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I don't know much about entanglement, but does this now explain why it happens? If we think of the universe eventually returning to some kind of steady state (i'm not sure precisely what i mean by steady state), and if there are certain limited ways for two 'entangled' particles to 'reunify' (again, i don't know much but i'm assuming in some final state everything would cancel out), then wouldn't it make sense that we can only see these particles in specific restricted states?


This has nothing whatsoever to do with entanglement.


Ah, Hm. So you did get what i was suggesting, though? The idea was that maybe you could think of particles exactly the same way as you do orbiting planets that eventually return to an original configuration. I am saying you could (possibly) think of entangled particles as kind of like billiard balls. You wouldn't think about bouncing balls, though, you would think about particles and the guaranteed force between them. The thought is that if the universe is just a wave system, then if you take all nondeterminism out of it, it's just gonna loop forever right? I mean if we think about gravity and basic bodies, like a universe of just two bodies, it's just gonna loop i think. The particles will eventually end up where they started, just like a pool table.

So maybe if two particles are entangled, they phased together in some way at one time and must phase together in that way until the end of time, unless you bump it wrong again.

I dunno.


Yeah I'm pretty sure I understand what you're talking about and as far as I can tell it doesn't really have anything to do with quantum mechanics at all.

Entanglement is "just" the result of the fact that the space of possible states of a combined quantum system isn't the Cartesian product of the state-spaces of the subsystems that make it up.

If I have two classical systems, one of which has state-space {A, B} (i.e. the first system is either in state A or state B) and the other has state-space {0,1,2} (i.e. the second system is either in state 0, 1 or 2) then the system I get from combining them has 6 possible states {(A,0), (A,1), (A,2),(B,0), (B,1), (B,2)}.

Thats not how quantum state-spaces combine, they combine with the tensor product, rather than the Cartesian product, so the state-space of the combined system is much richer than what you'd get if you try to use the classical "Cartesian product" rule to combine them.


I think it works out fine here. You have one path through all lives, you can't be adam and eve at the same time but you can interact with yourself as either of them at some point in your path. Of course i think original sin should come pretty early in your path ;)


Sounds like a possible psychological issue. This might lead to a problem for society. We might want to get you some preventive treatment for that before you have a chance of harming someone. Do you think prison might work well here?


I advocate medical treatment for addiction, though of course I am joking here.

I assume we were discussing this yesterday, after the last HN restore point?


Yes, discussing yesterday, exactly. I missed that discussion when it was gone.

The point is the same whether you were joking about addiction or not. Preemptive forced action based on subjective reason like labeling makes for unwarranted control of human beings by other human beings or systems. I can just imagine a set of RAS checkboxes similar to stop and frisk for mental illness and homelessness. None of these are ok and the fact that we are supporting systems like this means we are headed backwards instead of forwards.

Harming others is a separate issue and is always a problem.


Going out on a limb here because this does not make sense to me either. But maybe this has something to do with the fact that the valley built all of the software used to support this, quietly invested in it all in 2010 for undisclosed amounts at least in the tens of billions and approaching or exceeding 100 billion, and the money doesn't want it on the front page of one of the most popular news sites?

By money i mean this money that keeps its actions shadier than the NSA: https://angel.co/emc https://angel.co/emc-ventures


Why is this on the second page of news right now? Older stories with way fewer points are currently ranked higher. This story is 22 hours old with 1495 points. There are stories with 264 and 305 points that are older but are currently ranked just higher than this story, moving it to the second page of news


Stop "Stop Xing" everything


It's also possible (more likely?) that life on any nearby planet discovered would just be a failed attempt of our own. If this is the case, then its discovery would actually be good news, it would mean we can continue in the face of catastrophe. I don't think the author touches on that.

We already know of at least one catastrophe we are rebuilding from, there's also no reason to think we weren't already rebuilding from earlier (possibly much larger) catastrophes.

Following this, there's nothing to say that we haven't already had some major effect on our surroundings (intentional or not) in some previous, possibly more complex or larger-scale growth. Our influence on our surroundings could be huge. Lack of life or anything that seems anomalous in our immediate vicinity could be our own doing. A seeming lack of evidence for this might be explained by scale, or the nature of the catastrophe, or (if it was intentional) by design.


Yes, which 'rock' (point of origin) did the first human-scale single-celled organism on earth launch from? In this line of thought, the fact that we got off of that rock, grew into the ecosystem that we are today, and are now well on our way to doing it again is hopeful in itself.

Also, when thinking about this, i don't think we should discount the possibility that we have already discovered and merged with other forms of life, especially during explosive growth periods over previously uncharted territory. Maybe some forms of life we know of today were actually independent in origin.

But i definitely like this kind of intelligent design by self angle more than any other.


There is about a 750ms delay for scrolling on my lastgen macbook air. I am going to upgrade my machine for this site.

edit: Actually it's more like a 50ms delay followed by some mollasses


don't worry. i have the macbook retina with a gig of video ram and the latest and fastest i7 processor and it's scrolls like crap.


Aww no parallax on iPad


But ignoring all of the ways RFCs could be better, this site is significantly better than the alternatives (the ietf site, plain text on some random domain, or that shitty purple one i always seem to end up on...)


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