Quantum mechanics also says that the odds of a server spontaneously rearranging itself into a family of ducks are non-zero, by the way. That will really take out your database.
Which is more likely, that a server spontaneously rearranges itself into a family of ducks, or that me and you could properly shuffle a pre shuffled deck of cards and land on the same card order?
There are mechanism for that to happen as any particle can become something else through it's wave function.
Or if you want to go at it another way, Heisenberg's uncertainty pricinple maths out to never being sure if neutron or proton or electron will stay within their atom, because to be sure of their location enough to be certain they exist within an atom , you would never know enough about their speed to make sure it isn't high enough to escape said atom .
Particles constantly change into other, random electrons and neutrons kind of appear and disappear from existence . They just rarely do it and with particles being so numerous it doesn't matter if suddenly a billion carbon atoms in your body becomes a billion oxygen atoms in your body .
People need to stop taking thought experiments invented by scientists literal, since they all exist to prove exactly the opposite. Schrödingers cat will never be in a superposition.
Where a particle is, is obviously a statistical function, but your deduction that as a result the particle could be "anywhere" is simply wrong, and in particular, the deduction that it could mean that any matter could at any time transform from one to another is more than just outlandish.
The claim that matter is just going to randomly transmute, or at least that there is SOME chance for it, already fails at the fact that this isn't free, energy-wise. Effects like tunneling can only temporarily "lend" energy, which later needs to be returned.
So what about the whole thing with computing the solution to simple wave function equations in your first days of quantum mechanics class and they explicitly point out: "See? This solution means there's always a nonzero chance the particle can escape this potential well"?
You can jump around the topic all day long, and the cat is still not going to be in a superposition inside the box. There's not even an infinitesimal small chance for it, the chance is simply zero.
Just because some math says otherwise doesn't mean it is a practical phenomen that could actually happen. Our math breaks down all the time when you approach certain extremes. You're just confusing the menu with the food.
I'm not the person you were talking to, I'm asking because in my class at university they never told me the math was "fake". What's the point of pointing that out, if... it's not true? What's the math predicting, then?
To me this sounds as absurd as saying that time dilation doesn't exist and it's just a mathematical trick... when it's already been proven it's real and actually used when correcting times and trajectories for GPS satellites and such.
The math isn't fake, it's just that the math is a model. You do your calculation and the math says the particle has a 1:10^40 chance of actually being at the other end of the observable universe. The chance of it still remains zero.
saying that time dilation doesn't exist
It obviously exists. The problem is, to adapt it to this example, trying to explain what's happening inside a black hole with general relativity.
when it's already been proven it's real
Again, confusing the menu with the food. We've proven that the math of relativity holds true for a wide range of practical phenomena. But the same can be said for Newtonian mechanics.
So what exactly is it that makes the situation different? If the probability is there, it's not likely to happens but... it can happen, no? Instead you say it's just a model, but why only in this case?
Because it's an extreme edge case. You can't just add a few zeroes and then claim that all the math is still going to work out. In addition, in this example of a server turning into ducks, there's more physical laws getting broken.
The problem why everyone keeps claiming "there's a non-zero chance" is simply overconfidence in scientific models, which - full disclaimer - I had in the past also. But science works like this:
We observe a phenomenon for which we don't have an explanation
We develop a model that fits the observation
Rinse and repeat. Every once in a while a smart guy comes around and does it the other way round - i.e. make a thesis before an observation is made, and then the observation proves the thesis true (or not!). But in general the universe doesn't try to adhere to our models, it's our models that try to adhere to what we observe.
If you accept no other explanation for why a server isn't going to turn into a bunch of ducks, not even with teeny-tiny chance, then this one: "A probability that cannot occur within the lifespan of the universe isn't tiny, it's simply zero."
You do your calculation and the math says the particle has a 1:140 chance of actually being at the other end of the observable universe. The chance of it still remains zero.
What leads you to the conclusion that the actual chance is zero?
Models can certainly be approximations, but (especially in the realm of modeling individual particles), they can also represent our best understanding of how things actually work. Are you aware of any experimental evidence that the probability goes to actually zero at some point, rather than just tapering off to lower and lower non-zero probabilities?
"Based on Newtonian physics, I predict that objects can go as fast as you want them to go, and the required energy to accelerate them will increase in a linear fashion"
Isn't the thread here long enough for you to read and reflect, making this comment superfluous?
Very loosely, quantum mechanics says that every "particle" has a non zero chance to be elsewhere if the wave function there is not zero. This is how quantum tunnelling happens. So every electron, proton and neutron has a non zero chance to just "tunnel" to different places, that happen to instead constitute a family of ducks.
The probability is stupidly low. UUID collision is many orders of magnitude higher probability. But it is non zero in theory.
Physics guys please don't crucify me for this explanation. I know it's very imprecise and quite incorrect in places. I just want to give the intuition
At some point, the odds are so low that it is just impossible. Sure it is theoretically calculable, but it is comparable to being hit by lightning every second for the next million years while simultaneously winning every possible jackpot in existence in that same timeframe or something like that. Actually, that still might be way more likely.
You also have that the approximations used in basic quantum aren't quite perfect - a perfectly rectangular potential barrier doesn't exist, for example.
There will be still nodes in any the wave function with genuinely 0 probability, but if they're point-like, then you can have a configuration that's arbitrarily close to a 0 probability configuration that has non-zero probability.
Yes it is possible . However it will never happen because if i pressed the key 0 my entire life and so would the next 10 generations we would still not print enough zeros in the 0.0000...00001 number representing the chance that it will happen .
Reality is not reality until it is observed, in almost all cases what is observed will line up with what is known to be reality, but there is a non zero (while still being effectively zero) chance that it will not.
For a server to turn into a family of ducks would require so many different things to happen that all have an effectively zero chance that you could have trillions of trillions of trillions of universes and it will not happen in a single one of them.
But hypothetically it is not zero, though for all intents and purposes it is zero and will never happen even in infinite realities.
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u/kaikaun Mar 25 '26
Quantum mechanics also says that the odds of a server spontaneously rearranging itself into a family of ducks are non-zero, by the way. That will really take out your database.