{"id":10072,"date":"2010-12-05T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=10072"},"modified":"2010-12-05T14:01:39","modified_gmt":"2010-12-05T19:01:39","slug":"richard-feynman-science-and-chess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=10072","title":{"rendered":"Richard Feynman: Science and Chess"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Richard Feynman describes scientific inquiry as someone observing a game of chess.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/o1dgrvlWML4\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Years ago I was reading <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brief_history_of_time\">A Brief History of Time<\/a> and I came up with a very similar analogy where I was likening the study of quantum physics to observing a game of billiards.  For example, perhaps you can only observe the table between turns, when everything is still.  Eventually we&#8217;ve come up with a list of rules and observations:<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->1) Probability of any given ball being on the table, or vanishing from the table.<br \/>\n2) Probably that a given ball will move between the observations, noting that this is 100% for the cue ball, but lower for other balls.<br \/>\n3) Observations noting how balls tend to move less the closer they are to the corners, and more likely to move greater distances when in the middle of the table.<br \/>\n4) The most likely outcome is that a single ball will vanish. The next most likely outcome is that none vanish, followed by two, three, and on down in sharply declining probability.<br \/>\n5) The cue ball is the only ball that re-appears after disappearing from the table. <\/p>\n<p>We could have hundreds of observations like this.  Charts, equations, theories&#8230; and still have no idea what the rules of the game are or how it&#8217;s played.  This is where I think we are with quantum mechanics. <\/p>\n<p>I had the same problem back in seventh grade (1984-1985) when we were taught the system of fixed obits on atoms. I&#8217;m not talking about current wave-based <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atomic_orbital_model\">atomic orbital<\/a> theory, I&#8217;m talking about the older one, which I can&#8217;t even find on Wikipedia, perhaps because I can no longer remember the proper name for it.  In that old system there were a lot of seemingly arbitrary rules for electrons orbiting a nucleus. There were fixed orbital distances and odd rules about how many electrons could share a given orbit.  I thought it was a bunch of nonsense. It lacked the elegance and the usefulness of gravitational theory. Oh, I&#8217;m sure the math worked out, but like seeing a game of billiards in terms of probabilities, it felt like we were describing without discovering. <\/p>\n<p>I felt somewhat vindicated a few years ago when I learned they no longer taught that stuff.  (Although don&#8217;t give me too much credit here.  I  haven&#8217;t gone out and learned the <em>current<\/em> theory or anything.) I don&#8217;t have a scientific background.  Heck, I don&#8217;t even have enough mathematics to noodle around with the simple stuff they give to first-year students. But I enjoy watching from the sidelines, and am really hoping someone does for Quantum Physics what Einstein did for gravitational physics a hundred years ago.  Because our lack of an elegant theory is really starting to bug me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Richard Feynman describes scientific inquiry as someone observing a game of chess. Link (YouTube) Years ago I was reading A Brief History of Time and I came up with a very similar analogy where I was likening the study of quantum physics to observing a game of billiards. For example, perhaps you can only observe [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}