POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : I think not everything is quantized : Re: I think not everything is quantized Server Time
3 Sep 2024 13:10:45 EDT (-0400)
  Re: I think not everything is quantized  
From: Darren New
Date: 10 Jan 2011 17:21:25
Message: <4d2b8665@news.povray.org>
Warp wrote:
>   If this is so, it goes against the notion that basically *everything* in
> this universe is quantized.

Actually, what happens is this:

You calculate the probabilities, summing in smaller and smaller and smaller 
probabilities of something happening. Now if you do the math all the way 
down to zero probability, you find out the sum blows up to infinity. But as 
long as you stop somewhere *before* you go all the way down to zero, you get 
an answer proportional to where you stopped.  Proving that it didn't matter 
where you stopped as long as you didn't go all the way down to zero was what 
Feynman won the Nobel prize for. It's called "renormalization."

Basically, if you add the sequence of terms together, it (more or less, 
depending on the particles involved) rapidly converges on the answer. If you 
take the limit, tho, it diverges.  Weird.

So, mathematically, yeah, the probability itself seems like it's quantized, 
at least as far as I understand it.  The math that matches to 15 decimal 
places behaves as if there's a lower bound of "epsilon", but that isn't zero.

It has been too long since I read about it to remember the details, tho, so 
this might all be incorrect.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."


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