The explanation is that there seems to be a mathematical parallel between some wave equation used in quantum physics and the wave equation used in studying weather patterns.
While it is correct, this oversimplifies the point.
The finding was that certain wheather patterns can be modelled better than before by using a quantum physics equation. To further the point: The model of this quantum physics equation is also useful for quantum computers built with superconducting materials.
Underlying is the question though, why does this equation apply to the earths wheather?
There seem to be parallels in the quantum and "macro" model, like windings of electron and wheather currents. Maybe the right view to modeling the earth is about dynamics as much as it is about topoligical phenomenons. After all, topology is used for solving gravitational problems, too.
Then why can the earth can be treated as a topoligical insulator and what implications does this have? Can we learn something from it that can be applied to other wheather phenomenons? Or maybe even to the earths core?
The finding was that certain wheather patterns can be modelled better than before by using a quantum physics equation.
I think this is the wrong way of looking at this, quantum physics does not really have anything to do with this. Both systems, the oceans and topological insulators, share some of their structure and dynamics which means that the same mathematical models can be used to describe some aspects of both systems.
Large groups of people or animals can, to a certain extend, be described with fluid dynamics equations as they have some common structure, i.e. being composed of many particles interacting with each other locally. But the link is not from fluids to groups of people or the other way around, the link is a similar structure underlying both systems which makes mathematical models transferable between the two.
That’s a whole lot of fancy words. The core is that they used a fancy wave equation. In that context, the topological insulator is an inspiration rather than an exact and accurate model.
It’s similar to the layman view of an atom as a miniature solar system. There are some similarities, but also very significant differences and not all knowledge is transferable from one to the other.
It is not particularly surprising that we would find new solutions to Navier-Stokes equation applied at the level of a whole planet, these things are very complex and far from completely understood.
> Then why can the earth can be treated as a topoligical insulator and what implications does this have?
That’s jumping to conclusions a bit. Again, they have found similarities in atmospheric flows and magnetic currents in topological insulators. It does not mean that the Earth is one, or that all properties of topological insulators also applies to the Earth.
> Or maybe even to the earths core?
There is bound to be some similarities, as with any fluid flow (assuming we’re not talking about the solid inner core). There are also significant differences in things like viscosity, compressibility, etc. So yeah, that’s a possibility, but as in the atmosphere, that would not make the outer core a particularly quantum object.
> why can the earth can be treated as a topoligical insulator
I am missing something here. Topology is a field of mathematics that studies the properties of objects that do not change under continuous deformations. So before asking why can Earth be treated as a topological something - one should specify what topology he is looking at, that is what continuous deformations of Earth he is talking about.
So - what continuous deformations of Earth are you talking about?
That’s a culture difference issue. A topological insulator is a kind of material with specific properties (heavily simplified, that its inside is an electric insulator and its surface is an electric conductor). That’s where the topological aspect comes from. It has nothing to do with topology in mathematics except the name.
based on the article, they are representing weather patterns on earths surface as a topological insulator. I don't know which class of insulator, but the catagorization of all topological insulators have equivalent classifying spaces of Hamiltonians. Which give you the invariants that you are asking about for deformations of H1 to H2.
That makes sense to me, but - neither H1 nor H2 is Earth, they are Hamiltonian spaces. And the statement that puzzles me is: “the Earth can be treated as a topological insulator”.
When you put it that way, the "magic" disappears. Isn't this what category theory seeks? Relationship between distant/different mathematical structures? Whether this equation belongs to the same class with another even though they explain different physics?
Just because two phenomena are described by similar equations doesn't mean they are driven by the same physical mechanism. Wave equations are ubiquitous in physics. Sound waves. Water waves. There is no connection between any of these and QM.
First order differential equations generally govern diffusion where energy spreads out over an area. Second order are often waves where energy propagates but does not diffuse.
Is pretty much everything described by those two classes?
Any third-order differential equations in physics?
If phenomena are described by similar equations, it does mean that there’s something in common between them. For example the equations :). The equations are a system of constraints. Means both systems are constrained in the same way. And we cannot simply hand wave this away and say it’s just a coincidence. A system of coincidences. We need to at least try to figure out why is that, before we dismiss it so haphazardly.
> We need to at least try to figure out why is that, before we dismiss it so haphazardly.
No, we don't. There is enough misinformation and woo surrounding QM already. There is absolutely no reason to entertain the notion that there is some deep connection between QM and any macroscopic phenomenon simply because both inolve a wave equation. That's just stupid.
I'm not sure you understand how the scientific method works, but "ignore new applications of existing models, even if they have high predictive quality, because it causes woo" is not among the rules it sets.
In fact such attitudes tend to hold back science for an entire generation, until all those stubbornly persistent in ignoring the obvious start passing away.
It's too easy to misinterpret it and think that the Quantum Physicists used Quantum Mechanics at the whole Earths. They actually used some mathematical tools first discovered to solve QM problems and repurposed them to solve climate patterns.
That confused the person that made the comment at the top of this thread.
Let's go back to the original comment that started this thread:
> Aren't quantum effects supposed to disappear in the macroscopic world? How is this explained?
The answer to this question is: yes, quantum effects generally disappear in the macroscopic world. There are some exceptions, like rainbows and transistors, but in general macroscopic phenomena can be completely explained by classical approximations to QM, notwithstanding that they are in fact quantum systems "under the hood". To be technically precise, in macroscopic phenomena, and in particular in thermalized systems (like the planet's climate) decoherence causes all of the interesting effects of QM (and specifically all of the non-local effects) to become unmeasurably small. In thermalized macroscopic systems, the classical approximation is 100% in agreement with observation, and so any suggestion that because some of the math of QM is applicable to climate that there might be a new physical phenomenon waiting to be discovered and that this phenomenon has something to do with quantum mechanics can be dismissed out of hand. Supporting such a claim would require a lot more than just some similar-looking equations.
But I didn't feel like getting quite so long-winded about it.
> There is enough misinformation and woo surrounding QM already. There is absolutely no reason to entertain the notion that there is some deep connection between QM and any macroscopic phenomenon simply because both involve a wave equation.
I'm with you here.
Lot of ground for certain people to pick the sentence and use it out of context to augment their systematic bullshit.
Would you suppress actual scientific discovery if it happens to be similar to some "woo" a scammer used in his cult? Is this how you weigh things... better to ignore truth than admit some fake science has merit, even if by accident?
This is not a description of the scientific process, but a description of tribalism, polarization and confirmation bias. People who prefer their team to end up right (or even worse, their goal is for the other team to end up wrong regardless of merit) by bending reality to fit their view, rather than bend themselves to perceive reality as it is, end up wrong.
Things tend to fall into patterns in physics, chemistry, ecosystems, societies, information technology. If they didn't, math would be useless, as it's the abstract description of such patterns and the quantitative relationships of measurable variables within them.
And these patterns will be constantly rediscovered, often by different people, under different names, with different levels of sophistication, and many of those people won't have the best of intentions or wisdom how to use what they found, or guessed about. We can't simply reject every concept, simpy because someone we don't like happens to subscribe to it. This is an outright childish way of looking at the world.
Well, that would be a terrible outcome, but fortunately, it is all predicated on a misunderstanding in your first post: "The equations are a system of constraints. Means both systems are constrained in the same way." There's an isomorphism, that's all, and it's not an unexplained mystery to those who have sufficient relevant knowledge. It's pretty clear in the article, where the word 'analogy' appears more than once.
I realized I asked a similar question but then let's put it another way: would it be problematic if in reverse, some quantic phenomenons were found to be described well by Newtonian equations ?
This wouldn't be "problematic", it's just extremely unlikely to happen. The math of QM is fully understood. No experiment in over 50 years has produced results incompatible with QM. (This has produced a major crisis in physics.) Some aspects of the math of QM -- the ones that produce the "quantum weirdness" that gets everyone's attention -- are fundamentally incompatible with the math of classical mechanics. CM is local, QM is non-local. Locality is intuitive, non-locality is not. So the odds of discovering something fundamentally new in QM at all, let alone something that can be described by the math of CM, are indistinguishable from zero.
There are some aspects of our day-to-day lives that are governed by QM, like rainbows and transistors. But not weather or climate. Those are purely classical phenomena.
It’s more that wave functions are ubiquitous in all areas of physics. It generally falls out of the fact that we can model tons of stuff with second order differential equations, which often result in models that have oscillator/wave-like behaviors
You are mixing up two different (but related) terms. The wave equation is a second-order partial differential equation which has some solutions in the form of waves. A QM wave function is a particular case of a wave equation, yielding a probability amplitude.
One significant application of the wave equation in pre-quantum physics occurred when Maxwell was able to derive, from the electromagnetic theory he was developing, a wave equation having solutions in which electromagnetic waves propagate at the speed of light.
This is a big beef I have with a lot of STEM types, especially in IT
Math should never be taken a concrete thing. It’s a guide to understanding such things. A map.
Truth in the physical world is determined by experiment. That’s physics.
Too many in IT and engineering seem to think making purpose built counting machine count is experimental verification.
We can’t iterate on rockets forever; not enough stuff. Yet so many smart people just scoff at the idea.
Unscientific mind viruses about reality for us being endless permeate society. Even as religion fades, paranoia at the real nature of reality, anxiety over it, has latched on to the biology religion accidentally stumbled upon.
Not an explanation but the scientist who recognized the analogy of the quantum effect was also a physicist, seeing the parallel between particle movement and the fluid flow along the earth.Then another physicist was able to tweak Maxwell-Chern-Simons equations describing quantum particle movement and show they also applied to fluid flow topologies. It's not explained at all why this is so.
Quantum effects certainly do not disappear at macro scale. Everything at every scale aside from gravity is directly explained by quantum effects. The reason you don't see many weird things except in certain circumstances is related to 1. decoherence and 2. the wavelength that matter has.
But everything is quantum even if you don't see weirdness. Certainty of probability and other "non-quantum" effects still fall within QM.
For examples of macro scale quantum effects, see e.g. the Casimir effect and the HBT experiment aka photon bunching.
There are many of them and scale doesn't really enter into it whatsoever. The key factor that underlies your question mainly is entanglement.
Would a knowledgeable person be able to explain the following to a rookie: if the quantum physics equation describe a reality (or "phenomenons") which cannot be comprehended in the non-quantic reality (ie. classical physics), how can there be common patterns in both realities where equations from one realm would somehow still match patterns in the other realm ?
Some problems need all que quirks of quantum mechanics, but other can be simplified and you get a simplified equation.
For example the electrons moving inside a very pure and very cold conductor are weird but if you have a normal conductor at room temperature, you can use the usual equation V=I*R to calculate the current. The simplified equation V=I*R is not 100% exact, probably only 99.99999999999% so everyone use it.
The same equation can be used to calculate flux of water inside tubes, when the speed of the water is low. You must replace the voltage V with the pressure P, and other similar replacements. When the speed is high, you get more complicated equations, but in some cases the simplified equation is good enough.
The idea is that in some conditions, both system can be approximated with a simplified equation, in spite under the hood they are very different.
The El Nino pattern is not an oscillation... it is a fluctuation. Nobody has ever been able to predict the next El Nino based on the historical record. That's typical of fluctuations driven by non-linear phenomena. These are systems that display sensitive depenence to initial condition. Even a trivial research effort should have revealed this. Go read Edward Lorenz 1995 Essence of Chaos.
This is really embarrassingly ignorant and incorrect. Classic case of experts in one field having no idea of what's been going on in another field for decades and so making fools of themselves.
But if the new theory is able to predict successful observations, then what was once fluctuations can now indeed be termed oscillations as the cause is characterized.
Being so hung up on the term is a bit strange considering that's precisely what the theory is setting forth to describe...
That is par for the course for this specific publication. I wish heir articles did not appear as often here; most of the time they do not really deserve more than an eye roll.
You're being downvoted for not liking Quanta, but if your original point was that Quanta is not a good reporter, you're right.
They frequently make subtle but impactful misinterpretations, or more outrageous redirections, such as the Quantum Gravity fiasco from earlier this year. To excuse that is to participate in Gell Man amnesia, in my view.
I didn't think it needed explaining. Every article from them is crap.
Like I did end up clicking TFA. It's just some rambling about how some math from QM also describes weather patterns. But the title is clearly bait to get you to think that the weather is somehow quantum.
I'm not a physicist, and I'm not a mathematician - I'm a computer engineer. I've studied physics, and I've studied math. I'm not terrible at it. I should be the target audience for Quanta - someone who isn't a professional but may be interested in new results. However, every time I read one of their articles, I feel dumber (and not in a good way). I can't imagine how someone who didn't go to college or didn't take the physics classes I took is possibly benefited by reading this. I think it could only serve to confuse them.
