@DIRAC1930 I am a person and I did a phd on statmech-related stuff

I don't really have time to commit to 1:1 consulting but if you ask questions here I might have a look

I would appreciate it if someone could explain-to-OP/mediate/step-in/vote-to-reopen/vote-to-close here.

If the orthodox position, is the most dominant one in quantum mechanics, say that a particle before being found using experiment is to be found no where shortly before it, only forced to be there by the expirment, how does this correspond to the normalization of the schrödinger equation. where we conclude that the integral is equal to one, meaning the particle is to be found somewhere?

@Mad In non-realist interpretations (which the Copenhagen folklore is), the probability density is the probability to find the particle at a particular place if you measure it

if you don't do a measurement, the probability doesn't really mean anything (except represent the quantum state)

I see.

it's less "the particle is nowhere" and more "it doesn't mean anything to talk about the position of a particle if you don't measure position"

But did not John Bell show that it makes a difference if the particle is actually no where ?

Griffiths notes on the orthodox idea of "it does not make meaning to talk about it since a meassurement is needed" that John Bell showed in 1964 that there is an observable difference if the particle was actually no where, thus excluding this ideology as a valid interpretation

I talk about the actual implications of Bell's theorem e.g. at philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/75662/28574 and physics.stackexchange.com/a/566641/50583

Oh God those are some long posts. Alright i will check them out.

While i read those, i have a simpler question:

@Mad This is Schrödinger picture. Time evolution is encoded into the state $\Psi$.

Observables do not evolve in Schrödinger picture

I did not know that, thank you

If your reference is Griffiths, check chapter 6, section 6.8.1 to know more

(3rd edition)

chat.stackexchange.com/messages/61787172/history

A kind soul helped me :)

@Mad $x$ there is just the integration variable

Hello there human beings

In Manhattan the cost of living is pretty high so therefore wages are higher too but I just read in places like Oklahoma wages are high and yet the cost of living is low, how does that work?

@ACuriousMind :3

what does "the wages are high" mean?

Are you talking about the average wage? Are you comparing the wages of specific equivalent job positions? Something else?

Let's say rent in Manhattan is $5k a month and the average wage is $70k a year, in Oklahoma the average wage is $70k a year and yet the average rent is like $1k

(example numbers)

average wage is greatly affected by the average type of work in an area - unless you know that the two places you're comparing have similar proportions of typically low- and high-paying jobs, the average wage doesn't tell you anything, really

(also, using dollar signs in a chat where people have MathJax active isn't the best idea :P)

The fact that average rent in Oklahoma is 1k USD vs 5k in Manhattan doesn't mean that Oklahoma people live in smaller/shittier homes right?

It just means there's less demand for the housing there so prices are driven lower?

My initial confusion was - if people in Oklahoma make the same wages as people in Manhattan, why is rent so low in Oklahoma?

I think I'm being rather dumb rn

I can think it thru but at the same time I can't XD

In my mind higher wages lead to higher rent, which I guess is pretty incorrect

btw it's absolutely not true that wages are the same, there's almost a factor 2 in median household income between manhattan an oklahoma

@JingleBells rent is mostly driven by demand (and gentrification) - the rent is high in places where a lot of people want to live

Alright got it, I got another question - during an economic recession or a depression all the resources, people, and organization are there, can't the money numbers be "reset" somehow so everything functions how it was before the economic downfall?

that sounds suspiciously like you want a centrally planned economy :P

Nop I want the government to hit a reset button so people can be back to producing stuff, I mean if inflation is just a numbers phenomenon, and not resources/people/orgnization phenomenon, what's the issue with getting it back to how it was?

Should be even easier to do now when 97% of the money is "digital"

Just tell the bank to restore the backup from 2 years ago

XDD

@ACuriousMind What do you think? :3 Am I a genius economistisic?

People will be mad that their bank balance randomly gets reset/changed in some way but it's kinda upsetting to see (in the case of the great depression and whatnot) people sitting and doing nothing/businesses failing, etc. because some numbers on a screen say so yk, all the resources and people are there and no one is producing stuff

The essential promise of a capitalist economy kinda is that the government doesn't randomly change your money :P

@ACuriousMind I don't care if it's capitalistic, communistic, left or right, I just think and try to arrive at what best aligns with my values

all I'm saying is that what you propose is just not a power most governments currently have

I know but I'm wondering if it's actually gonna work :P

Seems like it'll piss people off but will it get them to produce faster than otherwise?

and you can't really speculate about the effects because a system where this would be possible would be one with a very different idea of property rights

Yeah I'm not thinking about it realistically, just trying to figure out if resetting the money and stuff will get the economy back up

I mean, if you believe in determinism then resetting won't work because it will just go downhill again in the same way :P

there's presumably a reason your inflation/depression/whatever happened, and one would think that you'd need to address that reason

Did you watch "line goes up" ?

You guys kinda make me feel guilty, I find politics and economy inherently boring (well, non-math/physics stuff) and I can't really help but avoid that stuff

If not @JingleBells go to Wikipedia and read the punch line

sorry Feynman

@ACuriousMind Yeah I don't mean resetting exactly like a backup, more like setting the bank accounts to whatever will get people producing again because the whole assumption is that labor, resources, etc. is there

@Feynman_00 I understand the urge somewhat, but I just find humans almost as interesting as subatomic particles ;)

@JingleBells and what meaning does money in your fictional economy hold if it can just be centrally changed on a whim?

@ACuriousMind Interesting. The second sentence means you really understand what I mean

the reason money is powerful is because the state (implicitly by force!) guarantees both its status as legal tender and the property rights that allow people to hold onto it

Sometimes it's frustrating :P

@ACuriousMind Is it a big issue for people if they know that during a recession/depression the best thing to do for progress and production is to change the bank accounts? Obviously, it's a dumb idea but maybe there's some substance to it who knows

@JingleBells A fundamental part of the value of a currency on modern capital markets is other people's trust in its continued (and long-term) usefulness. A currency that can just vanish from your account because the government decided that it was "better for progress" will gather no trust.

@ACuriousMind Bet XDDD

I look at money as a tool for effective resource allocation toward what the collective subjective deems as valuable, and that ain't happening during a recession/depression

"collective subjective" I'm a genius.

since value is subjective I mean the average of all subjective values

Explain how you are going to separate money from politics.

@ACuriousMind Look at this XDDD - youtube.com/watch?v=AuqemytQ5QA&ab_channel=MattHudson

@JingleBells some would argue that never happens :P

@ACuriousMind That is fine

@ACuriousMind I mean it definitely doesn't happen if you have some bozo dictating what should get produced and what shouldn't but let's not get into that

you should not mistake my critiques of one system for advocacy of another - you're the one advocating "central recession planning" here, not me :P

He concludes the video arguing that the core of the upcoming Web3 movement is a "turf war" between the top 5% and 1% and the market is based on the pitch of 'buy in now and you can be the next tech millionaire',

@ACuriousMind :P

@ACuriousMind I'm curious tho, why do you think effective resources allocation (not perfect but overall) doesn't happen, or it never happens?

@JingleBells I already gave you a laundry list of examples when you last claimed that money represented "benefits for society"

@ACuriousMind What I claim is that value is subjective and to create it you have to ask the subjects about what they value, do we agree here?

(important to note that the subjective values change thru time, we no longer want DVDs for example but want other stuff, etc.)

@JingleBells Yes.

@ACuriousMind And are you in support of creating that subjective value?

I don't know what that question means

there are certainly things some people value which I would prefer were not produced

Alright but what about overall creating the value that the people want (with some exceptions as you said)? I'm trying to establish if we both want the majority of the subjective value demanded satisfied.

Yes, I want people to be happy.

we don't need to coat this in this clinical utilitarian-posturing language :P

@ACuriousMind wdym, is my language too formal and stuff?

I'm just taking it step by step so we reach the point of disagreement

What is "happiness?"

@user4539917 happiness is when you eat a burger.

That's fulfilling a hunger.

@ACuriousMind Alright so what do you think the best way would be to figure out what the subjective values are and then go on to create them?

@JingleBells I mean that I see no reason to talk in terms of a "majority of subjective value" instead of e.g. happiness or contentedness. It's not that it's "too formal", it's that it is already using the same "objective" language of finanical institutions that indeed think about people mostly in terms of (monetary) value

@JingleBells that's what democracy is for, no?

the whole idea of democratic institutions is to represent the will of the governed

Ideally, yes.

@ACuriousMind I'm not sure what happiness and contentedness are referring to exactly, by "subjective value", I simply mean whatever people want.

@ACuriousMind Oh I'm asking about the process, Earth has a bunch of resources (including humans) and the goal is to allocate those resources in such a way so that whatever people want is as satisfied as possible

@JingleBells sure, why not let that process be democratic? One human, one vote.

I'm not sure what democratic process means :P

lemme google I guess

...you don't know how voting works?

You're saying there's resources we need to decide what to do with

@ACuriousMind Nevermind I read a bit and remembered what a democracy is LOL

I'm mainly talking about converting the resources into goods and services that people want

on the democratic part, I agree

direct democracy with no proxy might be even better, who knows

the collective intelligence might learn thru time what to vote on and what not to

@JingleBells if you're trying to convince me that money is a good idea, you're wasting your time

I don't think we should stop using money

there's a large space between "abolish money" and "our current economy represents an efficient allocation of resources"

I never suggested to abolish money nor am I trying to convince you that money is a good idea :P

then I'm afraid I have no idea where this is going

My brain is working a bit slow rn

I don't think I know where this is going either XDD

Lemme think

Yeah so for efficient resource allocation to occur you need to know what efficient means right, so asking people what they value and then creating that is efficient to me, you agree?

@JingleBells yes (but again you're just describing how democracy works)

@ACuriousMind Me electing a representative will not transmit the information that I value vacuum cleaners for example, I'm talking about supply and demand of products and services

@JingleBells but then you're just arguing that you should be able to vote on whether or not vacuum cleaners are produced!

So you're saying that since democracy is supposedly not present, our current economy doesn't represent an efficient allocation of resources?

Efficient resource allocation is mainly not done thru political voting and election of representatives

@JingleBells I mean, currently I'm just pointing out that the problem you're describing (determination and realization of a collective will) is already solved by (ideal) democracy

you haven't yet really made an argument for why any of this would lead to the form of capitalism we see today

@ACuriousMind So the way people should tell that they want this tree turned into pencils (this is what I mean by resource allocation) is by electing representatives in a democracy?

I'm talking about prices, supply and demand, not electing representatives to make the law

@JingleBells If our only goal is to ensure that we best satisfy the will of the people, then yes, of course!

(or, well, you can also choose whatever non-representative forms of democracy you want)

I'm not really arguing that I want the world to work that way in all cases, but I am saying this would be the logical consequence of your argument so far

I highly doubt people will be okay with constantly being asked if they want this resource turned into this product

@JingleBells there's lots of votes in democracies where the people who aren't interested just don't vote

So your way to allocate resources toward the creation of things that people want would be to constantly ask people about all the billion types of products and whether they'll want them or not?

People vote on products thru prices, not by clicking yes or no on a screen 10000 times a day

@JingleBells how is it a vote if I may be too poor to pay the price anyway?

we generally condemn "democracies" of the past where only the rich, or only men, or only people of a specific ethnicity had votes that counted

@ACuriousMind We can get into that but I still don't know what you think the resource allocation system should be currently

What way if not thru prices?

@JingleBells Let me perhaps be less cryptic. I think there is something fundamental missing from your attempt to construct a justification of economy: A theory of labor. Resources don't get magically turned into product, it is the labor of actual humans that does that. The problem we have to solve is not that we have a cake and need to divide it, it's that we have to get someone to bake the cake

Labor is part of the resources that should be allocated effectively, labor is part of the cake

This may sound a bit wrong

What I'm trying to say is that people should also be allocated effectively

@ACuriousMind Before we continue tho - to figure out what resources people want turned into what product, are you in support or prices or something else?

In a labor-focused view, money, fundamentally, is not a representation of an ability to vote on what products you like. This is a side effect, but fundamentally it represents the value of labor performed - the things you can purchase with a day's wages are the expression of society's valuation of your work

@JingleBells I already told you I don't want to abolish money, so I am confused why you now ask me if I want to have prices.

Okay so if you want to have prices to figure out what people want then where do we disagree?

@JingleBells I already wrote it above - to me, money is not foremost a representation of "what people want"

But you do want to have it because there's nothing better currently?

the value of money is not that it "allows you to vote", it is that it represents the notion that you can, in exchange for labor performed, get stuff

there's nothing inherently efficient about this

your construction of the value of money as a "vote" effectively constructs the results of market forces as the inevitable result of the will of the people - it is democracy, just printed on paper or minted in metal

but there is nothing inherently just or democratic about the exchange token of labor (that, mind you, is property that can be accumulated while labor itself can't) - it is just a tool our economy runs on

Alright lemme ask a few question before we proceed :P

@ACuriousMind "In a labor-focused view, money, fundamentally, is not a representation of an ability to vote on what products you like." Do you mean that the wage someone has was not voted on by people in any way? I'm not sure what you mean here

@JingleBells unless you are being paid a law-mandated minimum wage in a democracy, no, I would not say that your wages are the result of voting in any sort of democratic sense

@ACuriousMind I agree and then you say that it's the value of the labor performed, and isn't that value determined by what price people are willing to pay for the product, what the supply and demand of the labor are, what the circumstances are, etc.?

@JingleBells primarily the value of my labor is what the person employing me is willing to pay for it

just to make things more complicated: there's no such thing as "what people want" per se

sure, the main problem with any system are that people are confusing and often confused ;)

@ACuriousMind Then why isn't your salary $1 a year?

@JingleBells I don't answer non-sequiturs

@ACuriousMind Well if your salary is primarily decided by the person employing you, if I was employing I might as well give you a $1 salary to increase my profit margin

@JingleBells sure, and then no one would work for you

what's your point

Supply and demand

can you phrase that as a coherent sentence that is recognizably an objection to anything I said? :P

@ACuriousMind Yeah, so I was just reading today how wages are determined and I still haven't formed an exact opinion on it, I guess it's a bit complicated, but generally, I wouldn't say that whatever your employer says is what primarily determines your salary, I think supply and demand plays the biggest role but it really depends on a lot of stuff

If I was hiring someone I'd generally just look at what other employers pay for such positions but I'm not sure how that number has formed exactly (many factors play into it is my best guess)

How did we even come to talk about that lol

@JingleBells The employer is the person who decides the salary - I don't understand how the existence of outside factors that influence their decision is a counterargument to that

@ACuriousMind Oh in that sense I agree

Whatever comes out of your employers mouth is what your salary is, I guess you can put it that way

and that "supply and demand" shape their decision doesn't mean there was a meaningful "vote" on how much I should earn

If I buy something in a shop, I'm not making any sort of statement about what I think the shop assistants should earn

I'm pretty sure most employers just look at what the average pay is for such positions, do you agree?

why does it matter?

@ACuriousMind It matters because if we're to determine why your salary is what it is, we have to look at how the average pay has formed

Because I assume most employers mainly just look at the average pay and go with that

Are we ending the discussion here? :3

I don't get what the point here is: If you think that there's been some sort of democratic vote on what my salary is, you should be able to explain to me how that works :P

@ACuriousMind Again, I was just reading today about how salaries are formed and I still haven't made an exact opinion, it's just that I doubt it's primarily whatever your employer decides on because if that was the case then your salary would be $1

I think you are confusing "X decides based on a reasonable (to them) argument" and "X decides completely arbitrarily without any logic"

I of course meant the former, not the latter

@ACuriousMind Sure but reasonable to them doesn't allow for a lot of movement, it's still based primarily on the average pay for that position, and I think that the average pay has been carved out through time by supply and demand by many companies and many employees

my point is that you do not have any sort of guarantee that that decision is directly connected to whatever expression of voting you think happens when people buy products (again: When I buy something in a shop, how am I making a statement about how much the people working there should earn?)

@ACuriousMind I agree, maybe to a degree the salary is determined by how much the company makes which is determined to a degree by how much the product is sold and at what price

But I'd still say that the main anchor for the salary is the average pay

so what?

what does the average pay have to do with your idea that this represents a collective and fair decision?

reminder for onlookers: If anyone is annoyed by this discussion, it's completely fair to request moving it to a different room

It's cool when the chat is active

@ACuriousMind I'm not sure what collective and fair decision mean :P. My main point is that salaries are primarily determined by supply and demand because most employers look at what the average pay is an anchor around that. From then on you can argue that the supply and demand in some way represents what the salary "should" be taking into account all sorts of factors

I'm talking about it generally and I'm not talking about a perfectly supply-and-demand-ed salary

so you decided that "what is" and "what should be" are the same. Here it looks like "one can argue"="my ideological position is that the market is right"

@fqq I never said that what the salary is is what the salary should be. I made a point that the salary is generally and primarily determined by the supply and demand of many companies and employees through time. What the salary should be is a separate point.

yeah, that. I never argued against supply and demand playing a (or even the definitive) role. It's the part where you decide that this should be what the salary is that I'm interested in

@ACuriousMind Well yeah honestly I'm not sure what the salary should be, the word "should" itself implies that there's some right way to do it, and "right" can mean different things to different people

...but you started this whole thing arguing that the market economy reflects the best satisfaction of all people's needs/votes/desires!

@ACuriousMind Where did I say that?

if that wasn't the point of that whole questioning, I'm entirely lost as to what your point is

Sure that's my point, that the current "prices" system most effectively allocates resources (including people) toward what people want than any other system we know of

You said some people say that the system never ends up delivering on what people want, so that what got me curious the most

@JingleBells I am confused how that meshes with your claim above that you're not sure whether this is the right way to do it

simultaneously believing "this is the most efficient way to do things" and "I don't know whether this is right" strikes me as a contradiction

(unless you want to point out that "efficient" and "right" don't need to be synonyms, but then why on earth are we trying to be "efficient" in the first place?)

@ACuriousMind It doesn't mesh, I was just saying how in my opinion salaries are determined

@ACuriousMind Ah you're asking me why I don't know how salaries should be determined?

How does the salary of someone even relate to whether resources are allocated efficiently or not?

@JingleBells oh no, I think you completely misunderstood what I was going for with that line: The problem isn't money or prices or "supply and demand" or whatever, the problem is e.g. the massive inequalties or the irrational desire for constant exponential growth that our current unregulated economy produces!

@ACuriousMind Well how was I supposed to extract that information from what you said :P

you might have asked what I meant before embarking on this apparently very irrelevant tangent :P

I was talking about creating stuff that people want, not massive inequalities or whatever

@JingleBells you brought up salaries when you were talking about efficient resource allocation!

@ACuriousMind Welp I enjoyed it a lot anyways

@JingleBells presumably most poor people don't want to be poor!

@ACuriousMind and I want to go to Mars

everyone wants everything

(not really but you get the idea, scarce resources, infinite wants)

we started talking about salaries when I brought up money as a representation of labor as opposed to being a representation of "voting"

Aight

yeah I was probably wrong and it arose a bit more organically in the discussion

@ACuriousMind In all cases I really really enjoyed this discussion, the fact that it challenged me and opened my eyes to other opinions, views, and ideas

@JingleBells See, but in order for that to be a correct reply, you would have to show that there's really no way to do better

@ACuriousMind What correct reply, I was just saying that there are scarce resources and infinite wants

yes, and then you want to imply that unfettered capitalism is the most efficient allocation of scarce resources, yes?

the only way "but stuff is scarce" makes sense as a reply to my "people don't want to be poor" is if you genuinely believe there is no possible way to have less poor people - otherwise the current system clearly doesn't most efficiently satisfy the needs of poor people.

@ACuriousMind Which poor people?

Poor because of what?

why does it matter?

Well some people can be poor cuz of a war or something donno

I guess most people are poor because they don't produce correct?

...and that makes their needs and wants somehow less worthy of being satisfied than those of others?

@ACuriousMind No, why would you put that in my mouth, it means that capitalism probably won't solve their problems

@JingleBells but I thought it was about the most efficient allocation of resources!

Btw I'm not sure about all the things that fall under the umbrella of capitalism, I'm mainly arguing for free markets and open trade

why doesn't it efficiently allocate resources to help war survivors

@ACuriousMind not when you have a war

@JingleBells by the way, it's not correct, many people are poor despite working full time

@fqq I said production not working time

@JingleBells okay, no war in this fantasy world in which we live

what does whether or not people "produce" have to do with whether or not their needs should be satisfied?

@ACuriousMind because you don't have peace and you don't have free trade and free markets

you have guns and death

well probably no guns :P

if you're poor

What are we discussing now?

still your strange claim that scarcity somehow implies we have to have poor people

poor people are just people that don't produce

@JingleBells it's still not true, people working full time as nurses/carers or teachers easily go below the poverty line in some rich western countries

@JingleBells Even if that ridiculous statement were true, what does that have to do with anything? How did we get from "we want to most efficiently allocate resources to satisfy the most people" to "people who aren't producing should not get their needs satisfied"

@ACuriousMind what is ridiculous about "poor people are poor because they don't make stuff" (again I'm talking about Africa, India, etc.)

...what

you said my statement is ridiculous

and your response to that is that you think "Africa" is poor because the people there aren't producing anything???

I don't even know where to begin with that statement

well if they're making stuff where does the stuff go?

maybe look up "colonialism"

can you explain real quick please, is it kinda like a dictatorship?

is some dictator eating their stuff?

Alright I'mma go eat dinner, @ACuriousMind I'm really enjoying our debates and discussions here, thanks for having them with me, it's opening my eyes to so much and it gets me to question my views so it's pretty great

@ACuriousMind I'm back, do you wanna discuss more?

@JingleBells personal offence taken >_<

@MoreAnonymous I'm sorry then, I was just referring to those countries due to the amount of poor people there

So Griffiths writes products for the schrödinger equation, and then he divdes by them at some point, how does he know, these functions are not Zero at some point?

he doesn't

How can one divide by something that can be zero.

one can't

Thus?

so whatever he's doing holds only at places where $\psi$ is not zero

I'm not sure what sort of answer you're looking for here :P

mhm...

@ACuriousMind Did I offend you in some way during our discussion?

@JingleBells Yes (although people who actually are from post-colonial countries arguably have more reason to be offended). Did it, at any point in time, ever cross your mind to type the question "why is Africa so poor?" into a search engine before making such a breathtakingly ignorant judgement of billions of people?

@ACuriousMind I think you misunderstood what I meant. I did not mean that they can just start producing stuff, like yay it's so easy and they're just lazy - that's obviously super ignorant. I'm aware of the horrible situation African people are in.

@ACuriousMind If African people are to produce stuff and they get to consume that stuff afterward, in a free market with trade, shouldn't there be growth and less poverty? (that's all I meant by what I said above) I'm aware of the horrible factors that prevent that from happening currently and obviously, there's a lot of stuff to be done before they're even able to freely start producing and trading.

I'm sorry if I've offended you or any other person in this chat room by what I said above, I was never making any judgment of African people, I never said that they're able to produce.

does anyone know of a website or resource which shows what textbooks different universities (internationally) use for their physics courses?

I don't see why someone would maintain such a resource, it would be a lot of work - There are tens of thousands of universities in the world, with potentially tens of physics courses each potentially changing lecturer/books each year

also some countries/universities don't make the information publicly available

i think it'd be an interesting thing to see if it existed :). but i see what you mean--i wish syllabi and such were more publically available. hard to get syllabi for some courses from my own school

When I love the course I'm taking I keep reading the syllabus over and over lol

xD

unrelated, but do we use the modified bessel function set of solutions to solve laplace's equation in cylindrical coordinates to have a periodic Z(z) solution? Where Z(z) is the Z part of the separable solution for potential.

when we want a periodic Z(z)** sorry