Quantum mechanics works perfectly in experiments, but Oxford physicist Tim Palmer argues it rests on a mathematical fiction: irrational numbers like √2 have no basis in physical reality.Paywalled article. No, I do not think he is correct. I am just posting because I think it is amusing.Strip them out, and quantum's strangest mysteries disappear.
Palmer's theory makes a testable prediction: quantum computers will fail beyond 400 qubits, hitting a fundamental limit set by the discrete structure of nature itself.
The coming quantum computing race will determine whether our most successful physical theory contains a basic mistake.
Sunday, August 30, 2026
Palmer says Irrational Numbers Not Real
New tweet:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Roger,
ReplyDeleteEven pure abstraction has limits.
Just because you can put something on paper syntactically does not mean it's real. It's no different than constructing a grammatically correct sentence about something you made up. You can also write any number divided by zero on paper, nothing is physically stopping you, but it is meaningless and you can't do the calculation.
I would posit that a great deal of physics about so called black holes is in essence meaningless because it keeps insisting you can have any kind of measurable physical phenomena requiring there to be mass at a point (a location of zero size), when it physically can't. There is no way you can calculate a density of zero volume or size, nor can you calculate an instantaneous velocity (velocity at a point), as both require some positive period, or extension of space or time to even have any meaning in reality.
If you are going down that route, no numbers have reality, they are an abstraction from nature that is purely in the mind used to model, so why this argument should be used against irrational numbers specifically I don't know. There is evidence that pi and the golden ratio can be successfully used to model nature.
ReplyDelete