rationality and randomness http://awmitchell.posterous.com a personal blog of eclectic interests posterous.com Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:51:09 -0700 Calculating why we see classical behavior in a quantum world - Ars Technica http://awmitchell.posterous.com/calculating-why-we-see-classical-behavior-in http://awmitchell.posterous.com/calculating-why-we-see-classical-behavior-in
One of the remaining mysteries of quantum mechanics is the question of how we transition between the probabilistic world of quantum mechanics and the everyday world of classical objects. From a strict reductionist point of view, everything is quantum, and, yes, you could build a dog if you had the right mixture of quarks and electrons. Although this statement is technically true, it highlights an enormous gap between what we observe reality to be—continuous and largely deterministic—and its foundation, the weird mixture of continuity, descreteness, deterministic evolution, and probabilistic behavior that define the quantum world.

This is an intersting take on what has been an awkward problem.

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http://posterous.com/images/profile/missing-user-75.png http://posterous.com/users/4aQUIzR5baEN Andrew Mitchell awmitchell Andrew Mitchell