There’s something seriously wrong with reality. It’s dysfunctional. And that has serious implications for engineering our future. The smallest things are causing the biggest problems.
Two seemingly incompatible universes have collided. “The world we experience is driven by determinism,” says Flinders University spectrum security specialist Professor Samuel Drake. “We observe things. We measure things. From that, we know what outcome to expect. And once we know what’s happening, we can engineer faster cars, put satellites in orbit, and build better computers.” But our understanding has limits.
“Things that happen in quantum mechanics have raised the prospect that there is no such thing as determinism,” says Drake. “Even if I know something precisely, I can’t predict the outcome.”
A world ruled by particle-level measurement with a side-order of uncertainty is going to present future engineers with some pretty serious challenges, writes JAMIE SEIDEL.
What this means is that the world’s engineers are in the awkward position of grappling with uncertainty, and it’s having real-world implications – in computing, in nanotechnology and with sensors. Our understanding of how things work has struck a hurdle.
