I quit reading posts in this thread a while ago. I have a question to pose, though.

BigDon, has you're question been answered well enough for you? You haven't posted a thank you or response, as you usually do. It looks to me like this thread grew out of control, and I think that we should answer questions well here in Q&A.

It's too tiny to call "macroscopic". But zero-point vacuum energy is said to have some other effects which are macroscopic: some say it explains inertia and even gravity because the forces an object feels from the ZPVE are balanced when it's not accelerating or located near another massive object but become unbalanced when it's accelerating or when there's another massive object nearby. But these ideas are not especially widely accepted.

In neutron stars, the only thing left propping matter up against gravitational collapse is the exclusion principle, which is roughly that two particles can't be in the same place at the same time and thus must have some distance between each other. How much distance is enough is affected by uncertainty, so, in a universe where uncertainty was or higher or lower or didn't exist, the sizes of neutron stars would be different, and so might the range of stellar masses that result in neutron stars. (That's pretty macro!)

Uncertainty also affects the distribution of electrons around a nucleus, which dictates atom sizes and molecular structures, which dictate the physical and chemical traits of every object or fluid we ever interact with in any way... the problem is that uncertainty's woven into that so thoroughly that I can't imagine how to imagine how things would be different without it.

Another effect of uncertainty which we can observe effects of on a somewhat larger scale than single particles is quantum tunneling. It's been used in a type of "microscope", and in the read-write "heads" of magnetic hard disk drives, and apparently in X-ray machines in which a tungsten atom emits an X-photon when an electron jumps from the outermost shell to the innermost shell and back again. (I presume other gadgets I can't name right now also qualify). Of course, in each of these cases, the thing actually being detected or produced by one tunneling event is tiny, but, by making them happen over and over again and using them as the starting points for chains of cause and effect, we get macroscopic results from them, like big electron microscope pictures and the movements of computer-controlled machinery.

Oh God yes.

Sorry, I was caught up in the reading!

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

Nothing to apologize for. I just saw the thread blow up, and wanted to make sure we hadn't lost you.

A couple of posts here reminded me I used to draw a paycheck from Uncle Sam for being a radar technician on AWG-9 and AWG-15 systems in F-14's. The UP's effect on certain side lobes is used as a seed number for encryption of the signal to prevent jamming and hostile manipulation of the signal and to allow multiple aircraft to paint the same target meaningfully.

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

Hey BigDon

here is a macro effect example of the uncertainty principle

Imagine a guitar string.
when you pluck it, it is in motion.
that motion is a frequency and the string had become a wave function.
you cant measure exactly where the string is. the faster the string moves (frequency goes up) the more uncertain your result will be. unless you stop the string, you really cant be certain where it is.

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-work in progress--

sabianq,

Please see my first reply in the thread.

1) A guitar string is large enough that you can easily measure its position without changing its frequency. The energy changes in the incident photons are not large enough to change the frequency. All you need to measure the position is a camera that's fast enough.

2) Please look at the relationships that the uncertainty principle applies to. It does not apply directly to frequency and position of a vibrating object.

yes, but when you take a picture of the string, you know exactly where it is, however, do you know what the frequency of the string is by looking at the picture? conversely, by listening to the frequency while the string is moving, would you know the exact position of the string?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncerta...Wave_mechanics
besides, i am just using it as an example.

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-work in progress--

Isnt that info slightly classified? It occurs to me that a physicist ex-sigint analyst might be able to use that kind of data to try to figure seed assignments to pop the encryption.

Maybe that's what they want.

A friend of mine (since passed away) who was in the Air Force told a story about some project he was on that had to do with sidelobes (not related to this at all), and the sidelobes were from some Russian transmissions. This would've back in the '60s, IIRC.

They were given a cover story to use if anyone asked what they were doing. Years later, he learned that what they were told they were really doing was itself a cover story. None of them had any idea at the time what they were really doing.

The idea was that if the Russians got interested in what they were doing and managed to get one of the participants to blab, that blab would be disinformation, and disinformation the source believed to be true.

Clever ain't it? Make someone think he knows the truth and even let him think he's in on the cover-up/cover story, but all the while he's "believing the lie". And then imagine doing that with not one, but several layers of lies on top of the truth.

-Richard

Sun Tzu gives great weight to intelligence of every sort, because it is so much less expensive than fighting a war.

For us, the technology spin offs for astronomy are wonderful.

...and then imagine what happens when they lose track of the lies until there's no one who has the truth any more. What do you get? WMDs in places no one expected them, and no WMDs in the places they thought they should expect them. But I diverge...

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Logic is the grammar of truth.

Meaning and absolute certainty are incompatible, and profound meaning and absolute certainty are profoundly incompatible.

The only thing intelligence is capable of is recognizing itself.

You appear to be imposing arbitrary limitations on the choice of instrumentation. With a suitable high speed motion picture camera one can in theory get a precise record of the string's position as a function of time.
This looks like yet another misapplication of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to a macro situation.

The tunnel diode depends on this effect. It makes small, low power microwave circuitry possible. As in cell phones. No uncertainty, no cell phones.

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I came for the astronomy but I do love the physics!

Now I know who to blame!!