Jim Choate wrote... Burrowing into what I claimed is 'wacky crapola' I discovered a nugget of truth I can agree with (but it'll take a minute to get there...)
"And no, Relativity and QM have -not- been joined into a -single cohesive theory-." You have to qualify this. General relativity has not been unified with quantum mechanics in any way that is universally accepted yet, but the superstring and M-Theory cats may be closing in. Special relativity is of course a completely diferent story. Much pof modern QM would be impossible without it, and relativistic considerations are a mundane part of high-energy particle and accelerator work. "What I -am- saying is that in this specific issue (ie behavior of entangled photons -or- two slip experiments) the 'problem' of instant state changes over distance doesn't actually happen. The reason being that the state changes are -not- taking place in -our time-space framework- but the -photons-. These two time-space frameworks are -not- the same." Well, I might be willing to agree with you...kind of. The little intuition I've been able to build up about EPR is that the uncollapsed wavefuction for the correlated photons isn't aware of 'distance' or other measurement parameters. Distance and time are only encountered during the measurement process, and only then is there 'two photons'...kind of a physical kenosis. "Whaledreck. How does the electron interact with -any- EM field (ie voltage)? Via an 'intermediate vector boson', that's how. What is that particle? A -photon-. How much difference in distance or time is there -from the perspective of the photon- between the electron and the shielded field? Answer, none. The reality is that the 'shield' is -only- a shield in our frame of reference, it's nothing from the photons..." Double whaledreck (I actually never heard that phrase before...) First of all, an intermediate vector boson is not even remotely a photon, but I doubt that's germane to the argument. (But physicists do not invoke Z-particles to explain this kind of interaction. In fact, right now there is no particle-based explaination for this interchange.) Second (and this does matter, from what I'm reading into your writing), A-B uses an electron beam that is split, and the upper and lower halfs of this beam made to reconverge on the other side of a toroidal-protected hole. In that hole is a voltage, and A-B easily predicts that the relative phase of the electrons as they recoverge will be different, and the magnitude of the phase change is directly proportional to the voltage in the hole, that they are completely 'unaware' of in the classical sense. The point for me here is that one can not extend classical thinking to account for this. (In fact, its very hard to extend common sense to understand this.) How do the electrons 'see' that voltage? Through what mechanism? According to quantum theory, it clearly appears that (like in EPR) they are aware of that field without interacting with it at all. There's no particle exchange. "It isn't a problem of physics, it's a problem of imagination." Well, that's basically MY point. QM seems to be telling us something about reali9ty, but we can't imagine what it is (David Duetch and a few others have tried). We don't have a picture yet ot go with our data and theories. But if I have time, I'll repost about why a 'Cypherpunk' (of any stripe, not just CACL...is that still a Cypherpunk?)...cares, or should. (Well, kinda...)
