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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • devil’s advocate, it does have some logic to it.

    • An ambiguous report of an unconscious person could be the result of a crime/attack. Having the police turn up quickly helps with that significantly.

    • As others have said, the police could have been faster to respond.

    • Some people, when coming out of a fit, etc, can be aggressive. E.g. A friend is, apparently a “puncher” when she comes out of a general anaesthetic. She makes it a point to warn the nursing team, when possible. She’s still given out a few black eyes. Having police respond makes sense. They are, supposedly, trained in safe handling of an aggressive person. This makes them ideal for containing someone till their brain reboots, and stops panicking.

    Unfortunately, it sounds like the officers here forgot their duties and training. I’m often horrified to hear how american police tend to operate. It’s the sort of thing you don’t see much of in most developed countries.






  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    21 days ago

    You could detect decoherence in the system, that doesn’t indicate a human observer, however.

    That process is, however, used to protect cryptographic keys, transfered between banks. A hostile observer collapses the state early. The observer gets the key instead of the 2nd bank, which is extremely conspicuous to both banks.




  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    21 days ago

    Depends on how you are observing it photons impart energy and momentum. The true, detailed explanation is a lot more convoluted, it’s all wave interactions, in the complex plane. However, digesting that into something a layman can follow is difficult.

    The main point I was trying to get across is that there is no such thing as an independent, external measurement. Your measurement systems minimum interaction is no longer negligible. How that is done varies, but it always changes the target and becomes part of the equations.


  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    22 days ago

    We know how it works, we just don’t yet understand what is going on under the hood.

    In short, quantum effects can be very obvious with small systems. The effects generally get averaged out over larger systems. A measurement inherently entangled your small system with a much larger system diluting the effect.

    The blind spot is that we don’t know what a quantum state IS. We know the maths behind it, but not the underlying physics model. It’s likely to fall out when we unify quantum mechanics with general relativity, but we’ve been chipping at that for over 70 years now, with limited success.


  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    22 days ago

    Observer here doesn’t mean the same as the layman meaning. It’s anything that interacts with the system while it’s developing.

    Interestingly, it actually can be used for a presence detector, at least in a sense. You can use it to transfer cryptographic information. If no-one is listening in, about half your sent numbers are wrong, but you can agree on what ones. However, if someone is listening in, all your data gets randomised.

    They actually now use this system to transfer information between banks. They send a random stream of 0s and 1s over a fibre optic cable. They then send (semi publicly) which bits made it properly. If someone spliced into the fibre, they would get the encryption data, but the target bank would not! They know instantly that something is wrong.


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    22 days ago

    For those confused, it’s worth noting the difference between observed as a layman concept and as a quantum mechanical one.

    In QM, to observed is to couple the observer to the “system” being observed. Think of it like “observing” your neighbour, over a fence using a BB gun. When you hit flesh, you know where your neighbour is. Unfortunately, the system has now been fundamentally changed. In a classical system, you could turn down the power, until your neighbour doesn’t notice the hits. Unfortunately, QM imposes fundamental limits on your measurements (heisenburg and his uncertainty principal). In order to observe your neighbour accurately, you need to hit them hard enough that the will also feel it and react differently.

    QM behaves in a similar way. Initially, the system is just a single particle, and is not very restrained. This allows it to behave in a very wave like manner. When you observe it, the system now includes the whole observation system, as this coupling propagates, more and more atoms etc get linked. The various restraints cause an effect called decoherence. The system behaves ever more like a classical physical system.

    In short, a quantum mechanical “observer” is less sneaky watching, and more hosing down with a machine gun and watching the ricochets.



  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBlocked 🚫
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    23 days ago

    Theories can be a stepping stone to other theories. Until we explore those chains, we don’t know if there is anything useful at the end.

    E.g. initially, lasers were a solution looking for a problem. An interesting quirk possible due to some interesting bit of physics.

    Maths explores idea spaces. Much of that is purely of interest to other mathematicians. However, it sometimes intersects with areas of interest to other scientists, at which point it becomes extremely useful.






  • Pay attention to how laye you generally are. I used to be chronically late. I began to notice I was generally about 20-30 minutes behind. I could often make up some of that, but it was rushed.

    The fix was quite simple, I trained myself to add 30 minutes “faffing time” to any estimate or leave time. I have an “aim to leave” and “MUST leave” time. I generally leave about 10-15 minutes ‘late’, but due to the buffer, I have 15-20 minutes leeway still to deal with things like extra traffic.