h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi,

your link to your gif is broken.

I had a look at your original paper and I think the h2g2 entry would be better if you could make it more colloquial (I'm thinking of phrases like "for the purposes of this essay".

I'd like to see the a straight forward description of the uncertainty principle - you have some mileage for another entry if you want to address "many worlds" and then link them together.

Basically HUP limits the accuracy of measurements of linked variables, classically position and momentum but there are other "pairs"

I'd avoid referencing out to other stuff unless you also explain why its relevant

If you want specific comments let me know.

Hi

I'm fairly new to h2g2, so I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right place. I'm appending it to the only other posting I can find, as that seems to be what most other people do.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but, as I remember it, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says the the product (not the sum) of the uncertainties (i.e. the *expected* errors) of the measurements is h_bar.

"We are only conscious" Surely not: I think you mean "Only we are conscious". Even this is contentious. I think my dog is conscious to some degree. A contributor to a recent Radio 4 program said she has come to think that the term "consciousness" is so vague as to be meaningless in any serious discussion. Can you make a concise, unambiguous, definition of "consciousness"? If so, it will be the first.

".. tangible particle .. tangible photon .. " ?

Is the title misleading? I think this is as much an exposition of the many-worlds theory as it is about HUP.

You could add much more about the collapse of wave-functions, e.g. Schrödinger's cat paradox, or give links to articles on these, if any.

Roger Penrose, in "The Emperor's New Mind", gives a rational & original view of the problem of the collapse of the wave function, rejecting the hypothesis that the observer's mind has any influence on this process.

I greatly respect Niels Bohr's statement "I don't know what is reality", from which I infer that we must base our physical theories on what we can observe. I favour the Copenhagen interpretation, since it works and it's based on what we know without involving hypothetical factors. I like to hear about other theories, however. If we can't know what reality is, any model that explains it is as valid as any other and it is natural to ask, e.g., where a quantum is, or has been, between observations.

Dry.