You cannot counter it by tilting it because the thermal perturbation is random.
Randomness is an attribute of the map, not the territory. You do not know how much to tilt it, but there is still a correct position.
This isn’t something you can feasibly do in real life. It’s not hard to make it absurdly difficult to find the point at which you have to position the needle. It’s just that there is a position.
You do not know how much to tilt it, but there is still a correct position.
The amount to tilt it takes is changing in time. Thermal and/or quantum fluctuations continue to start the thing falling in one direction or another, and you have to keep seeing how it’s going and move whatever your balancing it on to catch it and stop it from falling.
You have created a dynamic equilibrium instead of a static one by using active feedback based on watching what the random and thermal noise are doing. You have not created a situation where an unstable equilibrium takes an arbitrarily long time to be lost. You have invented active feedback to modify the overall system into a stable equilibrium.
If you tilt it the correct way, it will not just stand there. It will fall almost perfectly into every breeze that comes its way. Almost, because it has to be off a little so that it will fall almost perfectly into the next breeze.
You can’t keep it from ever tilting, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t keep it from falling completely.
Randomness is an attribute of the map, not the territory. You do not know how much to tilt it, but there is still a correct position.
This isn’t something you can feasibly do in real life. It’s not hard to make it absurdly difficult to find the point at which you have to position the needle. It’s just that there is a position.
The amount to tilt it takes is changing in time. Thermal and/or quantum fluctuations continue to start the thing falling in one direction or another, and you have to keep seeing how it’s going and move whatever your balancing it on to catch it and stop it from falling.
You have created a dynamic equilibrium instead of a static one by using active feedback based on watching what the random and thermal noise are doing. You have not created a situation where an unstable equilibrium takes an arbitrarily long time to be lost. You have invented active feedback to modify the overall system into a stable equilibrium.
If you tilt it the correct way, it will not just stand there. It will fall almost perfectly into every breeze that comes its way. Almost, because it has to be off a little so that it will fall almost perfectly into the next breeze.
You can’t keep it from ever tilting, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t keep it from falling completely.