Magic is real

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Lately I've been thinking about quantum particles I've been thinking about how they can appear, dissapear, and be in two places at once. That sounds like magic to me, objects disappearing and reappearing. Also, some quantum physicists think that a quantum particle can affect another quantum particle a long ways away, like a voodoo doll. Is this a mystery that science has yet to solve or is this magic?

Imagine if we could extract the magical power of quantum particles. We could make the natonal debt disappear! We could make any weapon we need appear in multiple places at once! What is North Korea going to do if they start using magic before us?

While quantum particles have odd behaviors, that alone isn't enough to make "real" objects go away. Everything you see and touch will normally remain stable as you see and experience them.

On the other hand this HAS happened to me almost every single time: When I do my own laundry, I'll typically (obsessively) count the PAIRS of sock I put in the wash, which means there is an even number of socks going in. When I empty the wash, my clothes go straight into the dryer, nothing gets dropped in between. When the dryer stops, I take them out, put them into a basket, and put my clothes away. So when I get to my socks, I pair them back up again in balls. EVERY SINGLE TIME there is an odd sock, one less than what went in. The sock is nowhere to be found.

This happens frequently, but every now and then I'll find "extra" socks, for example in a suitcase that I haven't unpacked from a weekend trip, a dirty clothes hamper that I've overlooked, under the bed, and so on. So somehow the number of socks in my possession doesn't seem to be radically decreasing as you'd expect from the washer/dryer "eating" them. So if I have a fairly regular supply of socks, and if one sock is always disappearing between washer/dryer, WHERE DO THEY GO?

Is there a relationship between charge or some other quantum dimensional property of socks not shared with other clothes? Or is the dryer some portal to Hell, a sort of wormhole or black hole and the suitcase, clothes hamper, space underneath the bed its opposite?

Well my laundry sometimes ends up in an entangled state but...

um, particles don't magically appear and disappear.

the basic founcation of quantum theory is that everything has wave and particle properties, which is why you have the photoelectric effect (light acting like a particle), and diffracted electrons (electrons acting like waves).

because particles act like waves, you have the uncertainty principle, which is if you measure time more accurately, the accuracy of energy measurement gets less, and also momentum with distance. so for a radioactive atom with a very short half life, the mass can not be measured very accurately.

from this, you also get the Schrödinger equation, which you can use to calculate the probability that you can find a particle within a particular area, which is different to particles appearing/disappearing, which doesn't happen.

I haven't seen What the [bleep] Do We Know?, but I wouldn't believe anything in it, kind of like The Secret, which is just nonsense.

All it would take to make national debts disappear is agreement from the parties involved - there's never been the slightest shred of reality in money.

Magic, though, is harder.

can't remember who said it, but:

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic