Lots of things are true but not real.<\/p>\n
For example, if a village has 100 families with 150 children, there are one and a half children per family. That’s true. But that doesn’t mean that there’s such a thing as a half child.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, especially when it comes to physics, many people don’t appreciate the difference between true and real.<\/p>\n
So they learn, for example, that a quantum-mechanical description of the world is non deterministic and assume that that necessarily means that the world is non deterministic. It doesn’t. The non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics may be like the fractional child — a useful part of a useful model that doesn’t directly represent anything real.<\/p>\n
A clear example comes from coordinate systems. A point in space can be described by Cartesian coordinates $(x,y,z)$, but that doesn’t mean that there’s any reality to $x$, $y$, or $z$. The same point can be described by polar coordinates $(\\rho,\\theta,\\phi)$, but, again, it’s not as though a point actually has a radius and two angles. Both of these systems are true. Neither one is real.<\/p>\n
Similarly, from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle we know that $\\Delta x \\Delta p \\geq {\\hbar}\/{2}$. Or, more popularly, the more you know about a particle’s position, you less you know about its momentum, and vice versa. But, again, we don’t know that particles have momentum at all, any more than they have an $x$-value or a radius. (They may not even have position.) Just like Cartesian or polar coordinates, perhaps Heisenberg’s principle tells us something fundamental about the universe. And perhaps not.<\/p>\n
More generally, it’s a mistake to leap from truth to reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lots of things are true but not real. For example, if a village has 100 families with 150 children, there are one and a half children per family. That’s true. But that doesn’t mean that there’s such a thing as a half child. Unfortunately, especially when it comes to physics, many people don’t appreciate the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4,12],"tags":[9,8,7],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-world","category-physics","category-probably-right","tag-heisenberg","tag-reality","tag-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":205,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}