|
|
|
|
|
|
by inimino
3359 days ago
|
|
|
> since no one is able to easily explain it. (No, really, no one is.) Where the hell did that "easily" come from? You just added it, moving the goalposts, and making your whole argument nonsense. There is no blog post that explains quantum mechanics easily to me in an hour of effort, therefore QM is obviously impossible to explain and probably the whole thing is just made up. /s (By the way, if you don't respond with a link to such a blog post, you prove my point.) |
|
|
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics
It seems absolutely easy for me to read and follow! It even includes a section "Why QM is hard to learn", clearly explaining the challenges.
To me, the conversation should have included more mention of wave/particle duality and the uncertainty principle, as well as the double slit experiment, which if clearly described could have shown how quanta behaved "statistically" as though they interfered with each other, even when released one at a time.
It also lists Einstein among the discoverers, but does not talk at length about how Einstein historically was against Quantum Mechanics (saying "God does not play dice"), or what the inherent tension is between his quite deterministic theories, and Newtonian deterministic physics, and the inherent facts of quantum mechanics which I take to be statistical.
There are extremely visceral facts about quantum mechanics, today: today, etchings in silicon are so tiny that sometimes the electrons will jump through (tunnel) to another side. This is because quantum mechanics shows that electrons don't ACTUALLY have a specific location, but rather a range of probabilities of being at certain spaces.
There is currently a certain probability that if I were to individually measure every one of your atoms, they would ALL actually turn out at the instance of measurement, to be beyond Mars in distance from the Earth.
It's just that the chances of that are small in the way 1 in 10^Googolplex is small. (A severe underestimation of the chances, I just don't want to be wrong.) In a very real sense, there is a nonzero chance that every one of your atoms is beyond mars. Of course the chances involved are ludicrously small - much smaller than sitting down with a pair of fair dice and rolling two sixes a hundred times in a row, fairly.
But at the 10 nanometer scale, the scale of current etchings in silicon, the chances that an electron might turn out to be a whole etching over might be 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100 billion -- in other words, it might regularly occur, multiple times every second or every few seconds.
All of this understanding is quite visceral and could be given in the article, which it does not touch upon.
So actually this is a GREAT example that a very clear explanation does not reflect very deep knowledge: I have linked a superlative explanation above. But does its writer have a superlative understanding? Maybe yes, maybe no. It is not possible to judge.
If I were interviewing for a position as a chief physicist at Intel, then the ability of the candidate to produce a description on command of the above caliber, actually does not to me show their level of understanding of the subject matter. Is it college-level, doctoral-level, post-doctoral, or are they a leading contributor in the domain, one of the five best experts world-wide?
In fact, the "simple English explanation", though superlative from a subjective evaluation of an explanation, does not give this indication at all. In fact it could be that the explanation is fundamentally wrong in many ways. (I am not enough of an expert to tell.) So the linked page passes the criterion of a good description, with flying colors - but may be entirely wrong.
Finally, I checked whether we could at least find a simple English page for functional programming. Going to the link https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming
actually transfers us to a 3-line section within Programming languages. I will quote these in full:
>Functional programming looks at programming like a function in mathematics. The program receives input, some information, and uses this information to create output. It will not have a state in between, and it will also not change things that are not related to the computation.
>Procedural programs are a set of steps or state changes.
I think you will agree that as Simple English Wikipedia's COMPLETE description of functional programming -- that's it, that's all they wrote -- this does not fit the description of being a good explanation. "It [the program] will not have a state in between" is simply wrong, insofar as it isn't downright meaningless.
To return to your assertion that I am moving the goal-posts by adding "easily", making my argument nonsense, I will grant that if you are willing to accept obscure, difficult explanations, we are talking about a different metric than I referred to.
In this case, what do you judge the explanations on? Formal correctness? Sounding good? After all, under your suggestion it is not necessary that the person asking for an explanation be able to understand the explanation proffered. Are you suggesting that the person asking, must have sufficient domain expertise to be able to deeply judge even extremely obscure explanations, and that the standard must be "is this obscure explanation complete and correct?" Or what should the standard be under the way you take the goal-posts to be? (By the way I don't agree with your reading but I am interested in you how view it.)