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Can things exist without anyone being aware of their existence? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 9 points 4 months ago (9 children)

Object permanence is technically an axiom. The idea that things exist even when we aren't observing them.

There's also a problem with terms, particularly related to quantum mechanics. It uses the term observer. To a layman, that's a person watching. To a scientist its any collection of atoms/fundamental particles that can cause the quantum waveform to collapse.

The results of the axiom are that things do exist when we are not observing them. Our observations don't back propagate to retroactively bring them into existence. We can't prove that however, though it's fundamental to a lot of science making sense (quantum mechanics being the oddball).

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    Does the concept of an axiom actually exist and make sense in physics? I thought we just had models.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    One of the goals is to minimise them. Most of those left are blindingly obvious, but unprovable. They are technically there, but just part of the base assumptions of the models.

    E.g. we couldn't do science if an all powerful being was deliberately messing with our results. We also can't prove the universe isn't a computer program, only rendering what a "conscious" entity is looking at, while back calculating the required history on the fly.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (6 children)

    How do you distinguish axioms from just another parameter of your model? If an all-powerful being is messing with our results, then you just get a stochastic model. In fact, we already have stochastic models in quantum physics. And whether or not the universe is a simulation doesn't affect the model's ability to make predictions at all, so why would it matter from a physics perspective? The model would be unchanged either way.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (5 children)

    I think you might be confusing statistical with stochastic. Quantum mechanics makes incredibly precise predictions about the statistics of particle interactions. A stochastic model implies an experimental result could change depending on what day it is, when in fact quantum mechanical principles are relied upon every day for modern technology, and the screen you are reading this on is likely lit up because of the small but predictable chance an electron in an LED has to overcome an energy barrier it classically could not.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

    Maybe we use these terms differently in different domains. In my field, stochastic means that repeating the same experiment under the same conditions doesn't guarantee the same results (e.g. rolling a die). The opposite of stochastic is deterministic. Something that changes depending on the day would be "a function of the date" or something that is "conditional on the date". This can either be a deterministic function (e.g. calling date.today().day in Python, or a mapping from the date to a uniform distribution ranging from 0 to date.today().day) or a stochastic function (e.g. sample a uniform random integer between 0 and date.today().day).

    Edit: I think what you're talking about is the deterministic mapping from some variable into a distribution. We (as in my field specifically) do sometimes call that "stochastic" too, even though that mapping is deterministic. There may be a bit of terminology overloading here because what we care about in the end is the sample drawn from that distribution, which is actually stochastic.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    No, that's exactly what I mean and exactly what I think you are missing: quantum mechanical experiments have been reproduced thousands of times, and even as measuring instruments became sensitive, the predictions have held true. The statistical nature of it doesn't make it any less predictable, and an experiment proving a different statistical value of an event than QM predicts would be world news.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    The statistical nature of it doesn’t make it any less predictable

    Exactly. Similarly, an all-powerful being messing with our world doesn't mean we can no longer make predictions. We just end up with a model with hidden variables that change over time.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    An act of god would break at least some predictions, or else it would be indistinguishable from a natural event. Also as a point of fact, QM has no hidden variables, that was proven by Bell's inequality experiments in the 70s. And again, experiments are reproduced every day, the results haven't changed, QM has been a successful and reliable model.

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