So today, in the computer activity, we were, as promised, covering quantum computing. And, at the end, somebody asked if entanglement was the same as the butterfly effect.
And I had to explain that no, quantum theory was completely different from chaos theory. Even though there seem to be some similarities, chaos theory was about non obvious but pre-existing patterns and structures in phenomena. While this allowed influences apparently at a distance, there was no direct connection. Entanglement had to do with an actual connection.
Our society has created a population of people who, because they know some terms, without ever understanding the concepts behind them, think that they actually understand the extremely complicated phenomena behind the jargon. I know that the psycholinguistics people say that you can't understand a concept unless you have a term, but I don't think the the reverse, that simply knowing a term allows you to understand the concept, is true.
My next worry -- entangled butterflies gaslighting us into singularities.
ReplyDelete