On Mar 4, 2005, at 4:26 AM, Robert Seeberger wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:
What's funny is that I regularly sense a strong commitment to QM(notjust in you), one that isn't comfortable with conceding that, sinceQMis incomplete, it's possible that some of its conclusions are false. Almost as though it's a religion.
So what about indeterminacy?
I've been ruminating that one for a while. Indeterminacy sure does look like it's there (though superstring proponents believe they've explained that one, and I'm half inclined to agree), but TTBOMK we only see indeterminacy with subatomic particles, and then only some of them, such as electron or photon wavicles. When you're looking at a macroscopic item -- sure, why not, Buckingham Palace -- indeterminacy is overwhelmed by other, much larger effects.
That's why, for instance, all the particles in your body don't just randomly decide to vaporize at once. You might get some state changes on the subatomic level because of indeterminacy, but think of it as a finite chance of any one indeterminacy effect happening at any one point in any one entity, and then in fairly ordered ways, as in electron shells -- where exactly in the shell the electron is is indeterminate; but it's proximally certain that it is *someplace* within that shell zone.
So you do get indeterminacy in a human body, but if at any one point the likelihood of loss of a single electron to it is, say, 1:1,000,000 (I don't know at all what the odds are of various indeterminate effects happening, but it wouldn't surprise me to know that someone has calculated it), you'd have to poll one million electrons each moment before you were reasonably sure of losing *one* to indeterminacy. That's a lot of electrons, and if your odds of losing one are balanced out by similar odds of gaining one, you still get an outcome that is simply too small to notice. The net effect is toward coherence, not randomization.
QM's indeterminacy effects are really quite small. If it were otherwise, we'd have a pretty interesting cosmos, with stochastic tunneling taking place all the time on the macroscopic scale and things spontaneously passing through other things. (As just one example.)
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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