Obviously the word can be used in various ways. — Mongrel
But then as I hold the ball, I tell you I'm never going to drop it. What is the potential? — Mongrel
In some respects, potential merely indicates a lack of knowledge. For with all knowledge, one might know exactly what will or won't happen, so the concept of potential becomes irrelevant. — Kenshin
There is no potential, despite what we imagine — TimeLine
Potentiality is physical, as opposed to merely logical, possibility, then? — John
f it's true that I'm never going to drop the ball, what is the resistance? — Mongrel
I want to say there is some connection to causal dispositions of things that is important here. Something could be potential if there is a disposition that is waiting to "react" as soon as the conditions present themselves. — darthbarracuda
But I don't think we can really make any sharp distinction between potentiality and non-potential possibility. It seems like anything with potential is logically possible, and from there we just see which ones have a greater likelihood of happening. — darthbarracuda
I think that's why potentiality is the most valuable thing. It's better than possibility because it actually has a chance of happening, and it's better than actuality because it hasn't started to decay or disappoint. It's pure anticipation. — darthbarracuda
[A] founder of quantum theory, Werner Heisenberg, stated that a quantum object is "something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality." Heisenberg called this "potentia," a concept originally introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. It turns out that if we apply Heisenberg's insight to an intriguing interpretation of quantum theory called the transactional interpretation (TI), we gain a unified understanding of all three paradoxical aspects of quantum theory.
TI was originally proposed by John G. Cramer, professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Its key feature is that the process of absorption of a quantum state is just as important as the process of emission of a quantum state. This symmetry is nicely consistent with relativistic quantum theory, in which quantum states are both created and destroyed. But it comes with a counterintuitive feature: The absorption (or destruction) process involves quantum states with negative energy. For this reason, TI has generally been neglected by the mainstream physics community.
However, it turns out that if you include this "response of the absorber," you get a solution to the so-called "measurement problem" — the problem of Schrödinger's Cat. A clear physical account can be given for why the cat does not end up in a "fuzzy" superposition of alive and dead. We even get a natural explanation for the rule used to calculate the probabilities of measurement outcomes (the so-called "Born Rule" after its inventor, Max Born).
In TI, the "collapse of the quantum state" is called a transaction, because it involves an "offer" from the emitter and a "confirmation" from the absorber, much like the negotiation in a financial transaction. When these occur, we get a "measurement," and that allows us to define what a measurement is — and explains why we never see things like cats in quantum superpositions. But, in the new development of TI, the offers and confirmations are only possibilities — they are outside the realm of ordinary space-time. In fact, it is the transactional processes that creates space-time events: "Collapse" is the crystallizing of the possibilities of the quantum realm into the concrete actualities of the space-time realm. So, collapse is not something that happens anywhere in space-time. It is the creation of space-time itself.
You can't physically speculate about alternative worlds in a fashion that exceeds the Planck limits on energy density. A brain or computer eventually will cram so much effort into a region of spacetime that it will collapse under its own gravitational force to become a black hole. — apokrisis
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