In Hilbert space, all things are quantumly possible

(quantamagazine.org)

51 points | by unprovable 3 hours ago

6 comments

  • djsjajah 1 hour ago
    Not all things are possible, only potentially possible ones. If you take all the numbers between zero and one, you will find an endless supply of distinct numbers but none of them are 3.
    • tcdent 1 hour ago
      Aren't you really just talking about the level of abstraction being applied? If there are infinite possibilities between zero and one, then it's just our way of relating to it that imposes the perception of a limitation.
      • packetlost 1 hour ago
        Maybe you can theoretically encode arbitrary (but not infinite) information, but there are still discrete underlying states.
        • fc417fc802 23 minutes ago
          > encode arbitrary (but not infinite) information

          What leads you to claim that you can't encode infinite information given an infinite set to work with?

      • mathisfun123 1 hour ago
        Terrence Howard is that you?
    • lolakutty 49 minutes ago
      And can't one do all of mathematics without 3...(just map all the numbers > 1 to points inside the interval 0-1)?
  • rozgo 2 hours ago
    "I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe absolutely in Hilbert space anymore." - John von Neumann
    • kdavis 54 minutes ago
      Surprising that he could have that intuition in 1935, before the Unruh effect was known of, before AQFT was invented, and really before most of QFT was formulated.

      But then again, he was John von Neumann.

  • inshard 31 minutes ago
    Superdeterminism... quantum noise and the which way paths are all correlated.
  • ocschwar 2 hours ago
    "What is a Hilbert space?"

    -- David Hilbert.

    • cgio 2 hours ago
      The nice additional reading is that you could even know what a Hilbert space is, but not what is a Hilbert space.
  • thrill 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • katzgrau 2 hours ago
      Or, there is no time. Awareness traverses the grand graph of possibility.

      Disclaimer: total armchair philosophy.

    • SantalBlush 2 hours ago
      Given infinite time, is it possible to randomly draw a rational (instead of an irrational) from the interval [0, 1]? And if so, is it possible infinite times?
      • rablackburn 2 hours ago
        Finally, a well-formed question to which the answer "42 (times)" is a possible solution.
      • LPisGood 1 hour ago
        Certainly! Probability 0 does not mean impossible.
        • voxl 1 hour ago
          In this case it does. Describe any effective measure to pick a random sample from the interval and you will have cheated into choosing from the computable reals instead (of which there is a countable amount)
          • fc417fc802 20 minutes ago
            I don't think that's correct. You're describing a limitation of our physical computing devices (or perhaps physical reality itself) as opposed to a theoretical flaw. At least as far as I can tell.
      • adrianN 1 hour ago
        "Randomly" drawing anything from [0,1] is already quite difficult.
        • taneq 54 minutes ago
          You could draw a line, or a Cantor dust. ;)
  • georgestones 54 minutes ago
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