In search of Schroedingers cat - john gribbin

•  In the classical world, everything has its cause. You can trace the cause of any event backward in time to find the cause of the cause, and what caused that, and so on back to the Big Bang... But in the world of the quantum... no outside agency pushes the electron... it just happens, for no particular reason, now rather than then.
• In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world.
• There is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else
• electron... something unknown is doing we don't know what
• even without understanding why the recipes (formula) work people are able to cook so effectively with quanta
• we cannot predict the future. But it is quite within the rules ... to calculate backwards and work out exactly what the position and momentum of an electron, say, was at some time in the past. The future is inherently uncertain - we do not know exactly where we are going: but the past clearly defined.
• This is the really fundamental feature of the quantum world. It is interesting that there are limits to our knowledge of what an electron is doing when we are looking at it, but it is absolutely mind-blowing to discover that we have no idea at all what it is doing when we are not looking at it.
• The world seems to keep all its options, all it probabilities open for as long as possible
• The physics is impossible, but the math is clean and simple, familiar equations to any physicist. As long as you avoid asking what it means, there are no problems.
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Roger Penrose – The Emperors new mind

Roger Penrose – The Emperors new mind

Quotes

• Many philosophers and psychologists seem to take the view that humans consciousness is very much bound up with human language.
• One way around this problem might be to ignore the boundary … but … one often needs to phrase arguments in terms of what actually happens at boundaries.

Summary / Key points / Ideas

• Great run-through through physics theory.
• Turing machine. Complex sets. Mandebrotset. Relativity theory and then goes into quantum theory.
• An interesting thought regarding quantum theory: It is all a simulation. Like Minecraft. But the simulation plays on a quantum level as the basic building block. And the frequency of the simulation is the speed of light. Thats why this is the maximum we can observe, that „exists“. That is the reason for quantum effects. The computer saves calculations and memory for quantums that are not „observed“ (Like a tensor in tensorflow). Once it is „observed“, i.e. there is a need to calculate the „real“ status, the computer does so. Is this what e.g. Musk is looking into? Is someone working on this theory? How could you prove that this is indeed the case? And whats the point of simulations like this? You can try outcomes of different sets of rules for the simulation (i.e. Different physics rules). It also explains why physics laws are so tight with mathematics. Because it follow actually formulas! But what would / could be achieved with such simulations?
• I think his point is weak on how all this leads to Artificial Intelligence not coming. Its not a clear link. Euklidean geometry does also work really really well for nearly everything we do, why wouldn't AI even though we do not yet have the full physics theory in or beyond quantum theory?