Just Some Guy

Not a specific one, no. I just can't wrap my mind around how it fits into already established theories like quantum mechanics and relativity.

Something like just saying "this is how it's defined in relation to ______." And yes, I do realize this is a strange question.

So I'm trying to clarify in my head a better idea of the observer, and how it fits into relativity and quantum mechanics, but I'm not finding the info I need scattered about. Anyone mind just giving me whatever rundown you think fits the question, and/or if there's any equations that directly relate?

Hey, my apologies for not contributing with my earlier post, but I felt that I was beginning to get defensive, and that is a terrible state of mind to try and communicate with others in.

If I may chime in here?

Now as I staed above, I beleve the best way to approach things is by paradox (and you can take that or leave it, that's your choice as a thinking human being), but in that vein I'd like to toss in here.

What I interpret you both as expressing is that duality is not, in essence, the highest concept and there is a state of perfection and unity above that. You may call it the self, or Advaita Vedanta, or even the Buddha consciousness would not be too much of a stretch. However, if you would be so kind as to allow me to use a term from my own lexicon, I'd like to call it"all that is". Which is everything concievable, all at once, in a non-dualistic form. It is one thing that encompasses everything.

Now with that in mind, the idea object that you both seem to be expressing is well... everything, and therefore not tied down to one point of view for it encompasses everything, and you can't have only one point of view on everything. So what I've been getting around to (in my usual rambling and roundabout way) is that in the eyes of "All That Is" you are both correct. For there are as many ways of looking at everything as there are things in the universe, because each can only see everything from one angle, because they can only be in one place at once. None are incorrect, or better/worse than the other, simply different. An analogy would be the famous painting where one person may see two faces, another may see a vase. Both are looking at the same object, and both are completely correct. A bit of a paradox, but I've already touched on that.

So if I may be so bold as to make a suggestion? You may wish to try looking at each other's viewpoints in the mindset of "What knowledge can I gain from this different viewpoint?". Respectfully, you may try thinking in a manner of "this AND that" rather than "this OR that". Take what they have said and integrate it into your own, already existing viewpoint (not negate in any way, but rather) to expand upon it. Take what you already know is true, and build upon it.

But as I said, your right as thinking beings is to make up your own minds, and I would never be so brazen as to insist you must think only one way.

P.S. - I found a link to the painting I spoke of here, for those visually-minded people like myself: (http://www.opticalil...ir-of-face.html)

Hmm. Are you sure you can conceive of it as concept?

Not in it's entirety no, but as the gentleman above me also expressed, as a concept, we can understand it as the opposite of everything we know.

Because we are beings living inside existence, made of existence. And I'm not talking in a religious sense, though you can take it that way if you wish. What I mean by that is we exist, and so does, conceivably (key word), anything that we can imagine, with the exception of fantastically crazy things that violate the laws of physics.

So we, as creatures born, raised, and educated in existence, and knowing nothing else, cannot conceive of it except as the opposite of everything we know. For to completely imagine non-existence within only the frame of reference of existence is impossible. But since it can still be understood to be a concept, even if we don't know it's particulars, enough of one that we could invent a word specifically for it ("Nothing") then it must exist.

And yes, I realize that therein lies the paradox, but that (to me, I cannot speak for others) proves it's truth. Because we are playing to a bit of a play on the word "existence" itself. We are saying that something that is the opposite of existence must exist, because existence cannot exist without it. Do you understand the paradox?

Answering the question "Can nothing exist?":

 

"nohing is" and "everything is not" against "everything is" and "nothing is not". the second statement is a paradox, the firs isnt.

 

to me, this would imply, that the original question isnt correct, that its opposite IS the question: "can nothing not exist"

Of course nothing exists. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to conceive of it as a concept.

There would be no "thing" that you could slap a label on called nothing.

I don't believe that a single concept that you could concieve of can not exist.

How can we as members of existance concieve of something for which we have no basis for comparison? Non-existence cannot exist within existence except as that which is conceptually understood to be the opposite of existence.

That depends very much on what you mean by "unobservable", and also by what interpretation of quantum mechanics you ascribe to.

 

The kinds of observations physicists make are quite indirect. Take something as mundane as stepping on a bathroom scale to see how much you weigh. You aren't really observing your weight. You are observing the angular deflection of some pointing device. Yet you would never say "Wow! My diet is working! I only weight 37 degrees today!" For one thing, the scale isn't calibrated in degrees. For another, weight as angle doesn't make sense. That angular deflection is caused by a somewhat complex mechanism that converts the linear deflection of the scale's plate against a spring into that angular deflection. This linear deflection is no better than an angular deflection for representing weight. This linear deflection can be converted to force by assuming the spring in your scale obeys Hooke's law (which it doesn't). With this at hand, you could say "Wow! My diet is working! I only weigh 667 newtons today!" Physicists might think that is a good expression for weight, but colloquially and legally, weight means mass. One last thing needs to be done, which is to convert that 667 newton force value to a 68 kilogram mass value by assuming that this force results from a gravitational acceleration of 9.80665 m/s² (which almost certainly isn't the acceleration due to gravity where you live).

 

And that's just for stepping on the scale on the morning. The path gets very indirect when it comes to observing things like photons, electrons, neutrinos, and quarks. I would say that those photons and other things of interest to physicists are "observable" even though the observations are quite indirect. With this concept of observability, the Copenhagen interpretation, taken to its logical positivism extreme, pretty much says that that which is utterly unobservable doesn't exist. A slightly less extreme view that still falls under the Copenhagen interpretation umbrella is that the existence of something that is utterly unobservable is irrelevant to physics (except when it's a useful fiction, such as wave function collapse).

 

There are other, more modern interpretations of quantum mechanics than the Copenhagen interpretation. Each has its weirdnesses. They pretty much have to; quantum mechanics is a bit (more than a bit) weird.

I think what I was trying to get at originally (though the question has kinda mutated thanks to all the replies from you fine folks) was what would happen if you discounted all the things that were not directly observable. i.e. external forces "outside" the range of a fixed experiment, and things that we could perceive the effects of, but not the effector itself.

I was kind of trying to figure out the question that popped into my head one day: What would happen to our view of the world if everything the we couldn't observe (as in: us as observers in the classical sense) didn't actually exist until we observed it? I understand that there's the theory of quantum superposition, wherein everything exists in all possible staes until observed, but I also recently watched Leonard Susskind's lecture on he possibility of the observable world being a hologram, so I was trying to reconfigure the two ideas in my own head with the help of people much more knowledgeable than myself.

My apologies for the vagueness, I should have come right out and said all of this in the beginning, but at that point I barely had the idea of the question in mind, much less it's rationale.

Wow, thank you so much guys, that actually helps clarify things quite a bit. Which would bring me about to another question, more along the lines of what I believe I was actually thinking.

So if the presence of an observer forces objects in quantum superposition down to a singular position or outcome, as has been theorized (but not proven I believe); when there is no observer present and there exists the setup of one object acting on another (say for example the moon pulling the tides), how could it be affecting the corresponding object in a linear way if it is, in fact in all possible positions at once?

I apologize if this doesn't belong here, first time posting on this board (or most any for that matter). I enjoy reading books and articles about physics and quantum physics, and I often read the ones that leave the math out and explain the concepts. However, for this question I have, I think might need to ask those who know the math:

What would happen to the commonly held laws of physics if we treated everything unobservable as nonexistant?