Jim Rutt’s Post

The ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’ explained. Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea once had an interesting thought (as philosophers do): if an arrow in flight is examined at an instant in time, the arrow appears to be motionless. To put the quantum Zeno effect into understandable (yet nowhere near accurate) terms, take a common example: waiting for something to load. Suppose Zeno wanted to watch a YouTube video, but it was taking a long time to load and he was growing impatient. Then an idea struck him: if he closed his eyes while waiting for the video to load, periodically opening them to check on the progress, he might make it seem to speed up! He does this, measuring the state of the video frequently. However, he finds that his video—which usually finishes loading after a short while—doesn’t load at all. In fact, everytime he glances at the loading icon, it seems like nothing changed! That’s because, according to the quantum Zeno effect, nothing—or at least very little—did change. By measuring the system frequently enough at specific intervals, Zeno was able to arrest his video’s time evolution (that’s assuming that his video is actually a particle abiding to quantum laws), keeping the video at its initial conditions. Put into simple terms, the quantum Zeno effect describes how a quantum system can be “frozen” by measuring it frequently enough.

Finally finished reading Robert Lawrence Kuhn's recent paper: "A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications." Highly recommend it to anyone interested in consciousness and the mind-body problem in general. https://lnkd.in/d2Zm46rZ

Check out what I'm selling: Stephen Hawking "The Universe in a Nutshell" (4 Audio CDS): Get up to $30 off* when you use my code JPUSEF to sign up for Mercari. *Terms apply #mercari Stephen Hawking "The Universe in a Nutshell" (4 Audio CDS in new condition. Paper Case shows some wear) Stephen Hawking’s phenomenal, multimillion-copy bestseller, A Brief History of Time, introduced the ideas of this brilliant theoretical physicist to readers all over the world. Now, in a major publishing event, Hawking returns with a lavishly illustrated sequel that unravels the mysteries of the major breakthroughs that have occurred in the years since the release of his acclaimed first book. The Universe in a Nutshell • Quantum mechanics • M-theory • General relativity • 11-dimensional supergravity • 10-dimensional membranes • Superstrings • P-branes • Black holes One of the most influential thinkers of our time, Stephen Hawking is an intellectual icon, known not only for the adventurousness of his ideas but for the clarity and wit with which he expresses them. In this new book Hawking takes us to the cutting edge of theoretical physics, where truth is often stranger than fiction https://lnkd.in/gHAqmy3S

"We’ve built trillion-dollar media empires around this simple desire. Dividing and connecting and redividing over taste, preferences and niches. But that habit can easily cross a line. It turns out that birds are real, that the Earth isn’t flat and that 2 + 2, in all common parlance, does equal 4. To argue about these things isn’t useful. Quantum mechanics doesn’t care if Albert Einstein believes in it or not. It’s still the best explanation available for what happens when things are very small. Public health, math, engineering and the science that underlies them isn’t based on taste or the need we have to be in groups. Show your work, make a prediction, assert something falsifiable and then give others a chance to respond. If you can make helpful predictions and create interventions that produce value, your work is useful. Otherwise, it’s simply noise. Every day, we’re celebrating a splintering of taste, but it’s worth pausing before we embrace the idea that there are no facts. That’s not useful."

"2 + 2. Arguments about taste are more common than ever before. The long tail makes it easy to find what you like, and to talk about what you don’t. There’s no accounting for taste, and that’s a good thing. Because taste is useful. Flopping the toilet paper under or over the roll, Beatles vs. Stones, Chevy vs. Ford… the interactions and tribal identity that result from these discussions satisfies our need to be seen, to have agency and to be part of something. Sports fans don’t change the outcome of the game, but they have fun arguing about it. If you want to listen to Jamaican polka music, please do. You can even make up new words or ignore the Oxford comma. If it helps, that’s okay. We’ve built trillion-dollar media empires around this simple desire. Dividing and connecting and redividing over taste, preferences and niches. But that habit can easily cross a line. It turns out that birds are real, that the Earth isn’t flat and that 2 + 2, in all common parlance, does equal 4. To argue about these things isn’t useful. Quantum mechanics doesn’t care if Albert Einstein believes in it or not. It’s still the best explanation available for what happens when things are very small. Public health, math, engineering and the science that underlies them isn’t based on taste or the need we have to be in groups. Show your work, make a prediction, assert something falsifiable and then give others a chance to respond. If you can make helpful predictions and create interventions that produce value, your work is useful. Otherwise, it’s simply noise. Every day, we’re celebrating a splintering of taste, but it’s worth pausing before we embrace the idea that there are no facts. That’s not useful...#SethGodin🌟🌐🌍🌐🌟

What can an advanced mathematical theory teach us about overwhelm and wellbeing? Complexity Theory is a theory of reality, along with relativity and quantum mechanics. While relativity explains very big things, and quantum mechanics explains very small things, complexity gives structure to our day to day reality. In his exceptional book "Notes on Complexity" Dr Neil Theise maps how complexity shapes our reality. It might sounds... well, complicated... but here's are 2 key concepts that can help you in shaping your own life and wellbeing: 🤝 All interactions are local - meaning there is no grand-poohbah top down control of our lives day to day. Human interactions happen when we talk, touch, write, or move in ways that influence one another. The same is true for the organs and cells in your body. Want to change? It's one local interaction at a time (not a full reboot and reinvention of everything) 👬 Adjacent Possible - if all interactions are local we can only change into what's adjacent for us. It may take some experimentation to figure out what works but when we explore, even randomly, we discover new insights into possibility What's that have to do with overwhelm? When you're feeling overwhelmed: 🙏 focus on what's local 👫 focus on what's adjacent 🔬 experiment a bit in how you're thinking, feeling, & doing Whether we're talking about ants or organs, those are the only ways living beings continue to evolve and change. Find Neil's book here: https://lnkd.in/gnvc7wcB

[PART V] Following up my take away from "The Great Mental Models" by Farnam Street: This chapter is "Experience of thought": This was the most simple chapter so far, there is only one take away I would like to share: The reflection is to use our minds to create mental experiments/scenarios to help us validate hypotheses of the events that we created (or that actually happen) and then, we are able to understand the real relationship between those event, so we can better map the possible effect of those decisions. "Imagination is used to investigate the nature of things..." The book used the example of Albert Einstein, where he first create the hypotheses on his mind, and then once he was able to separate the impact of each factor, he went to create the theory in numbers. This was how he created the general theory of relativity. -------- Next chapter - "Second order thinking"

Discover the intriguing debate on the reality of time through logical and philosophical perspectives. This article challenges our conventional understanding of time as a fundamental entity. Full details: https://lnkd.in/eJquwEP9 #QuantumTheory #PhilosophyOfTime

Infinitely many causal influences coming together. -- Actual infinity Mainly because of a Grim Reaper argument, but also because of the bob argument here, I do think there is a problem about certain kinds of actual infinities. But not all of them. The Grim Reaper argument, as well as the bob argument, only tells against one kind of actual infinity: an actual infinity of causal influences on a single event. So while one could conclude that actual infinities are impossible, a more conservative move is to conclude that it is not possible for an infinite number of causal influences to be in the past history of any event. This limited anti-infinitism means that I do not need to worry about arguments in favor of actual infinities such as the following: The actual existence of an infinite future. The actual existence of mathematical infinities. The intuitively very plausible possibility of a simultaneous infinity of objects. At least, it's plausible to me. In fact, my worry is not so much about an actual infinite as such, but about infinitely many causal influences coming together. https://lnkd.in/ghvfT289

50 years ago, the philosopher Robert Nozick made an interesting thought experiment about contemporary life. In his 1974 book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he asked his readers: would you willingly plug your brain into a simulated "experience machine" if you could live out your deepest desires? Would it matter to you if it wasn't "real"? Nozick proposed that most people would prefer the real world, in spite of the fact that the machine would definitively offer a more pleasurable life. He suggested three reasons for our aversion to the experience machine. 1) "we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them". 2) "we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person", and we cannot truly be anything in the experience machine. 3) "plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct". Through the lack of "contact with any deeper reality," we would lose access to meaning and significance. Ultimately, Nozick wrote, "we learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realising that we would not use it".