life does not exist hypothesis

TX123

hi not sure if this is the right place to post this. when i was in school. my science teacher once explained of a hypothesis which grabbed my attention. i really would like to read upo about it but i do not know what it is called .basically it goes like this:
There is no proof that life exists if one shuts themselves from all activity. for exaample. if i lock myself in my room with no light and no contact with the outside world then i can choose to believe that the existence of all other life ceases to exist expect from me and what is in my room. only when i see attempt to intearct with the outside world, it begins again. i know it is crazy but who knows it cannot be disproved so it could be true. lol just would love to know what it is called. thanks

Thomas_S_Hunterson

I think that pretty much stems from quantum mechanics.

This maybe of interest to you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodinger%27s_cat

mathias

Actually thats more of a philosophers point of view , and that particular one was made famous by Nietzsche ( although its entirely possible Im mixing my philosophers up here ).

It goes something like ,

How you see the world is unique , no one else sees it like you , therefore it follows that your world is unique , and as it wouldnt exist without you , you are the most important person in it !

Kind of nice way to look at it , the pessimistic view is that its all in your own head and doesnt really exist in any sense.

This is a much simplified version of " Perspectivism , all human truth is based on perspective " , following from the " God is dead" writings.

Of course the man was barking mad most of his life !

This was also used in restaurant at the end of the universe , twisted around and used in the total perspective vortex.

In the same book , there is a mathematical formulae to prove that there is no life in the universe. ( Robbed off the back of a future cereal box by a time traveller and printed in the guide )
Done for fun , with an obvious error , but its only there to raise a laugh !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

Professor_Fink

TX123,

What you're talking about is a philosophical stance rather than a physics on. It's known as solipsism.

TX123

thanks for the replies . so i am now a physics students who is also a solipsist. it is not just philisophical because schrodingers cat explains such an hypothesis

Professor_Fink

TX123 wrote:

it is not just philisophical because schrodingers cat explains such an hypothesis

No it doesn't. In both cases in the Schrodinger thought experiment the cat is assumed to exist. A solopsist says there is no way of knowing whether the cat actually exists or not. In QM you can learn about the state of a quantum system by performing a measurement on it (which then alters the system unless it was already in an eigenstate of the measurement operator), while a solopsist says that the measurement doesn't actually tell you anything about reality, only about the way you percieve it.

Solopsism is self consistent and completely independent of physics. It's an interpretation of how we percieve the world, and can never be distinguished from other valid interpretations of perception.

Quantum mechanics is a very specific set of statements about how the world works, not an interpretation (although there are interpretations of quantum mechanics).

TX123

ok i accept that but what do you think about the cat surviving in this universe and dying in another? if this were to be true then for every quantum experiment performed 2 outcomes or 2 universes shows the result(another idea of infinity). only one can be seen.

your thoughts on this pls?

Professor_Fink

TX123 wrote:

ok i accept that but what do you think about the cat surviving in this universe and dying in another? if this were to be true then for every quantum experiment performed 2 outcomes or 2 universes shows the result(another idea of infinity). only one can be seen.

your thoughts on this pls?

That' the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics. Thinking of them as seperate universes is a little misleading. Basically in the Everett interpretation, measurements don't exist, you just have quantum processes. So the way function has parts in which you observe a dead cat and parts where you observe a living cat. You only percieve one of these, hence the illusion of measurements collapsing the wave function.

It's an interpretation, so basically always gives the same results as the Copenhagen interpretation, where measurements collapse the wave function. I'm not sure it even makes sense to say that one is correct and the other is false, but I favour the Everett interpretation, since you don't need extra rules to deal with measurements, and there is no problem in defining what exactly consitutes a measurement.

JoeB-

Professor_Fink wrote:

....where measurements collapse the wave function. I'm not sure it even makes sense to say that one is correct and the other is false, but I favour the Everett interpretation, since you don't need extra rules to deal with measurements, and there is no problem in defining what exactly consitutes a measurement.

Is the problem with measurements things like 'if a machine makes a measurement does that collaspe the wavefunction?' and 'what level of conciousness is required?'... i.e can a dolphin collaspe the wavefunction?'. This make no intuitive sense to me... I find it hard to believe that concious observers taking measurements can alter the reality of the universe. But then conciousness is hard to explain too....

But then I don't really understand any of it.... I prefer the Transactional Interpretation since it seems to do away with concious observers... but as I say I'm definitely no expert, lol.

(On this issue, it has been mentioned that there is no mechanism in current physics that can provide for human free will... but surely since conciousness itself is also unexplained by physics then the posssibility of true 'free will' is also possible?)

The original poster may be interested in 'Quantum Suicide' and 'Quantum Immortality', both talked about on WIki.... (applicable to the 'Many World' interpretation)
On Quantum Immortality I have the following problem.. I am only aware of my existence in one universe, so even if I do something that causes me to die in one universe and continue to exist in another my current conciousness will most likely be the one that dies, i.e I won't magically transfer over to start experiencing life in the universe I have survived in?

Cheers
Joe

TX123

prof fink just to let you know i aint that advanced with my studies of this and you make things quite confusing for me to understand. i am a bit confused when you say that the wave function collapses.

there is no way to prove that the universe does not spilt into 2 for each thing we do. in one universe a single chair could be in a different place and that is the only difference . its impact may have different situations arising but it is still different. the changes then in further universes changes significantly due to our everyday actions. we could say in life" to do or not to do" both decisions are reflected in different universes. and we may switch over to weither one without our knowledge.

Zombrex

TX123 wrote:

there is no way to prove that the universe does not spilt into 2 for each thing we do.

Science doesn't prove anything, it is a system of modeling what we think is happening in the natural world. It is impossible to prove that scientific models (theories) are 100% accurate. Not that that really matters.

Professor_Fink

TX123 wrote:

prof fink just to let you know i aint that advanced with my studies of this and you make things quite confusing for me to understand. i am a bit confused when you say that the wave function collapses.

Ah ok, I'm sorry. In quantum mechanics measurements can result in a number of answers. In you example this might be that either the cat is alive or it is dead. Once a measurement is made, the evolution of the system continues as if thecat had always been in the state you measured it. Even though while unmeasured the cat remains in a superposition of being alive and dead, once you measure it, it is very definitely either alive or dead, and the superposition is lost. This is what we refer to as collapse of the wavefunction. The superposition of measurement outcomes that existed before measurement is now gone. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics asserts that this is what happens in quantum mechanics whenever you make a measurement on a system. The Many worlds/Everett interpretation(s) say that measurement is not a special operation, but rather a normal quantum mechanical one. In this interpretation you appear to collapse the wave function, but in actual fact it is that you are conscious of just one branch of the wave function. This is what people mean when they talk about the universe splitting. It doesn't really split, it's just seperate branches of the same superposition.

TX123 wrote:

there is no way to prove that the universe does not spilt into 2 for each thing we do. in one universe a single chair could be in a different place and that is the only difference . its impact may have different situations arising but it is still different. the changes then in further universes changes significantly due to our everyday actions. we could say in life" to do or not to do" both decisions are reflected in different universes. and we may switch over to weither one without our knowledge.

Well, interpretations of a theory don't actually predict different things. At least not if they are consistent. They're simply different ways of looking at the same piece of mathematics. The maths gives the answer to anything you try to predict, and will be the same independant of interpretation. People just like to visualise the mathematics in different ways, which are experimentally indistinguishable. Consistent interpretations aren't physics, because they do not alter the outcome of any experiments. Rather they are philosophy of physics.

Son Goku

Alright, let's say you have an atom that could be decayed or not decayed.
If the atom is decayed I'll label it with |Decayed>.
If the atom is not decayed I'll label it with |Not Decayed>.

The thing is, in quantum mechanics, the atom can be decayed and not decayed at the same time.

It can be in an equal balance of decayed and not decayed, such as:
(0.5)|Not Decayed> + (0.5)|Decayed>
(I know the coefficients should be (Root2)^(-1), but I'm just simplifying)

Or it can be more decayed:
(0.33)|Not Decayed> + (0.67)|Decayed>

Or more Not Decayed:
(0.67)|Not Decayed> + (0.33)|Decayed>

When you come along with a big classical object, like a machine, to measure the atom, the atom has to go to purely |Decayed> or purely |Not Decayed>, because that's all that exists in the classical world. So to interact with a classical machine the atom has to enter into a classically sensible state.

Many-World and Copenhagen are just different ways of viewing how the classical world comes about and will be just confusing if you bring them in at this level.
(That probably sounds dreadful to you Professor_Fink, I know Quantum Computing deals with collapse, e.t.c. in a lot more detail.)