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Post by speakertoanimals on Nov 30, 2010 18:42:01 GMT 1
Well, showing non-entanglement isn't exactly the issue, since when it comes to communication or quantum computing, the usual interest is in STOPPING that happening, rather than measuring that it has!
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Post by nickcosmosonde on Nov 30, 2010 21:09:13 GMT 1
The conjunction of these posts neatly reveal why the standard interpretation of this experiment is so philosophically inept. You set up an experiment to demonstrate some supposed implication of a theory that is not at all logically coherent. It simply objects to an interpretation of results that have been demonstrated. The test fails, i.e. fails to show the hoped for refutation. This is taken by the supporters of the interpretation the "test" was designed to refute as a confrimation of that interpretation. Exactly the same basic schoolboy error was made over the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Logically, this is complete nonsense, as anyone with an IQ of above 100 should be able to see immediately. Why do highly trained physicists fall for it, time and time again? The only answer is: wishful thinking. Partisanship.
Evidence? Clearly by definition it can't be observational. You are making this deduction from the terms of a theory. Not even the mathematical content of the theory, but a philosophical interpretation of what those terms might mean, made by a handful of philosophically untrained physicists from the 1920s.
Evidence? Clearly by definition it can't be observational. You're claiming to know what a measurement might be before any measurement is made. Your assertion is entirely derived from the theory, therefore. It can hardly then be used to "test" those very predictions of that theory. You have already built into your predictions this "spooky at a distance" by the implications of your theory. You haven't observed anything "spooky" - you've observed that there's something wrong with your theory.
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Post by nickcosmosonde on Nov 30, 2010 21:17:06 GMT 1
Am I living in a parallel universe? Since when did the opinions of some clumsy fool who writes a Wiki article become the word of God? The arbiter of scientific reason? I could edit this article myself and within a few hours post the opposite conclusive evidence.
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Post by abacus9900 on Nov 30, 2010 21:20:45 GMT 1
You are either on a 'wind-up' or really do not understand that an 'interpretation' has nothing to do with the actual results of an experiment. Interpretations arise from verified experiments but are no more than 'proposals' of what the experiments might mean beyond the data they offer. Again, the results of entangled pairs of quantum objects have been verified repeatedly and to a very high degree of accuracy.
I cannot provide you with the details of how such experiments are constructed since I am no expert so STA will have to do the honours. However, once again, we are not dealing with interpretations here but hard data, unless it is your view that the data has been misunderstood by people who's job it is to understand such things.
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Post by nickcosmosonde on Nov 30, 2010 21:21:45 GMT 1
Beacuse "Truth" is not ordinarily understood to be a much larger telephone directory. "Information" isn't the criterion on which it's judged. Now you can make that argument, by all means - it's been done before. But it doesn't get to the heart of what knowledge or its mysterious relation to Reality means.
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Post by abacus9900 on Nov 30, 2010 21:23:40 GMT 1
Am I living in a parallel universe? Since when did the opinions of some clumsy fool who writes a Wiki article become the word of God? The arbiter of scientific reason? I could edit this article myself and within a few hours post the opposite conclusive evidence. Well, Wiki is one source I cited but there are many others, as this information is well documented.
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Post by nickcosmosonde on Nov 30, 2010 22:01:32 GMT 1
"The results of entangled pairs of quantum objects" is a sentence that is theory independent is it? Free of any prior determination of what you're doing, what these experimental measurements might mean? No interpretation at all involved? We're all familiar with "entangled pairs of quantum objects" like we're familiar with something like a pair of joined bananas? No. We're immersed 9in complex theoretical implications and unobservable hypothetical entities even from our first verbal formulation.
So we set up a complex experiment where we generate according to highly sophisticated theoretical expectations and interpreted mechanisms of machinery we've built according to those theories a pair of "particles" or "quantum objects" which are, of course, "entangled". Do we know this by observation? No, of course not - this is an interpretation derived from the getgo, dictated by our currently available theoretical understanding of what we're doing.
We set these "entangled objects" off in different directions, measure or influence and then measure a quantity associated with our theoretical understanding of them - spin say, angular momentum, charge, whatever, these are of course entirely theory-independent too - and observe that the other "object" displays the quantity associated inversely with our measurement, despite there being no apparent means of them communicating.
What does this show? What is it that you're observing, proving "conclusively time and time again"? That the "wavefunction" collapses when we make our observation? Right - not theory-laden at all, that explanation, is it? That "locality" has been shown to be a dead duck? That Reality doesn't exist until someone creates it by their conscious observation of it? Right - let's throw everything else we observe in our experience out of the window because a handful of nutty physicists say this is what this peculiar observation must mean, and if we object it's crazy, just humbly accept that's because we haven't read enough physics.
The fact is the so-called "tests of Bells's Theorem" are entirely predicted by Bohm's Implicate Order theory. They don't necessarily imply the "collapse of the wavefunction" or any of the other gobbledygook notions espoused by the Copenhagen Interpretation. These results are also entirely in accord with Schrodinger's interpretation of QM - again, no need at all to see them as evidence let alone as proof for the Copenhagen Interpretation. They can equally be taken as evidence for Schrodinger or Bohm or a potential infinity of other alternative theories.
There is no such thing as "hard data" devoid of theoretical background, that's my point. We are always dealing with interpretations. It is certainly my view that the data has been misunderstood, that's undeniable and incontrivertable. Again, anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the history of science knows this happens all the time. As for "people who's job it is to understand such things" - no such job. It's not the theoretical physicists, that's for sure, with a very few very rare exceptions such as Einstein and Poincare they've shown themselves to be hopelessly unqualified for the task. Certainly not the mathematicians. The popularisers of science are next to useless.
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 1, 2010 10:04:21 GMT 1
I'm sorry, but all you are really illustrating here is what I have already pointed out, i.e., that all science is based on ideas that originate from our native biological mental apparatus. Nothing new, really.
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Post by nickcosmosonde on Dec 1, 2010 16:38:12 GMT 1
This is the paragraph you've cited, Abacus. It is not "information", of course, but factually incorrect and logically absurd nonsense:
This paragraph states that a mathematical theorem "suggests" that it is "impossible" for there to be elements of reality that we have not yet discovered that might influence the behaviour of matter at the quantum level. Further, it states that "most physicists" share this belief.
I ask you to consider whether any mathematical theorem could ever have this sort of universal empirical power. Indeed, whether any sort of empirical observation could ever have such power. The very fact that you cited such clumsy idiocy as authoritative is simply another indication of how normally reasonably intelligent people become voluntarily clueless whenever they start spouting off about quantum mechanics.
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Post by nickcosmosonde on Dec 1, 2010 16:52:04 GMT 1
You haven't "pointed out" anything, you simply asserted it to be the case, and then failed utterly to provide any rational warrant for it. You gave no reason at all for not concluding it's anything other than uncritically parrotted but thoroughly discredited Idealism from the 18th century.
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 1, 2010 17:24:56 GMT 1
nickcosmosonde, you are entitled to air your own opinions but the fact remains that the best evidence so far indicates that local variables are not an answer to the behaviour of entangled quantum objects. If you have any legitimate alternative theories backed up by good evidence in relation to both entangled particles and other aspects of quantum mechanics please present it, but I do not think you have. It seems pointless in criticizing the basis of scientific theories if you cannot provide a better way of investigating nature.
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 1, 2010 17:54:27 GMT 1
Nothing to do with Idealism or any other kind of 'ism.' Fact remains that we are forced to think with our brains, as that is all we have and our brains are a result of a long evolutionary process. What's so controversial about that?
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Post by speakertoanimals on Dec 1, 2010 18:09:33 GMT 1
Sorry, but have you ever actually READ a derivation of Bell's inequality?
All this stuff about a theory that is not logically consistent is nonsense. What's Bells theorem starts from is not a theory, but very general statements about conventional, classical theories.
So, all it looks at are the correlations between measurements made by the famous Alice and Bob. IF reality is local, then certain things that Bob does (like change the orientation of his polariser), can have no effect on what Alice measures. All we have to assume is that they are measuring signals received from a common source of polarised light. It says NOTHING per se about what that source is. Locality alone makes a prediction about the correlation between Bobs measurements and Alices measurements.
It says NOTHING about quantum theory, and we don't need to know that! We just find that when we have a particular type of source (that we later call one that produces special pairs of photons that we later call entangled), we get correlations between their measurements that are inconsistent with our initial assumption of locality.
That is it -- we need make NO assumptions whatsoever about quantum theory, we can even imagine that we haven't discovered it yet! The only assumptions we do make are about locality. And the experiment shows that that is not true.
Perhaps you would care to explain why you think classical physics and the assumption of locality is not logically coherent, because if that were true, we wouldn't have needed to go through this whole messy process, we could have deduced the non-locality of nature just using your logic..................
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Post by robinpike on Dec 1, 2010 19:14:38 GMT 1
STA (or anyone else), do you know if, when EPR experiments are performed, such as the version conducted by Alain Aspect using entangled pairs of photons, that a non entangled version is performed as well?
Because it seems to me, for a QM EPR experiment to prove that the results are a consequnce of QM (and not something else), that the classical version of the experiment is needed to be included (and found to agree with the classical prediction) for the confirmation that the results from the QM version are down to QM.
My concern, is that when it is stated that the results of an experiment 'proves' absolutely a particular theory is correct (or incorrect), that things get overlooked that would show otherwise.
(For example, there is the example of the research programme that looked into whether eating just before going to bed, makes you put on weight or not. The evidence was overwhelmingly that it does. Then 6 months later, someone happened to ask whether the researchers had checked if the people who ate midnight snacks, happened to also eat more during the day. And when they checked, they found that they did. So a second survey was conducted, this time taking into account what the candidates ate during the day and late at night, and they found no tendency of putting on weight by eating just before going to bed.)
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 1, 2010 19:16:49 GMT 1
nickcosmosonde, put simply, the statistical data of examined correlations between entangled quantum pairs and non-entangled pairs is violated, meaning the behaviour of entangled pairs cannot be subject to a 'classical' and, by implication, 'local' interpretation.
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