On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 spudboy100 via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> > Don't you suspect that the conclusion that phenomena can have an effect, > sans cause, is largely because our ability to measure phenomena, is limited > by our equipment, that isn't sophisticated or refined sufficiently to > detect the true cause? > If that were true and quantum randomness was caused by our inability to obtain some crucial bit of information then Bell's inequality could not be be violated, but we know from experiment that it is. I wrote a little essay about that a few years ago, I'll repeat it here: When a photon of undetermined polarization hits a polarizing filter there is a 50% chance it will make it through. For many years physicists who disliked the idea that God played dice with the universe figured there must be a hidden variable inside the photon that told it what to do. By "hidden variable" they meant something different about that particular photon that we just don't know about. They meant something equivalent to a lookup table inside the photon that for one reason or another we are unable to access but the photon can when it wants to know if it should go through a filter or be stopped by one. We now understand that is impossible. In 1964 (but not published until 1967) John Bell showed that correlations that work by hidden variables must be less than or equal to a certain value, this is called Bell's inequality. In experiment it was found that some correlations are actually greater than that value. Quantum Mechanics can explain this, classical physics or even classical logic can not. Even if Quantum Mechanics is someday proven to be untrue Bell's argument is still valid, in fact his original paper had no Quantum Mechanics in it; his point was that any successful theory about the world must explain why his inequality is violated. I will attempt to show how to find the inequality, show why it is perfectly logical, and demonstrate that nature refuses to be sensible and just doesn't work the way you'd think it should. I have a black box, it has a red light and a blue light on it, it also has a rotary switch with 6 connections at the 12,2,4,6,8 and 10 o'clock positions. The red and blue light blink in a manner that passes all known tests for being completely random, this is true regardless of what position the rotary switch is in. Such a box could be made and still be completely deterministic by just pre-computing 6 different random sequences and recording them as a lookup table in the box. Now the box would know which light to flash. I have another black box. When both boxes have the same setting on their rotary switch they both produce the same random sequence of light flashes. This would also be easy to reproduce in a classical physics world, just record the same 6 random sequences in both boxes. The set of boxes has another property, if the switches are set to opposite positions, 12 and 6 o'clock for example, there is a total negative correlation, when one flashes red the other box flashes blue and when one box flashes blue the other flashes red. This just makes it all the easier to make the boxes because now you only need to pre-calculate 3 random sequences, then just change every 1 to 0 and every 0 to 1 to get the other 3 sequences and record all 6 in both boxes. The boxes have one more feature that makes things very interesting, if the rotary switch on a box is one notch different from the setting on the other box then the sequence of light flashes will on average be different 1 time in 4. How on Earth could I make the boxes behave like that? Well, I could change on average one entry in 4 in the 12 o'clock lookup table (hidden variable) sequence and make that the 2 o'clock table. Then change 1 in 4 of the 2 o'clock and make that the 4 o'clock, and change 1 in 4 of the 4 o'clock and make that the 6 o'clock. So now the light flashes on the box set at 2 o'clock is different from the box set at 12 o'clock on average by 1 flash in 4. The box set at 4 o'clock differs from the one set at 12 by 2 flashes in 4, and the one set at 6 differs from the one set at 12 by 3 flashes in 4. But I said before that boxes at opposite settings should have a 100% anti-correlation, the flashes on the box set at 12 o'clock should differ from the box set at 6 o'clock by 4 flashes in 4 NOT 3 flashes in 4. Thus if the boxes work by hidden variables then when one is set to 12 o'clock and the other to 2 there MUST be a 2/3 correlation, at 4 a 1/3 correlation, and of course at 6 no correlation at all. A correlation greater than 2/3, such as 3/4, for adjacent settings produces paradoxes, at least it would if you expected everything to work mechanistically because of some hidden variable involved. Does this mean it's impossible to make two boxes that have those specifications? Nope, but it does mean hidden variables can not be involved and that means something very weird is going on. Actually it would be quite easy to make a couple of boxes that behave like that, it's just not easy to understand how that could be. Photons behave in just this spooky manner, so to make the boxes all you need it 4 things: 1) A glorified light bulb, something that will make two photons of unspecified but identical polarization moving in opposite directions so you can send one to each box. An excited calcium atom would do the trick, or you could turn a green photon into two identical lower energy red photons with a crystal of potassium dihydrogen phosphate. 2) A light detector sensitive enough to observe just one photon. Incidentally the human eye is not quite good enough to do that but frogs can, for frogs when lightgets very weak it must stop getting dimmer and appear to flash. 3) A polarizing filter, we've had these for a century or more. 4) Some gears and pulleys so that each time the rotary switch is advanced one position the filter is rotated by 30 degrees. This is because it's been known for many years that the amount of light polarized at 0 degrees that will make it through a polarizing filter set at X degrees is [COS (x)]^2; and if x = 30 DEGREES then the value is .75, if light is made of photons that translates to the probability any individual photon will make it through the filter is 75%. The bottom line of all this is that there can not be something special about a specific photon, some internal difference, some hidden variable that determines if it makes it through a filter or not. Thus the universe is either not realistic (nothing exists till it is observed) non-deterministic (events without causes) or non-local ( everything influences everything else and does so without regard for time or space ) . One thing is certain, whatever the truth is it's weird. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
