One quantum mechanics homework problem I was assigned in grad school was to determine how long it would take a perfectly balanced perfectly sharp ice pick to fall over just from quantum uncertainty driving it off balance. There was no specific ‘correct’ answer, and the answers we came up with were in the range 5-15 seconds.
Neurons are much much smaller, and will lose their coherence on a much shorter timescale.
That said, that doesn’t at all mean that coin flips are quantum random. If all of those decoherent branches end up as heads, well, it’s going to be heads. That has a lot more to do with the non-quantum aspects of the system—the dependency graph—than the quantum part that underlies it.
Certainly you’re not going to get any coherent interference between heads and tails.
That said, that doesn’t at all mean that coin flips are quantum random. If all of those decoherent branches end up as heads, well, it’s going to be heads.
Yes, and taking this train of thought further, you realize that a clear distinction cannot be made; it’s a continuum.
Everything in the Universe is ‘quantum random’, to some extent. Even a perfectly predictable pseudo-random number generator on a computer that always outputs the same sequence of numbers with the same seed. This is because there is a non-zero probability of quantum fluctuations spontaneously causing some of the bits in the generator to flip, creating an unexpected sequence. Of course, computers have multiple mechanisms for preventing this sort of thing (error correction, etc.) but there is a non-zero probability that the bits will flip in precisely the right pattern to evade those mechanisms. The fact that this usually doesn’t happen is just one possibility among a sea of possibilities, albeit by far the most likely one. By using a pseudorandom number generator, you are accepting a small (very small) amount of non-deterministic randomness.
One quantum mechanics homework problem I was assigned in grad school was to determine how long it would take a perfectly balanced perfectly sharp ice pick to fall over just from quantum uncertainty driving it off balance. There was no specific ‘correct’ answer, and the answers we came up with were in the range 5-15 seconds.
Neurons are much much smaller, and will lose their coherence on a much shorter timescale.
That said, that doesn’t at all mean that coin flips are quantum random. If all of those decoherent branches end up as heads, well, it’s going to be heads. That has a lot more to do with the non-quantum aspects of the system—the dependency graph—than the quantum part that underlies it.
Certainly you’re not going to get any coherent interference between heads and tails.
Yes, and taking this train of thought further, you realize that a clear distinction cannot be made; it’s a continuum.
Everything in the Universe is ‘quantum random’, to some extent. Even a perfectly predictable pseudo-random number generator on a computer that always outputs the same sequence of numbers with the same seed. This is because there is a non-zero probability of quantum fluctuations spontaneously causing some of the bits in the generator to flip, creating an unexpected sequence. Of course, computers have multiple mechanisms for preventing this sort of thing (error correction, etc.) but there is a non-zero probability that the bits will flip in precisely the right pattern to evade those mechanisms. The fact that this usually doesn’t happen is just one possibility among a sea of possibilities, albeit by far the most likely one. By using a pseudorandom number generator, you are accepting a small (very small) amount of non-deterministic randomness.