Almost the end

I've nearly finished writing my dissertation. Today I looked at the feedback sheets that the audience gave me after my presentation and discussed the results. I have tried to evaluate my sources throughout the project but I need to conclude all my reseach (this will probably be a part of my evaluation instead of a separate section).
TOMORROW:
Write up a report type document evaluating the whole project - pros and cons, things I could have improvedon etc.
I need to print out all of my GANTT charts and a bibliography/webliography (is webliography a word?)
And I think that might be it!!

Woow....it's been hard work but I'm so glad I did this project. I'll miss blogging every other day.

Evaluation of Does God Play Dice?

Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart is a book that discusses the mathematics of chaos. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick, so I knew that the book would be reliable to useful to my project.

I found the book helpful because Ian Stewart talks about Chaos in a way that allowed me to have a clearer understanding of it. I also learnt about the connection between Quantum Theory and Chaos Theory and so, I now have more evidence to support the argument of randomness existing in the world.

6 days to go

I have 6 days until all my work must be submitted and I think that I'm going to abandon my GANTT chart. The GANTT chart has helped me alot during this whole project, but now I'm just going to list the remaining things that I need to do...and do them!

SO:
Write Chaos/Quantum Theory section
Write Unpredictability section
Conclude all remaining sources
Conclude my research
Write up the the audience's evaluations of my presentation
Proof read/correct any parts of dissertation

Presentation

I did my presentation yesterday evening. It went okay. Members of the audience filled out an evaluation sheet so I could use this in my own evaluation. I could possibly represent the results on pie charts...?
I haven't blogged much because I was focusing on the presentation. Really need to prioritise writing the essay, as the deadline for the project is the 8th december.

Enough of reading for now...

I have 4 days to make my presentation, seeing as it is on Monday. I don't really know what I've been doing that has stopped me from already planning it, but that's life, I guess.

I want my presentation to be as interactive as possible. Clarity is extremely important too, as my topic can get a bit complicated and difficult to explain. I am debating whether to make my presentation a summary of my dissertation, or if it should be more about what I have done to get to my presentation. I may try to ask Mr Wright for advice, seeing as I missed the meeting about extended project presentations when I had a uni interview.

VERY rough structure of my presentation and helpful sources to go with it:

Introduction to myself and my project.
Should talk about why this topic interests me, what I wanted to get out of it. Structure of my project?

What is randomness?
"randomness implies a lack of predictability. More formally, in statistics, a random process is a repeating process whose outcomes follow no describable deterministic pattern, but follow a probability distribution."
Breif history about randomness?

How I structured the project
My aims, Blog, GANTT chart etc.

What I've researched? (this will be a big part of my presentation)

Probability, Quantum Theory, Chaos, Random number generators... basically all the different parts of my dissertation. Examples of each of these concepts. Reference to books etc.

What I've learnt?
Conclusion. My personal opinion on randomness after doing this project.


OKAY. I definitely need to get cracking on the presentation now.

Does God Play Dice?

"When you roll a die, any one of the six possible faces may end up on top. The result of throwing a die is like an eigenstate - it is a special state that is selected by the measurement process. [...] A Copenhagenist would say that the presence of a table mysteriously causes a die to 'collapse' to one of the states 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, an that the rest of the time it is in a superposition of those eigenstates - which is, of course, a mathematical fiction with no intrinsic physical meaning. Bohm would say that it does have a physical meaning but you can't observe it - at least with any conventional apparatus, and perhaps not at all. Diosi-to-Percival would say that as the die rolls along the table its state randomly jiggles, and eventually settles down to one of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. [...]
The imgae of dice suggest that they might all be right -
- and all wrong.

Chaos teaches us that anybody, God or cat, can play dice deterministically, while to naive onlooker imagines that something random is going on. The Copenhagenists and Bohm do not notice the dynamical twists and turns of the rolling die as it bounces erratically but deterministically across the table-top. [...] Diosi-to-Percival notice the erratic jiggles of the die [...], not realising that underneath they are actually deterministic.
Nobody tries to write down the equations for a rolling die. [...] One good reason is that they think it can't be done."

This extract helps me to understand the different ideas around chaos and quantum theory. It is also the first extract that has made me see a connection between the two concepts. It isn't possible to determine the state of a die before it lands on a number - this is the same idea of a decaying nucleus. Only when it actually happens, can we determine its state.

The last part of this extract supports the point that I made about randomness just being events that we cannot mathematically model because of its complexity.

Reading through Does God Play Dice?

After yesterday's meeting, I have begun to crack down on reading the remaining books and specifically picking out the parts that I believe will be most relevant to me. Chapter 16 of "Does God Play Dice?" by Ian Stewart is called "Chaos and Quantum" and may be exactly what I need to help me with understanding these 2 concepts for my project.

Ian Stewart discusses the 'cat in a box' experiment. I came across this experiment in the book Quantum by Jim Al-Khalili but I don't think I blogged about it:
"Imagine a box that contains a source of radioactivity, a Geiger counter to detect the presence of radioactive particles, a bottle of (gaseous) poison, and a (live) cat. These are arranged so that if a radioactive atom decays and releases a particle, the then Geiger counter will detect it, set off some kind of machinery that crushes the bottle and kill the unfortunate cat. From outside the box, an observer cannot determinw the quantum state of the radioactive atom; it may either have decayed or not. So [...] the quantum state of the atom is a superposition of 'not decayed' and 'decayed' - and so is that of the cat, which is part alive and part dead at the same time. Until, that is, we open the box. At this instant the wave function of the atom instantly collapses, say to 'decayed', and that of the cat also correspondingly collapses instantly to 'dead'.

This extract has helped me understand quantum theory a bit more. It shows that it is impossible to know what state something is in, and therefore it can be said that they are in both states.