The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and spiritual liberation

[AnotherSpin]

I had a more detailed comparison there, but the forum software was giving me the Forbidden error so I removed almost all of it. However, the basic question is similar: whether to believe in things that cannot be verified or measured. Call it personal experience vs. data.

Obviously, Einstein and Heisenberg believed in things that cannot be verified or measured. Who am I to argue with them ?

[Spotted Horses]

Obviously, Einstein and Heisenberg believed in things that cannot be verified or measured. Who am I to argue with them ?

They had beliefs that guided their research. They didn't expect anyone to accept their beliefs. They expected people to accept the findings they had demonstrated mathematically and which were verified by experiment.

[Daverz]

Obviously, Einstein and Heisenberg believed in things that cannot be verified or measured. Who am I to argue with them ?

Maybe they both believed in Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice, but in their scientific writings "things that cannnot be verified or measured" were exactly what both men rejected.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Karl Popper.

[Daverz]

Wrong. Heisenberg's fundamental insight into the nature of reality was stark: not everything can be measured.  To pin down one property with precision is to blur another, and this limit is a law of nature itself.

The level of precision needed to reproduce music or to hear it is many, many, many, (MANY!) orders of magnitude less than that allowed by the H.U.P.  It's just not relevant to measurements of electrical circuits and rooms.

     



 

[Spotted Horses]

Wrong. Heisenberg's fundamental insight into the nature of reality was stark: not everything can be measured. To pin down one property with precision is to blur another, and this limit is a law of nature itself.

After Heisenberg, science could no longer claim to be strictly deterministic. We can no longer predict with certainty, only in terms of probabilities. The observer, too, became part of the experiment - for the very act of measurement alters what is being measured.

In this way, Heisenberg introduced the unmeasurable as a scientific truth, reshaping our understanding of reality itself.

This description is not what you originally said,

Obviously, Einstein and Heisenberg believed in things that cannot be verified or measured. Who am I to argue with them ?

Heisenberg wasn't a mystic that believed in things that cannot be verified, he was a skeptic that had the insight that there are limits to how accurately certain physical quantities are defined. It is going to far to attribute this insight entirely to Heisenberg, who made a more concise statement of the implications of Schrodinger's wave mechanics.

It is worth noting that the quantum uncertainty is very small and would only be significant when applied to object such as individual electrons.

[Spotted Horses]

The level of precision needed to reproduce music or to hear it is many, many, many, (MANY!) orders of magnitude less than that allowed by the H.U.P.  It's just not relevant to measurements of electrical circuits and rooms.

You are right, but I am not sure how many MANYs are justified. Electrical circuits are typically limited by Johnson noise, thermal noise in resistors caused charge carriers jiggling (which goes away as temperature is reduced). Quantum noise would be shot noise, the noise of individual charge carriers jumping an energy barrier, such as in a diode or transistor. It takes a lot in ingenuity to make a circuit where shot noise measurable, but it can be done.

[Spotted Horses]

Some believe that everything can be measured, while others think they are confined within the shell of mind and body.

I do not mind, by the way. People think many strange things, and there is neither sense nor purpose in arguing with that. What is, is .

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a very specific limitation quantum mechanics places on measurable variables. It is not a justification for the belief that we can't know anything.

People think many strange things, and there is neither sense nor purpose in arguing with that.

I could consider that a rare self own.

[Elgarian Redux]

No one argues with that, of course science knows and can do some things. It just doesn't know and can't do everything.

I've never met a scientist who thinks that it can. Indeed, a scientist who thought so would be a bad scientist, lacking in the necessary scepticism that drives the repeated testing of theories to the point of failure. The science you keep on attacking is a straw man. The scientific method is based on the idea that any currently held theory is provisional: it is only as good as the most recent test of its predictions. It's through the repeated testing of its strongest theories, to destruction if necessary, that science progresses.

The point here is that scientific method could be said to have a built-in humility, if you like. It doesn't offer 'the truth'; it offers the best shot* currently available through experimental testing. And that best shot is inherently provisional. But it can get us to the moon (if we want to go), and it can help us design music reproduction systems. Then we come along and listen to those systems and choose the ones that seem, to us, to deliver our music in the way we most like.

Why would there be a row about this?

* 'best shot' meaning 'most successfully predictive model'

[71 dB]

No one argues with that, of course science knows and can do some things. It just doesn't know and can't do everything.

Science doesn't "do" or "know" anything. it is just knowledge. We people do things using science. This limit you are talking about isn't necessarily in science, but in us. Can we know everything? Is our mental capacity enough for that?

Only God knows and can do everything

If God knows what he does tomorrow, how can he do anything tomorrow?

[71 dB]

Wrong. Heisenberg's fundamental insight into the nature of reality was stark: not everything can be measured. To pin down one property with precision is to blur another, and this limit is a law of nature itself.

We don't understand intuitively the fundamental nature of the reality. Measuring the momentum AND position of electrons at infinite accuracy is not a thing in our reality. We only intuitively think it should be a thing we can theoretically measure at infinite accuracy. The laws of nature doensn't have any limitations. We see limitations because of our intuition based on how we experience our life. Evolution didn't shape us to understand how electrons orbit nuclei. It shaped us to avoid getting eaten by lions.

After Heisenberg, science could no longer claim to be strictly deterministic.

Not strictly deterministic, but statistically deterministic. Again, this is about our intuition.

We can no longer predict with certainty, only in terms of probabilities. The observer, too, became part of the experiment - for the very act of measurement alters what is being measured.

What if conducting a gallup changes people's opinions? In everyday life we don't notice these kind of thing easily, but when conducting precise scientific experiments, we see things.

In this way, Heisenberg introduced the unmeasurable as a scientific truth, reshaping our understanding of reality itself.

It is not about things being unmeasurable. It is about what measurements make sense. What colour is independence? If your question doesn't make sense, don't expect having answer that make sense.

[71 dB]

God has no tomorrow. God is eternally now, beyond time and space. Let me tell you one thing, only don't be afraid. The same applies to us as well, to our true selves, which are beyond time and space and not confined into body/mind.

How can we know there is something eternal beyond time and space?

[71 dB]

Nothing to understand here. Do you know that you are? That's it, no formulas required.

Doesn't this sound like "Don't think, those with power don't like it. Stay dumb and obedient instead"?

[Florestan]

Wrong. Heisenberg's fundamental insight into the nature of reality was stark: not everything can be measured. To pin down one property with precision is to blur another, and this limit is a law of nature itself.

After Heisenberg, science could no longer claim to be strictly deterministic. We can no longer predict with certainty, only in terms of probabilities. The observer, too, became part of the experiment - for the very act of measurement alters what is being measured.

In this way, Heisenberg introduced the unmeasurable as a scientific truth, reshaping our understanding of reality itself.

This is a misrepresentation of Heisenberg's principle.

First, it's not an insight into "the nature of reality" but into the nature of quantum particles reality, which is only a subset of the whole reality. HUP doesn't apply to the reality of bullets, buses or celestial bodies.

Second, it's not about any two properties of any physical object. During your walks on the beach your mass and speed can be measured with utmost precision. Heck, even the properties most associated with HUP, position and momentum, can also be measured with utmost accuracy during your walks, precisely because you are not a quantum particle and therefore HUP doesn't apply to your movements.

Third, HUP is not universally accepted among scientists. Its most vocal opponent was Einstein. Some physicists argue that ascribing classical notions such as position and momentum to quantum particles is a conceptual and methodological error because at quantum level they are properties of interactions between objects rather than intrinsic properties of individual objects.

Finally, no scientist worth his salt ever claimed that science does or can know everything. Intellectual humility is a prerequisite for being a scientist. Actually, it's precisely you who jump to hasty conclusions and unwarranted generalizations: you take a principle with limited validity and make it into a universally valid law of nature governing any and all physical reality, using it as a hammer against, what, the presumptuousness of scientists claiming they know everything. Gotta love the irony.

[71 dB]

Quantum physics tells us that the reality is quantised at (sub)atomic scale. There's Plack time (about 5.4*10^-44 s) and Plack length (about 1.6*10^-35 m) representing the smallest possibly lengths and time intervals possible.

Quantised systems introduce non-linear distortion unless the system is properly dithered. The statistically consistent randomness we see on quantum level is, I intuitively believe, the way our reality is "dithered" to function in linear manner. Without the randomness reality would cumulate rounding errors that would probably lead to "everything blowing up." With the randomness reality functions smoothly in stable manner.

In digital audio every sample point is mathematically "smeared" in time backwards and forwards in the shape of sinc(t)=sin(𝝿t)/𝝿t function. Similarly in our reality, particles are smeared in space and time in the shape of wave function Ψ(x,t). In digital audio, dither noise is used to linearise quantisation while in quantum physics we have quantum randomness.

[71 dB]

Do you happen to know of a scientific formula or perhaps a scholarly book that can grant an individual true freedom? If so, I would be most curious to hear of it. Please share .

What do you mean by "true freedom" and what makes you think we are granted it?

If you are talking about free will, smart people are still debating about it as far as I know and we don't have definitive answers.

[71 dB]

You don't even recognize that you can be liberated? Sad. But not hopeless.

Liberated from what?

[StudioGuy]

I'm not convinced that your mentioning of religious people and skeptics is entirely apt. Perhaps framing it as religion versus science would come a bit closer, though even that requires significant caveats. I'd be more inclined to call it personal experience vs. hearsay.

And who invented audio recording and reproduction, was it god/religion or was it science? And, the actual framing would be; science/the proven facts vs personal experience and hearsay.

With his Uncertainty Principle, Heisenberg introduced the idea that reality is fundamentally beyond measurement and proof.

In short, Heisenberg forced science to accept that the picture of the world must include the unmeasurable as a feature of reality itself.

Hang on, you're contradicting yourself. You also stated that "To pin down one property with precision is to blur another" so obviously, according to your own words, at least "one property" can be pinned down and therefore is not beyond measurement! As others have pointed out, Heisenberg was talking about the nature of measuring atoms/sub atomic particles, aspects of reality obviously are measurable, if they weren't there would be no speed limits, no engineering tolerances, no technology and no audio recordings.

No one argues with that, of course science knows and can do some things. It just doesn't know and can't do everything. ...

Some believe that everything can be measured ...

Who are these "some" who believe everything can be measured and again, what has "everything" got to do with it anyway? We're talking specifically about audio recording and reproduction, not "everything". Mathematics doesn't know everything, does that mean science doesn't know that 1+1=2? Fundamentally, we're talking about measuring oscillating air pressure waves, electrical signals where voltage is analogous to those pressure waves and digital data representing those measurements. This and some sub properties of these phenomena is what we're measuring, that's it, not sub atomic particle behaviour, not how comfortable my shoes feel, not all of reality, not anything else at all and certainly not "everything"!

Do you happen to know of a scientific formula or perhaps a scholarly book that can grant an individual true freedom? If so, I would be most curious to hear of it. Please share .

And again. We're not talking about "everything", granting "an individual true freedom" or anything else, we're talking about audio recording and reproduction. And for that, yes indeed we happen to know scientific formulas for that, they're some of the most famous of all scientific formulas, Maxwell's Equations/Laws and Shannon's theorems on information and digital communication being the most pertinent. They can be found in countless text books and on Wikipedia, so it should only take you a few seconds to look them up, if you really are "most curious" to know/learn the actual facts?

[Florestan]

Heisenberg was talking about the nature of measuring atoms/sub atomic particles, reality obviously is measurable, if it wasn't there would be no speed limits, no engineering tolerances, no technology and no audio recordings.

Speaking of speed limits: one can make an analogy between audio equipment and cars. A brand new luxury car is certainly safer and more comfortable than a cheap second hand car, yet if you drive them both at the same speed, all other variables being equal you get from point A to point B in the same amount of time. But hey, what do you know? The passenger in the luxury car claims he got there faster, because that's how he clearly felt it, and screw the speed and time measurements anyway, Heisenberg introduced (forced upon science, to be exact) the idea that reality is fundamentally beyond measurements and proof. There's no way the cheap second-hand car could have gotten there just as fast, because even if the cars' measurements are the same, their performances are not, and besides a cheap second car is not the proper way to get from A to B.
.

[Florestan]

Who are these "some" who believe everything can be measured and again, what has "everything" got to do with it anyway?

Only people who lack scientific education/training can believe that science is, or aims at being, an unassailable, universally and absolutely valid theory of everything.