your faith in the mathematicians.

Mathematical formalism is based on an idea of a continuum anyway, now we've discovered that we live in a quantum world and that the very idea that things were ever continuous was a bogus idea to begin with. Mathematical formalism itself is in need of a major reassessment. There is no logical reason to belief that mathematics should have anything at all to do with the true nature of reality.

You're just attempting to push your "God" (i.e. your faith in mathematics) onto everyone else. But where's your evidence that mathematics should apply to anything outside of spacetime? Or even be depended upon to correctly describe all of spacetime itself for that matter?