Monthly Archives: March 2019

What would a quantum measurement on Paul his IQ yield?

Magnetism

Today I came across one of those video’s where people try to explain how permanent magnets work. And originally I thought of a title like ‘Idiot of the day observed’ but soon I changed my mind because Paul Sutter does not do it on purpose; what he says is more or less the general accepted version of permanent magnetism…

In general there are two lines of reasoning when it comes to permanent magnets: One line of reasoning is that the magnetic domains get aligned, the other way is that the electron spin of all unpaired electrons align.

Paul Sutter goes for the second line of reasoning; the spin of all unpaired electrons align giving rise to a permanent magnet. Just like everything else in the video it is just wrong; in my view where the electrons carry magnetic charge, it is the placement of the unpaired electrons in the inner shells of for example an iron atom that makes the global permanent magnet emerge.

If it was just electrons having all their dipole magnetic moments point in the same direction, in that case with a strong magnet you could always change or invert the magnetic direction of a weak magnet. In practice this just does not happen; last spring I even made a simple experiment with this: I took my stack of the most strong magnets I have and placed them over 24 hours against the two most weak magnets I have. And, like expected, there was no change at all in the weak magnets indicating there is some kind of threshold at work. The threshold is of course that it is hard to remove the magnetically charged electrons from the inner shells of the iron atoms…

Here are two pictures of the simple experiment from 08 March 2018; the permanent but very weak magnets on the left were exposed to the stack of neodymium magnets for just over 24 hours and just nothing changed in the behavior of the weak magnets. If electron magnetic moment alignment were a significant factor in permanent magnetism, the stronger permanent magnets should alter the magnetic properties of the weak magnets. It just does not happen…

Weak at the left, strong at the right.
After 24+ hours of waiting zero change observed in the weak magnets.

A link to what I wrote one year back on this very simple experiment is:
08 March 2018: Reason 56: This experiment shows zero spin torque transfer. http://kinkytshirts.nl/rootdirectory/just_some_math/monopole_magnetic_stuff03.htm#08March2018

It is lovely to see so many of the wrong stuff bound together in just one short video: For example when Paul explains why electron pairs are magnetically neutral while the unpaired electrons are not. In my view if it is true that electrons are magnetic dipoles, they would be magnetically neutral. They are not and in my view this shows electrons are magnetic monopoles. How does Paul explain it? Very simple: The electron pair is magnetically neutral because one of the electrons has spin up while the other has spin down and that cancels each other out.

Here is the Youtube video of Paul Sutter, please don’t think that Paul is a dumb person or so. This is just the view of professional physics folks that have studied magnetism for centuries…

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uwjqy2HCgY

May be at last I am getting a little bit sarcastic: They have studied that for centuries… But if you let go that dumb and unproven Gauss law for magnetism, just try to think about our physical reality as electrons also carry magnetic charge beside their electric charge, a lot of things become better to understand. After all, why do we only observe electron pairs? Why never something else like an electron triplet?

Ok, let’s leave it with that. Till updates my dear reader.

On Schrödingers cat & an example known as the envelope problem.

Quantum mechanics

Today the Youtube channel SciShow had one more video out on quantum mechanics and as such the famous cat of the Schrödinger cat in a box problem comes along once more.

As usual we are told the cat can be in a super position of being alive and dead at the same time. I wonder why people think that this can be true, as far as I know history the Schrödinger guy came up with this example as an antidote as being everything into a super position…

I suppose you already know what the cat in the box setup is. The cat dies if just one radioactive atom decays yes or no. If you are outside of the box it makes sense to use a probalistic model of the situation, but does this mean that in reality inside the box the cat is dead and alive at the same time? After all the cat will be the very first to observe if radio active decay has happened because as soon as it does the state of the cat goes from alive to dead. So inside the box there is at least one observer present and as such all quantum states we are interested in (radio active decay yes or no) is constantly measured all of the time.

For myself speaking I use the fact that a cat cannot be in a super position of being alive and dead as an example that an individual atom cannot be in a state where radio active decay has passed yes or no.

That does not mean quantum particles cannot be in super positions, for example photons behave often like they took all possible paths to arrive somewhere. But as soon as there are all kinds of different energy levels involved this becomes more and more problematic. For example can a particle be in a super position of being a neutron and a proton? Can a particle be in a super position of being an electron and a positron? Can a particle be in a super position of being a hydrogen ion (a proton) and a plutonium atom?

Energy is at the heart of the quantum measurement problem: In order to measure a quantum particle some kind of interaction with the particle must be there. This interaction changes (or not) the state of the particle. It is a bit like this: Suppose I am sitting in my home country and I have to measure the length of some grassfield in Germany or Belgium but I can only use atom bombs for that. No matter how smart I craft my grass length measuring device, the giant explosions from the atom bomb will bring a great uncertainty in the outcome of the measurements… Here is the video:

The cat is also an observer…

Ok, now for the lesser known but rather interesting envelope exchange problem. In a nutshell it goes as next:

You can choose one of two closed invelopes and they contain money. The only thing you are told is that the amount in one of the envelopes is double that of the other envelope.

Now you play the game and you choose one of the envelopes, let’s say it contains 100€. You are asked by the quiz master if you want to keep those 100€ or that you want to change your choice and go for the other envelope.

You think about that for a few seconds and you figure out: If this envelope has 100€ and given the rules of the game, the other envelope contains 50€ or 200€ with equal probability of 50%. Suppose I want to swap to the other envelope, what is my expectation for the amount of money? That is simple, both 50€ and 200€ have 50% probability so the expectation of swapping becomes 0.5*50 + 0.5*200 = 125€. Therefore it makes sense to swap and choose the other envelope.

But hey, whatever envelope you choose at first and you find X money in it, isn’t it weird to swap that always? If you would have chosen the other envelope you would also swap…

This envelope swap problem or paradox has a relative simple solution: You assume equal 50% probabilities for having double or half the amount of money you found in the first envelope. But in that case the whole thing crashes because you are now calculating with three outcomes: the 100€ from the first envelope and two other amounts 50 and 200 Euro while there are only two enveloples. It is unwise to calculate the expectation values because the 50€ and 200€ exclude each other: if the outcome 50€ is observed all of the time the 200€ was non existant. And as such the expectation value makes no sense for an individual experiment.

Ok, let me end this post with a standard wiki around the two envelope thing: Two enveloples problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_envelopes_problem

End of this post.

The logarithm of all 2D circular numbers (the split complex numbers).

Uncategorized

Yesterday I was editing the six pictures for this update and all of a sudden I realized I had made a dumb dumb mistake: The pictures count down from number 7 to number 2…

I had processed them in the wrong order; I had made seven background pictures but I filled in the math text in the wrong order.

All in all I decided to leave it this way; it might be a stupid mistake but it is not a critical mistake like making a critical math error or having wrong ideas about what is actually happening on the math level. It is just an editing error and also funny. So I leave it this way.

In this post we look at the so called split complex numbers, they are the cousin of the numbers from the complex plane. The only difference is that where in the complex plane the square of the imaginary unit equals minus one, for the split complex numbers this equals plus one.

Although this is a minor change, split complex numbers are not a field because it contains non-invertible numbers outside the number 0. All I do in this post is finding the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of all split complex numbers and via taking the log of the eigenvalues we calculate what the log of an arbitrary split complex number is.

In the speak of this website the split complex numbers are just the 2D circular numbers. Remeber in all dimensions numbers are complex or circular depending if the first imaginary unit equals -1 or +1. You can find many more ways of crafting a multiplication but the best math results are always found in the complex and circular version of the numbers in that particular dimension…













Ok, in this post I left all things out that talks about the 4D hybrid space that is a mixture of the 2D circular and complex numbers. But as you see on inspection of the above six pictures, the eigenvalues might be always real but they can be negative. As such always pay attention when you apply that function named the log…

That was it for this post, at this point in time I have no idea what the next post will be about. After all we had this long rout of over 20 posts on the 4D complex numbers and I left a whole lot of other stuff out in that period. Stuff like 3D Gauss integers or a general definition for integration that works in all dimensions. Till updates my dear reader.