On 22/04/2016 12:53 pm, Jesse Mazer wrote:
On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 9:49 PM, Bruce Kellett
<bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
On 22/04/2016 5:17 am, Jesse Mazer wrote:
You seem to be saying this is impossible in principle, and you're
confident enough of this to dismiss the possibility Rubin's paper
has done this without apparently understanding the mathematical
details either. So, given what I said above, should I take this
to mean you think you have an argument for the impossibility
which is entirely independent of Bell's theorem? If so you could
you try to spell it out in a more detailed, step-by-step way?
I have done this in the thread with smitra. The min conceptual
argument is contained in the humorous little scenario I devised:
I dream of some "XKCD-style" cartoon. Alice and Bob perform their
experiments with particular settings and get particular results,
which they separately record in lab books. Several weeks later,
they meet up in a cafe down the street for a coffee. Alice puts
her lab book with her results on the table, "Look", she says, "I
got |+> with my magnet set at zero degrees to our agreed reference
orientation." There is a pause.......then Bob slowly lays out his
lab book. "Holy shit!", he says, "I also got |+> at zero degrees
to our agreed reference." They look at each other with gradually
increasing dismay........ "Fuck!", they say in unison. "That means
that we don't exist..........." Their voices fade into silence,
and then...........Nothing!.
The point here is that some combinations of results are forbidden.
How can this happen?
By the appropriate matching rules for locally-generated copies in
different locations, as in my toy model. There's no reason you can't
have something similar in a more general model, which I think is
exactly what people like Rubin are presenting.
The best I can make of this is that you have some theory that is not
quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics does not give any such "matching
rules", nor does it give any dynamics whereby such matching could be
effected. So you no longer have an interpretation of quantum mechanics,
you have a different theory. It remains for you to develop this in a way
that is convincing.
Following back the train of information exchange between the
participants, and accepting that worlds, once decohered, cannot
suddenly disappear, it becomes apparent that the zero probability
branches cannot arise because they are forbidden at the stage when
A and B are still at spacelike separations. So they are forbidden
non-locally.
But that clearly isn't true in my model, so there's no reason to think
it *must* be true in more general models that reproduce arbitrary
quantum measurements. In my model *and* in more general models of the
sort that people like Rubin seem to be proposing, until matching
between Alice and Bob has happened there *are* no "branches"
containing facts about both of their results, only a set of local
branches for one region and a different unrelated set of branches for
another region. And once the two sets of branches can interact, they
can be matched up in a way that creates zero probability of matching
up a version of Alice who got + at zero degrees and a version of Bob
who got + at zero degrees.
But your model only reproduces the quantum correlations because you have
put them in by hand. That is not a viable model of physics. You claim
that there are no branches containing facts about both A and B until
this matching takes place. The rules for this matching presumably say
that one must not match incompatible results. How is the matching done:
does one pick one result, and search about for a match that does not
violate the quantum statistics? You will have a problem if the basic
experiment on each entangled pair is done at a recorded time. Both
branches carry this timing information, so you can only match pairs that
have the same time stamp. This means that for aligned magnets, you will
have to discard 50% of the possible matches -- giving worlds that simply
vanish for no coherent internal reason. Frankly, such matching is
absurd, no physical law acts in this way.
Bruce
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