The Quantum Conspiracy: What Popularizers of QM Don't Want You to Know

Google Tech Talk
January 6, 2011

Presented by Ron Garret.

ABSTRACT

Richard Feynman once famously quipped that no one understands quantum mechanics, and popular accounts continue to promulgate the view that QM is an intractable mystery (probably because that helps to sell books). QM is certainly unintuitive, but the idea that no one understands it is far from the truth. In fact, QM is no more difficult to understand than relativity. The problem is that the vast majority of popular accounts of QM are simply flat-out wrong. They are based on the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of QM, which has been thoroughly discredited for decades. It turns out that if Copenhagen were true then it would be possible to communicate faster than light, and hence send signals backwards in time. This talk describes an alternative interpretation based on quantum information theory (QIT) which is consistent with current scientific knowledge. It turns out that there is a simple intuition that makes almost all quantum mysteries simply evaporate, and replaces them with an easily understood (albeit strange) insight: measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, and you don't really exist.

Slides are available here:
https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/...

Link to the paper:
http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

About the speaker:

Dr. Ron Garret was an AI and robotics researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab for fifteen years before taking a year off to work at Google in June of 2000. He was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords, and the original author of the Google Translation Console. Since leaving Google he has started a new career as an entrepreneur, angel investor and filmmaker. He has co-founded three startups, invested in a dozen others, and made a feature-length documentary about homelessness.

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  Science & Technology

[LeontariF1]

It seems that there are far more qualified people (i.e. people that spend all their life studying and researching these topics) to lecture people about it. You seem to like Belly Dancing, where are you from?

[satisamadhipanna]

And why not?

[judgeomega]

"proteins, chemicals, molecules" are all at the same level.

By biology i think you meant 'cellular'.

As for what you think or dont think is fractal: you should check out wikipedias article; Fractal

I can see different level of detail being VERY fractal to such a degree that no other concepts fit as well.

[judgeomega]

Without some background knowledge in psuedo randomized virtual world generation i can fully understand how you fail to make the connection. In order to generate content which is deterministic yet differentiating , a 'random' seed is used in a fractal procedure. I postulate that the random seed is preserved and embedded into the (non physical) meta-structures as 'entropy'. The reason being, the universe only needs that seed to reconstruct that structures history to derive its properties.

[elatus]

At every level smaller and deeper that we penetrate, we find novel/unique laws/mechanics and particles. Biology, proteins, chemicals, molecules, atoms, quarks... It does not appear fractal at all.

[LeontariF1]

Why is a software engineer makes a lecture about quantum mechanics again?

[judgeomega]

Spitball: perhaps the fundamental answers lay not at ever smaller scales, but instead on higher levels of abstraction. Take what we know of compression, programming paradigms, and computational complexity and see how one might model the universe.

Maybe the universe is generated in some sort of fractal equation. Perhaps entropy is the seed which is stored and then used to generate the properties of linked materials.

Perhaps all of subatomic theory is nothing more than a universe recycling bin.

[1cinjim]

wouldnt trust google its the government.useless.look at opening statement of how trchtalks r designed to disseminate views.starts as bullshit wont even watch.google keeps people ignorant.listen to google and stay a slave to this system.

[Chris Pearson]

New favorite word: kerfuffle.

[maiaibing]

Unconvincing also confusing unless you know QM well. For starters his understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong. Second - almost funny, but sad - he uses QM math which predicts that we can tell the up/down state of the "partner" particle to say that this is a problem for QM?? Is he joking?? The problem - this is where Copenhagen and others interpretations come in - is in explaining how QM math "translates" into our macro world. No one has a straight answer - certainly not RON.