Commerce Explained

Julian Sanchez | June 9, 2005

Are you a Supreme Court justice weary of the incessant carping of sick people trying to grow medicine? Wondering how you can prolong their suffering by means of the Interstate Commerce Clause when that medicine is neither bought, nor sold, nor crosses state lines? Don't worry, Fafnir of Fafblog is here to help. An excerpt:

"Insolent pot!" says Giblets. "Be more vendible!"
"Giblets why are you yellin at that pot plant?" says me.
"Giblets is trying to turn it into commerce," says Giblets. "But buying and selling it is too much work. He wants it to be commerce NOOOOOWWW!"
"Silly Giblets, everything is commerce!" says me. "Let's step into this maaaagical schoolbus and we will learn all about Our World Of Commerce!"

THE PHYSICS OF COMMERCE!

When you hold a ball in the air it has POTENTIAL commerce. When you let it go the potential commerce turns into KINETIC commerce, which makes it faaaaalllllll through the air! It is caught by Congress or gravity. Classroom Learning Challenge: Levy a tariff on the ball before it hits the ground!

Special Bonus Commerce PARADOX! A cat is in a box. According to quantum mechanics, it is neither bought nor sold. Instead it is a cat commerce waveform sold in all possible states at the same time until it is confiscated and destroyed by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Cats.

(Hat tip: The Flybottle.)

Comments

|6.9.05 @ 5:02PM|#

The whole thing is funny, but the Schrodinger's cat riff was hilarious.

gaius marius|6.9.05 @ 5:03PM|#

lmao!!

tomWright|6.9.05 @ 5:03PM|#

Not to mention the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Cats. Heh!

|6.9.05 @ 5:07PM|#

Rofl

|6.9.05 @ 5:14PM|#

Now you know the real reason why NIH hired me: Medical marijuana is fundamentally about physics!

|6.9.05 @ 5:23PM|#

FWIW, I have often wondered if Quantum Mechanics would make more sense if I were stoned. I've never tested that hypothesis, but given how damn little sense it makes to me while sober, it's a tempting hypothesis.

What's strange is that I was damn good at my QM classes. The calculations weren't all that hard for me to do. But if you start thinking about what it actually means and what it implies for the measurement process, your options are:

1) Just shut up and calculate and learn to stop worrying and love the paradoxes.
2) Explore non-local hidden variable theories like Bohm's. (And before somebody says that Bell ruled out hidden variables, he only ruled out local hidden variable theories. Bell himself was intrigued by Bohm's theory.)
3) Buy into crazy shit.

|6.9.05 @ 5:26PM|#

Hilarious!!

thoreau - I think you pretty much have to go with all 3, don't you? It's funny, but I know less about 'regular' physics than I do about qm...which is still not very much.

|6.9.05 @ 5:34PM|#

thoreau,

You can't just choose one of the options either. You can only assign a probability to each one.

R C Dean|6.9.05 @ 5:40PM|#

thoreau -

I think the way its supposed to work is you get into a box and close it behind you. Then, whichever option you believe when you open the box, that is the option that the probabilistic waveform of the options has collapsed into, and so that is the option you go with!

|6.9.05 @ 5:44PM|#

Thoreau

Oddly enough, I wasn't interested in any kind of physics until that fateful day when a college buddy stuck a bong in my hand. A few months later, I am scoring an A in physics 101 (or 141 at Cal Poly).

An engineer buddy who was a hotel manager in Santa Barbara into his late 30's confided that if it wasn't for mj, he wouldn't have applied to the Chem Engineering dept at UCSB!

|6.9.05 @ 5:47PM|#

holy crap i almost fell off my chair laughing!!! now i remeber why high school physics was so interesting.

|6.9.05 @ 5:49PM|#

QM was the end of my physics career. I smacked into Quantum Zeno and was done. As Thoreau, the math isn't hard. I found advanced newtonian mechanics problems considerably more difficult mathematically.

No, the problem for me is that I need a picture. I need context to derive implications, because, to me, implications are what matter. There is no picture and there is no context. I have trouble with hidden variable theories as solutions to the problem because they would have to work out just right so as not to interfere with what is really solid predictability in the current pure math framework. I then met some guys at Fermi, where all they do is billiard ball problems and QM, and I realized that not a single one of them bothered with what the implications of their everyday math problems were. I read Bell and a friend of mine did some chalkboard exploration of Bell's Theorem. It didn't seem to help.

All I know is:

1) Wave collapse seems very unlikely. I don't like the whole Copenhagen framework. It is fugly.

2) All of the alternative frameworks I've read seem to contain wacky stuff beyond belief. Gribbons, I think, had that whole deal about backwards in time influencing particles, for example. I dunno about that.

3) It is for people smarter than I do wrestle with.

|6.9.05 @ 5:55PM|#

All you guys having problems with QM, this explains it all: "twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe"

|6.9.05 @ 6:01PM|#

Jason-

Bohm's is the least offensive modification of QM. Try a book called "The Quantum Theory of Motion" by Holland. Decent book. The key assumption of the theory is in chapter 3 or 4, where he says that you have to assume that the initial probability distribution is that predicted by orthodox QM. Once you have that, everything else follows, and you have a theory that gives the same predictions as orthodox QM but has a much more reasonable interpretation.

And by hanging so much on that one assumption, I think Bohm's theory provides a natural spring board for probing physics "beyond the standard model" (although I don't mean that phrase in the exact same way that particle physicists usually use it). You can ask whether there are systems that start off with a different probability distribution and then relax to the orthodox distribution. You can ask why that is and what the mechanisms are.

Basically, Bohm's theory provides a reasonable interpretation and a direction to start pushing in if you want to ask why things are the way they are. Orthodox QM just says "That is the way it is and nothing else can be measured or observed. In fact, any question that strays outside this framework is inherently meaningless, so be a good little grad student and go back to doing calculations!"

I'm not saying that Bohm's theory is right (a scientist should never be convinced that a new theory is right until shitloads of data come in) but it seems like the most promising avenue of investigation if you want to go beyond orthodox QM.

|6.9.05 @ 6:04PM|#

I just hope gaius marius doesn't come around and explain that my arrogant refusal to accept orthodoxy is a pathology of modern society. And that I should live with conceptual ambiguities involving entangled, connected interactions rather than insist that everything must distill down to INDIVIDUAL particles (gasp!).

|6.9.05 @ 6:09PM|#

The comments are pretty hilarious, too:

You may be actually sitting on your front stoop basking in the gloriously warm rays of the sun. But is that really any different than exchanging money for goods and services at a tanning salon? No! The sun is a communist that undermines the tanning salon economy, and you, likewise are a communist.

|6.9.05 @ 6:26PM|#

thoreau:

I think the answer to a reasonable interpretation lies in the reconciliation of General Relativty and QM. Numerous paradoxes go away immediately if you can somehow get those two to get along. I'm waiting for the smart people to give me quantum gravity reconciled with GR, then I'll stick my head out to see if I can find a picture. 'Till then, I'm licking my wounds ...

|6.9.05 @ 6:33PM|#

As another casualty of senior-level QM, I'm hopeful that string theory (or some other higher-dimensional theory) proves out. I'd like to think that what looks probabilistic and nonsensical in 3 (or 4) dimensions looks more deterministic and intuitive in a higher-dimensional space. I have an easier time envisioning n-dimensional spaces than I do of superposition waveforms and whatnot.

|6.9.05 @ 6:34PM|#

Jason-

I vehemently disagree. I think it should be possible to understand, say, the Stern-Gerlach experiment without knowing anything about gravity. Things like string theory operate in a totally different energy regime, and so I don't see how effects from those theories could play a role in something simple like silver atoms in a magnetic field.

Besides, experiments have been done on quantum states of atoms and neutrons in gravitational fields, and all of the usual bound states and interference effects have been observed. Sakurai, which I'm guessing that you studied from, if you mentioned quantum Zeno, covers some of those experiments. A couple of years ago some people in Switzerland (I think) studied gravitational bound states of neutrons. It was published in Nature.

Those experiments can all be accurately modeled with the standard Schrodinger equation, just like, say, the Stern-Gerlach experiment. Yet the interpretation remains ambiguous, and I don't think string theory will help us interpret those experiments.

I think experiments on quantum coherence in optics and electronics will tell us more about the measurement problem than quantum gravity.

|6.9.05 @ 6:39PM|#

My biggest regret from undergrad is that they canceled the second semester of senior lab (the prof. retired, they were short on faculty, so they gave us credit for working in research labs). I had been planning on getting the Stern-Gerlach apparatus to work that semester (the first semester our choice of experiments was more constrained, and the second semester it would have been more open). But I didn't have the chance. Then I went to grad school and got involved in other research and never got a chance to do the Stern-Gerlach experiment.

Some day I'm going to find a way to do that experiment. Maybe I'll set it up in my basement some day. What would be really fun is doing it with single-atom resolution. Use weak beams and sensitive detectors.

Of course, gaius marius would say that my determination to study INDIVIDUAL atoms is a symptom of society decaying ;->

|6.9.05 @ 6:53PM|#

thoreau:

I smell optical, QCD bias! :)

I can't really comment because I know exactly bupkis of QCD, and I only had a semester of optics. Back in the day I wanted to be a real, honest to goodness, chalkboard jockey astrophysicist. Then in a moment of clarity I realized that I wasn't smart enough. That was one of those Life Moments, I'm here to tell you. I had another one when I was going Write a Great Novel, then discovered that I can't handle dialogue (nor, for you regulars, put grammatically correct thougts together).

Anyway, the reason I hold out for GR reconciliation is that at a minimum the whole class of light speed paradoxes in QM goes away. That would almost have to tell us something. There is some strange complementarity in GR and QM such that something almost has to give. As with everything in GR, you need big gravity to see clearly. I wouldn't expect to get General Relativistic distinctions from QM predictions under earth gravity operating on miniscule masses. You need to enter the GR dominant regime where GR diverges significantly enough from NULG to tell you something.

Bah. This is the stuff that used to keep me awake. Now I'm Dilbert.

|6.9.05 @ 6:56PM|#

Did anybody else hear Brian Greene on Art Bell's radio show this past weekend? Brian agrees there are little green men *out there* but no evidence they have actually been here. Art had him going on and on about time travel.

Brian had this really bizarre common sense argument for why you could theoretically travel to the future but not to the past.

|6.9.05 @ 6:59PM|#

"Some day I'm going to find a way to do that experiment. Maybe I'll set it up in my basement some day."

Watch out there, Bub. You'd be competing with legit physics labs. Wouldn't want the Physics Police busting down your door.

|6.9.05 @ 7:03PM|#

What about plasma physics and electromagnetic energy? Isn't electromagnetic energy much, much more powerful than gravity.? And doesn't it scale very well, ie, the results of a small-scale experiment here in a lab on earth could be extrapolated for much larger, or smaller phenomenon?

Ok, now me not knowing what that might have to do with QM, other than possibly being a part of the ol' grand unified theory, just goes to show you how little I know about the subject.

I'll shut up now...

|6.9.05 @ 7:03PM|#

Jason-

QCD bias? I don't think we need QCD either to explain Stern-Gerlach. At most we need QED. But since the paradoxes would exist even in a non-relativistic universe, I think we should resist the temptation to assume that all of our problems will be solved if we just go to a higher energy scale. Fundamentally, QM is a theory of how waves evolve under different interactions. String theory deals with gravitational interactions, QCD with nuclear interactions, and QED with electromagnetic interactions. But, at the end of the day, when you strip away all of the fanciness, we're assuming quantum mechanics as the starting point here.

I think the problem is in quantum mechanics itself.


Todd-

I'm a fully qualified professional physicist. But as a theorist I doubt I'll ever have lab space at whatever university I wind up teaching at. So I'll have to do this in my basement.

And if the Physics Police come I'll just show them my license...um, I mean, my Ph.D. diploma (signed by the Terminator!).

|6.9.05 @ 7:11PM|#

Yee ha. Dilbert too long, I have been.

Yes, I meant QED. Even when we did it in survey, I wanted the Chromo in Quantum Chromo Dynamics to actually mean 'light' instead of the stupid "color" scheme of quarks and whatnot.

|6.9.05 @ 7:13PM|#

Besides, thoreau. You are violating Jason's First Rule of physics: More energy solves every problem.

|6.9.05 @ 9:38PM|#

This thread is begining to sound like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Gernation.

|6.9.05 @ 9:40PM|#

Edit: Generation

|6.9.05 @ 10:06PM|#

Akira,

Episode #79, to be exact. But don't make me go Darmok on your Tenagran ass... ;-)

|6.9.05 @ 10:58PM|#

JL:
I can't really comment because I know exactly bupkis of QCD, and I only had a semester of optics. Back in the day I wanted to be a real, honest to goodness, chalkboard jockey astrophysicist. Then in a moment of clarity I realized that I wasn't smart enough. That was one of those Life Moments, I'm here to tell you.

This one hits close to home.

|6.10.05 @ 2:07AM|#

Wow... I'm absolutely trashed right now, and this thread was amazing to read in this state of mind. I, for one, hold a personal hope that QM will lead us into a more spiritual world. A quasi-Buddhist philosophy joined with the western science that will give meaning to all the nonsensical probabilities that are spit out at us today. However, as an aspiring scientist, I see that as all goofy, wacky loads of horse manure. Only hard data counts in science. But still, good books like "How Consciousness Commands Matter", "Descartes Error", and the classic "Tao of Physics" all make you look at the world like you've never seen it before. After all, there is more to the world than science can answer.

|6.10.05 @ 3:17AM|#

Since tanning in sunlight is a substitute for both tanning salons and sunless tanning creams, and salons are commercial services while the creams are commercial products, it is clear that under Wickard and Raich precedents, getting a suntan in your own back yard impacts interstate commerce for the purposes of Federal laws regulating tanning products and services, and can accordingly be regulated and/or prohibited by Congress.

|6.10.05 @ 3:21AM|#

Really? How do we know science just hasn't progressed enough, because when you come down to it, isn't science just real critical thinking (and acting, eventually, after the thinking part)

|6.10.05 @ 7:21AM|#

Wow. I was just reading the Punk Rock thread. I have this image of thoreau splitting protons in the basement, like Kate Rambeau.

Gabba! Gabba! Hey!

Kevin
(skipped H.S. Physics,
but took "Physics For Poets"
as a college Frosh.)

|6.10.05 @ 10:49AM|#

Science is NOT just critical thinking. That would logic and reason. While playing a fundamental role in science, it is not what defines it. Instead, science is the testing of hypothesis' with empirical evidence about the observable world to explain natural phenomena and predict future events. This is important because the Kansas School Board is trying to change that definition to take out the word natural so they can throw in intelligent design into the classroom.

|6.10.05 @ 11:48AM|#

Yogi,
Someone needs to do a Magic School Bus parody that riffs on ID.

"Come on kids! we're going back 10.000 years to the beginning of the world!" beep beep.