On Tuesday, October 8, 2024 at 2:14:32 PM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Oct 8, 2024 at 2:57 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: *>> Yes, it could be that the electron was in one and only one state before the measurement was made and we just don't know which one. If that is the case then realism is correct and, to be consistent with experimental results, either determinism or locality or both must be wrong. You just can't have realism and locality and determinism, you've got to abandon at least one of those three things.* *> Could you explain why this is the case, if it is? TY, AG * *I'll repeat a post I sent a couple of years ago when somebody asked me the same question.* *==* *If you want all the details this is going to be a long post, you asked for it. First I'm gonna have to show that any theory (except for superdeterminism which is idiotic) that is deterministic, local and realistic cannot possibly explain the violation of Bell's Inequality that we see in our experiments, and then show why a theory like Many Worlds witch is deterministic and local but NOT realistic can.* *The hidden variable concept was Einstein's idea, he thought there was a local reason all events happened, even quantum mechanical events, but we just can't see what they are. It was a reasonable guess at the time but today experiments have shown that Einstein was wrong, to do that I'm gonna illustrate some of the details of Bell's inequality with an example.* *When a photon of undetermined polarization hits a polarizing filter there is a 50% chance it will make it through. For many years physicists like Einstein 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 look-up 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 and can be derived with high school algebra; his point was that any successful theory about how the world works must explain why his inequality is violated, and today we know for a fact from experiments that it is indeed violated. Nature just refuses to be sensible and doesn't work the way you'd think it should. * *IIUC, Bell experiments demonstrate that hidden variables don't exist. Does this mean realism has been falsified. In an earlier post, IIRC, you stated that realism might be falsified. Which is it and why? AG* *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 look-up 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 on the 2 boxes 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 of the 12 o'clock look-up 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 with 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 local 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 polarizations 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 light gets very weak it must stop getting dimmer and appears to flash instead. 3) A polarizing filter, we've had these for well over a century.4) Some gears and pulleys so that each time the rotary switch is advanced one position the filter is advanced 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 is [COS (x)]^2; and if X = 30 DEGREES (π/6 radians) then the value is .75; if the light is so dim that only one photon is sent at a time then that translates to the probability that 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 local variable that determines if it makes it through a filter or not. Thus if we ignore a superdeterministic conspiracy, as we should, then one of two things MUST be true:1) The universe is not realistic, that is, things do NOT exist in one and only one state both before and after they are observed. In the case of Many Worlds it means the very look up table as described in the above cannot be printed in indelible ink but, because Many Worlds assumes that Schrodinger's Equation means what it says, the look up table itself not only can but must exist in many different versions both before and after a measurement is made.* *2) The universe is non-local, that is, everything influences everything else and does so without regard for the distances involved or amount of time involved or even if the events happen in the past or the future; the future could influence the past. But because Many Worlds is non-realistic, and thus doesn't have a static lookup table, it has no need to resort to any of these non-local influences to explain experimental results.* *Einstein liked non-locality even less than nondeterminism, I'm not sure how he'd feel about non-realistic theories like Many Worlds, the idea wasn't discovered until about 10 years after his death. * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> erx -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/ec23ceba-34c2-4836-bf25-d12a2495921dn%40googlegroups.com.
