Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Entangling butterflies?

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.

1 comment:

  1. My next worry -- entangled butterflies gaslighting us into singularities.

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