Dan said: [Quantum non-locality]
> This is a subject I've been interested in from way back, long before > it was cool. I find it hard to believe there was any time since Einstein and Bohr's arguments on the conceptual foundations when quantum non-locality wasn't cool. Maybe it wasn't popular though :) I've been interested in non-locality since I first read the chapter on the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics in _The New Physics_ (ed. Paul Davies) when I was in high school. I'm falling a little behind the state of the art in the subject though - the last time I read any papers on non-locality was when I did a literature review on the subject back when I was an undergraduate. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the causal structure of spacetime, quantum non-locality and objective randomness all turned out to be consequences of a nice, simple principle? It seems almost magical the way they fit together. > I worked with the Bell-Wigner interpretation of QM in my foundations > of physics class and my work on my grad school minor in the philosophy > of science back in the late '70s. Is the Bell-Wigner interpretation the one in which minds reduce quantum states? (I think I'm managing to stay moderately interpretation-neutral when I think about quantum mechanics. It seems to me that non of the interpretations is particularly good. I wonder if Weird Quantum Aliens would run into similar issues of interpretation when they probed the physics of the macroscopic realm.) > I was even able to talk to Wigner about that before he died. That is cool. > From what I've heard from John Baez over on sci.physics, there is > gonna be nothing that looks the least bit natural about quantum > gravity when it comes. I don't know about that. Some of the recent work on spin foams looks like it might lead to a nice, simple, elegant theory. Of course, it equally well might not... Did you read the quantum gravity seminar reports at http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/qg.html ? The book there is quite nice too. I wish I had time to really learn some of that stuff properly. Rich GCU So Many Interesting Things And So Little Time
