![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Socratic dialogues
Jun. 21st, 2014 04:38 pmOne of the wonderful things about the Internet is how many really cool people you meet, and how willing many of them are to patiently explain tricky things. I'm currently doing this with a physicist friend who is trying to explain quantum entanglement. (To grossly oversimplify, this is an odd yet empirically verified phenomenon in which changing one member of a pair of entangled particles instantaneously causes a parallel change to the other member of the pair, no matter how far apart the two particles may be.)
It's a very Socratic dialogue approach: he explains a concept and provides an example, I test my understanding by predicting a consequence based on what I think I understand, and he gently corrects me. Repeat as necessary until understanding arrives. For the specific example we're using to make the highly abstract a bit more concrete, I'm trying to come to an understanding of why you can't create an ansible (a faster-than-light communication device) using entanglement.
Over the course of a few days, I'm starting to get an intuitive feel for how entanglement works, and my predictions are slowly getting better. Or, to borrow a few words from Wolfgang Pauli, I'm progressing from statements that are "not even wrong" (i.e., so badly formed that they can't even be tested to determine whether they're correct) to statements that are wrong, but at headed in the right direction. By analogy, I'm hoping to start by at least ending in playing the same sport as the physicist. If he has enough patience, I hope to gradually get into the right league within that sport, then the right arena within that league, and eventually into the right game in that arena.
Of course, that may not happen. Understanding quantum mechanics is best done with mathematics, not English words. And even once you've got the math down pat, Richard Feynman famously remarked that "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." (There are many alternate versions of that quote, and it's not clear which version is authoritative.) I'll be happy when I understand enough to know that I don't understand anything.
It's a very Socratic dialogue approach: he explains a concept and provides an example, I test my understanding by predicting a consequence based on what I think I understand, and he gently corrects me. Repeat as necessary until understanding arrives. For the specific example we're using to make the highly abstract a bit more concrete, I'm trying to come to an understanding of why you can't create an ansible (a faster-than-light communication device) using entanglement.
Over the course of a few days, I'm starting to get an intuitive feel for how entanglement works, and my predictions are slowly getting better. Or, to borrow a few words from Wolfgang Pauli, I'm progressing from statements that are "not even wrong" (i.e., so badly formed that they can't even be tested to determine whether they're correct) to statements that are wrong, but at headed in the right direction. By analogy, I'm hoping to start by at least ending in playing the same sport as the physicist. If he has enough patience, I hope to gradually get into the right league within that sport, then the right arena within that league, and eventually into the right game in that arena.
Of course, that may not happen. Understanding quantum mechanics is best done with mathematics, not English words. And even once you've got the math down pat, Richard Feynman famously remarked that "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." (There are many alternate versions of that quote, and it's not clear which version is authoritative.) I'll be happy when I understand enough to know that I don't understand anything.