Comment by colechristensen

Comment by colechristensen 9 hours ago

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You're thinking about the atom very classically, At the scale of the nucleus things just don't "exist" in "places". Processes are truly random and things literally don't have position/momentum/rotation/alignment until you do the thing that requires them to decide where they were and what they were doing at the time.

Simpler than nuclear physics is just the electron. There is no meaningful answer to where it is around an atom at any particular time. You can either get a location or a momentum or half the information about each if you poke it, but that's just its response to being poked, it wasn't "actually" there until you poked it.

fooker 4 hours ago

> Processes are truly random

You can get a Nobel prize or two by proving this.

We don't know about random yet, just that there's no hidden variable.

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im3w1l 9 hours ago

From what I recall, quantum things have well defined states, even if those states may not correspond to position / momentum / rotation / alignment.

By correctly molding the energy landscape it may be possible to set the states and state transitions up in a beneficial way for what he proposed.

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  • colechristensen 7 hours ago

    Eh, not really. You can futz with the probability distribution, like a fast neutron will cause a different distribution of fission products than a slow one... but it is still a very random process. You can't control it like an expert at a billiards table. Especially the strong force mediated interactions between particles in the nucleus. Some people just won't believe you though.

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