Chaos & Unpredictability

How does science work? And what's all this about quantum mechanics?

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philosopher
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Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2018 3:37 pm

Chaos & Unpredictability

Post by philosopher »

I've watched some documentaries about chaos, unpredictability, disorder. From both Jim-Al Khalili and David Malone.

Like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7iuFIKmkN4

They all conclude the same nonsense: "You can have the simplest equation, with nothing random, yet when you run the equation you get randomness".
Something like that.

I feel that this is wrong. It is popular pseudo-science at its worst. It is not that the world is random. Nor that it is essentially unpredictable. The world is perfectly determinstic and without any sort of randomness. The thing is, the world becomes so complex that in order to understand it, we have to ignore the tiny butterfly effects having large implications for the entire system in the future, that we need to talk about stuff like "probabilities", "waves", "statistics".

But it is not like the world is essentially made of this stuff. The world behaves like particles, not both particle/wave duality.
See Pilot Wave explanation, of de-Broglie-Bohm Theory. Waves are nothing else than individual particles carrying local information about its history.

The world is not random.
The world is not chaotic.
The world is not unpredictable.

The world is complex, from simplicity.
The world is deterministic.
The world is as it is, and it could have been no other.
surreptitious57
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Re: Chaos & Unpredictability

Post by surreptitious57 »

Random does not mean entirely spontaneous but a particular outcome from all possible outcomes
So the outcome is not known in advance but it can only come from a finite number of possibilities
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QuantumT
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Re: Chaos & Unpredictability

Post by QuantumT »

This applies to your questions from your QM thread as well:

In this lecture Prof. Sean Carroll explains what particles, waves and fields are. How they work and interact. And how the LHC and future colliders can reveal more about reality, than we though was possible. The Higgs Boson (or rather Higgs Field) plays a major role in it all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEKSpZPByD0 (1:37:54)

The lecture itself ends after 1h 10mins, the rest is Q&A's.
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