Timeline for A meaningful distinction between determinism and causality
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 18, 2014 at 16:56 | comment | added | Davidmh | Bras, kets, and hilbert spaces are just tools for a mathematical description. If you want to know the position for a given wavefunction, you apply the position operator, and get a probability distribution, but everything remains the same. If you do the actual measurement, you get a single value, but then you have destroyed the experiment. | |
| Apr 18, 2014 at 16:54 | comment | added | Davidmh | An electron knows nothing about bras and kets. It just exists. Where is it? You cannot know until you measure, and to do that you have (for example) to knock it with a light beam. But before that, the particle is sort of spread over an area. | |
| Apr 18, 2014 at 16:20 | comment | added | Dennis Addison | That literally blew my mind. Thanks for being so explicit about the difference between a cause and a reason. I was in the mindset that in qm one can say that a particle has a position, a la stochastic classical mechanics. I think I have to keep reminding myself that it's a ket in some crazy Hilbert space, and that it's meaningless to speak of the particle having a position before you operate on it with a bra and a position operator. Please correct me if any of my interpretation sounds wrong. I understand quantum mechanics a lot better now. Thanks so much for your reply. | |
| Apr 18, 2014 at 15:52 | vote | accept | Dennis Addison | ||
| Apr 18, 2014 at 15:12 | history | answered | Davidmh | CC BY-SA 3.0 |