Does True Randomness Actually Exist?

Nah.  I'm done trying.  Life has too many pleasures to waste any more time with you.  Be sure to mention, as I leave, that I couldn't answer your simplistic questions.  That's another method of your madness.

Many modern CPUs have a source of genuine randomness built into the design!

This is normally used for seeding a high quality random number generator, but it can be used "raw" as well (the only disadvantage is slowness - but when I read that it uses "thermal noise within the silicon to output a random stream of bits at the rate of 3 GHz" it doesn't sound that slow!).

Source of quote: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/guide/intel-digital-random-number-generator-drng-software-implementation-guide.html

thank you, its just too awesome man!  I guess there is so much we simply don't know as yet

Fester - believe it or not, I often think "Does it really even matter?" 

Elroch - Okay. Please help me out here since you are the author of this thread.

Hypothetically - what would be most significant if.....

Randomness exists. What does that prove?

Randomness doesn't exist. What does that prove? 

Okay. So what is the point of this thread? 

To randomly pass the time 

The universe doesn't 'do' anything based on what humans need to understand about it.  Your comments seem to all point towards a need for logic in the universe.  Why?  Humans, life, earth, the sun, our entire galaxy are less than a nit in the universe.  What we suppose or deny or need to know about any of it makes no difference to the universe.  It is what it is and will do what it does whether we think it fits some math we've invented or not.  To suppose any different is beyond ludicrous.

It only takes imagination, not a creator, to understand determinism is possible.  There is no way we can come close to understanding let alone proving what makes the universe what it is. Any claim that it must be random is just a guess.

Scientists aren't very good at naming things... as far as I know "collapse" isn't used anywhere else other than quantum mechanics. It just means the moment when the quantum state becomes one thing or another. Before that is pretty interesting... because basically the universe itself doesn't know whether the property is one thing or another, not until a measurement is made.

A simple way to imagine it might be to imagine someone shaking a pair of dice in their hands. The dice aren't anything yet. After you roll them they'll show a number. There are different probabilities for different numbers (7 is the most likely if the two die are 6 sided) but they aren't anything until after you roll them.

Not understanding this is fine since no one understands it, and in fact the need for an observer or measurement has lead many to say that QM is fundamentally flawed, and that hopefully in the future we'll come up with something better.

noodles: “Elroch - Okay. Please help me out here since you are the author of this thread.”

hi noodles ; )

elroch is not the author of this thread, he merely plagiarized it sort of speak. you see, he and opti trolled the original TR thread to death. literally. and after some 3 yrs of doing so, they both got blocked, and the thread was announced closed. shame, but it is what is, am not going to guess about their motives. but i will try to give you a short run down.. 

in the spirit of the original thread, true randomness was defined something like..

“True-randomness is the type of randomness that is not produced by a deterministic process.” 

they on the other hand, were trying to define true randomness in terms of predictability. now you would think that this is a matter of nuances ,but is not. you know why? because QM tells us so. you see, according to QM we will never be able to make 100% accurate predictions, and probability is the most accurate we can ever be. (regardless if our universe happens to be deterministic or not, which is certainly an open question in QM philosophy, and solely depends on one’s personal flavor of interpretation.) more so.. it is almost certain that our U is in fact none local (QM sort of speak) and as far i know there’s only 3 or 4 active physicists that spend/waste their time working on a localist U). so if you reduce TR to be pseudo randomness, (as opti and elroch do) we can be almost certain it exist, but it’s completely not inline with true randomness as “defined” in the real thread.

personally? i gave up on arguing with them a long time ago. for similar reason that i never ever argued with you. not even in the happy days of itude free speech club. and i don’t intend to do so in the future..

you can call this a moment of weakness ; )

Electrons are leptons while photons are bosons... so no, they aren't the same You're probably thinking of the photoelectric effect where each photon "knocks loose" one electron. In this way photons behave like particles.

But yeah, most other times, AFAIK, it's more practical to think of them as EM waves.

But there's nothing subjective about this. Very fundamental equations explicitly describe the behavior (Maxwell's equations and the Planck-Einstein relation).

There was no trolling, and the OP was a moron who hasn't logged in once since.

Speaking of random it's interesting how many members are here for so much longer than their (our) profiles admit to.  Someday I might create a coming out thread where we all post our original names.  Not all the variants just the first.

This is surely one of the most intuitively difficult topics in physics.

Some points may help.

Firstly, wave function collapse is not a physical phenomenon. There are interpretations of quantum mechanics where there is a wavefunction and it collapses. There are other interpretations where there is a (different) wavefunction and it does not collapse. And there are interpretations without a wave function. All of these interpretation make exactly the same predictions (about what can be observed).

That brings us to the second point: the wave function is a part of a model, not itself a real phenomenon. It is a construct that allows you to get the right predictions about what is observed. That doesn't mean that it is real itself.  You could think of it perhaps like someone using a complex current and voltage to do electrical calculations. It doesn't mean that you can have a current of 5*i amps.

I like to think of the wave function as a state of belief. It's like we don't know where something is, but have a probability distribution. When we do find out where it is, the probability distribution collapses. The wave function is a bit more complicated than that - it has complex numbers rather than real probability densities (and wave functions can be even more complicated) but that gets the intuition most of the way.

Ehh... I'm not sure about the electric comparison. For example "imaginary" power is an actual thing, it's the power stored in the E and H fields. Sure you can't have an imaginary current, but since magnetic field is amp per meter you essentially do have that, it's just instead of the current being used to power a device, it's the "current" in the field.

Firstly, my comparison was only to try to be illuminating but I accept it was not a great analogy.

I said complex currents, not power. As I am rather sure you know, the calculation trick is to say

I = I_0 * e^ikt 

when really (pardon the pun)

I =I_0 * cos(kt)

While you can say the imaginary part has a relationship to the magnetic field, it has a non-zero value when the real (ahem) current is zero.

None of which helps understand wavefunction collapse.

Ok.

And yeah, it's a good point that it's a model that lets us predict behavior. It doesn't explain what's "really" happening (so to speak). Nothing "collapses" in a literal sense.

Having reflected on this, I feel even more strongly that the only way to be happy with the two ideas that the wave function is about a state of belief and that the wave function as a whole obeys the law embodied in a propagation equation is a many worlds interpretation. The idea of probabilities being based on counting all the things that actually happen in the many worlds (when we only see one branch is satisfying). Some day, maybe I will study this properly!

It's all incredibly unintuitive to me, I have no idea what to think.

As we were just saying, just because math exists that allows us to make accurate predictions, it doesn't mean the math represents what's actually going on (so to speak). A superposition of states is a good tool... whether it's more than a useful tool I don't know. We still haven't figured out gravity. It's easy to imagine that if physics keeps advancing we'll eventually discard QM for something even more precise.

A hot air balloon is a lighter-than-air aircraft consisting of a bag, called an envelope, which contains heated air.   It can also be a metaphor.

Sillver1 - Okay. Thanks. 

So it basically has to do with predictability or the lack thereof or trying to make sense of something(s) i.e. the heliocentric universe/model which was never meant to be fully understood in the first place! ?

Unless one views it as an imaginative theoretical construct/model. Then that explains everything!