"Let’s have a really good red wine tonight."
Well, I can’t argue with that.
But I can keep arguing with your suggestion that quantum physics is like prophetic dreaming in some "woo woo we can’t understand either so let’s not be skeptical" way.
The mechanisms of quantum phenomena are presently unknown; I can comfortably allow that they might even be somehow unknowable; they might operate on some scale that other physical laws prevent our perceiving even indirectly.
But the phenomena themselves are not imaginary; they are easily reproducible in any university physics lab. There’s no issue of subjectivity or trustworthiness in the data we have about the phenomena we’re trying to explain (even when subjectivity and observer involvement are the phenomena we’re trying to explain).
If Tom Young had logged into some antique telegraph-based Metafilter and tapped out "hey, I shined coherent light from a point source through these two slits, and it made a wave pattern on a photosensitive card! I showed it to my friend, and he was amazed! But it only works sometimes, and I didn’t keep the card. Isn’t that spooky?" the science-minded members of that community would been a lot more interested in the details of the experiment and why it wasn’t reproducible than in discussing its implications.
Are you telling me that your conscious, rational, analytical mind, your left-brain, thinks it understands how an electron can not only move instantaneously, that is with no time taking place for the movement to occur, but can be in two places at once?
Sure, and not just two. Any particle’s location is defined probabilistically by its wave function; as long as its velocity is partially known its location has to be smeared out and indeterminate. I’ve known that since I was ten or twelve. If you grew up thinking they were like little rocks, that’s a shame but 1926 was a long time ago; if gullible anti-skeptic nitwits didn’t keep making us fight to teach kids Darwin maybe we’d have gotten Schrödinger and Heisenberg into the public schools.
If your point is that I don’t know by what underlying mechanism wave mechanics operates, you’re right and so what? That gives me no reason to be skeptical about quantum mechanics; I know from personal experience that quantum phenomena are real, and I know that other skeptical people have been similarly convinced.
Whereas when we ask those who claim to have repeated prophetic dreams to test the veracity of their memory – just to show that something other than common déjà vu is happening – we are told they don’t feel like it; they don’t want to seem "geeky". So I think skepticism is natural and proper.
languagehat: is it "terrible" because you don’t agree with his conclusions?
No, Dunne’s Experiment is terrible because his methods are risible; after reading that I don’t care about his conclusions.
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