From: The Pantophobic (trivik@stwing.upenn.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 30 2002 - 01:08:11 GMT
a teacher; *ouch* sounds intimidating, but it won't stop me from irresponsibly
writing on stuff that i know nothing about:
> Here goes.
> I stand in front of you and I flip a coin
> if we could measure the initial conditions of the coin
> the outcome could have been determined before it landed
well yes and no.
> The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says there is a veil behind which we
> can't look. But is this veil like my hand covering up the coin?
no it is not.
in the quantum world particles do not have velocities or positions untill they
are measured. the measureing creates them - if thats tough to swallow - good,
it's supposed to be.
it is in any case imposible to even theoretically measure all of the initial
conditions to an infinite precision (infinite so not possible - even ignoreing
h'bergs principle).
but that does not mean that the system is not deterministic. there is this
thing called "chaos theory" - as a eacher you must know more about it.
my understanding is that it explains very large and complex systems - i.e.
chaotic ones. like flipping a coin. to psimplify it, if we use a machine to
flip the coin, and plotted the results some sort of patern oculd be extracted.
so a chaotic system will form never repeating patters - so they do not repeate -
always different, and they are so sensitive to their initial conditions ( as
measured by the precition) that you can dismiss them as being random, so yes,
your statistics is just a way of understanding, but today there are better ways
of understanding.
however there are systems which are not chaotic, but truly random, e.g.
radioactive decay (which mooves into h'bergs world)
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