----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 8:22 AM Subject: Re: The Shooting Room Paradox
> 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 found it interesting that it got to be a hot topic after I was involved with it. > 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. I do try to keep up. I'm also in a bit of a different position, since I do have a philosophy degree and have illusions of semi-retiring and spending some time writing in the area of the philosophy of QM. :-) > 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'm not quite sure what you are getting at. I think they do fit together well, and I do see basic principals that are underly they interrelationship. But, those principals are metaphysical, not physical. Thus, they have to do with the explanation of QM instead of an underlying structure. > 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.) Bell and Wigner are the ones who showed that there cannot be a local hidden variable theory. > > > 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... Well, we have gotten different feels on this. Since I'm a plumber, maybe we have different ideas of nice and simple. > 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. > Me too. Dan M.
