For folks who believe in an objective reality that can be interrogated with science, these are interesting times. Laurel sounds like Yanny. Octopuses are maybe from space. Sea levels are rising, unless they aren’t, unless they are because of erosion. Some of us aren’t even sure anymore that the earth is a spheroid. All of this uncertainty and confusion can be a little unsettling–or at least that’s how I feel sometimes, and I imagine others might have a similar experience. Can science help here, even with our uncertainty about scientific questions?
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uncertainty
Science Corner: It’s in the Cards
The game of heads-up limit Texas Hold ’em poker has effectively been solved. As I understand it, solving a game means identifying the best move to make in any given situation. Other games, like tic-tac-toe and checkers, have been solved in the past, but this result is significant because it is the first solved game where the player does not know everything about the current game situation–mainly, what cards their opponent is holding. The lessons learned have applications to a wide range of real-life situations where decisions have to be made without complete information about one’s circumstances. [Read more…] about Science Corner: It’s in the Cards
Science in Review: Quantum Foam Fluctuation, Roll for Initiative
I’ve always been sympathetic to Einstein’s famous assertion “God doesn’t play dice with the world.” In my public health training, I regularly and fruitfully used statistics and probability theory. Ideologically, they struck me as concessions to pragmatism. Human beings are too complex, their measurable attributes innumerable; we cannot know enough about them to accurately describe their full condition at any moment. We appeal to the law of large numbers to save us from our finitude. Somewhere behind those statistics are objective truths about the health of each individual in the public. As with people, so with photons; underneath those probability waves, surely there must be a bedrock of certainty.
When I read about this result in Big Bang cosmology, I was intrigued. I discovered that an interpretation of quantum physics with certainty at its core does exist, and has existed for some time. It was never widely adopted, and has become less popular in recent years. This new cosmological result resurrects it, or at least its central and most controversial element — a guiding equation that makes the properties of a single particle dependent on every other particle in the universe. This results in nonlocal effects which are considered irreconcilable with the locality of other physical phenomena. Â It also gives each particle a definite location and velocity. The probability wave still limits how precisely those quantities can be measured, meaning this version of quantum physics gives all the same results as fundamentally probabilistic interpretations.
Having been intrigued, I began to wonder. Why am I so opposed to a fundamentally probabilistic reality? [Read more…] about Science in Review: Quantum Foam Fluctuation, Roll for Initiative