Alain Aspect + The Holographic Universe

[laptop]

So your magickal beliefs are drug-induced.

I was afraid they might be the outcome of an organic, permanent psychosis.

Drugs are fine for shaking up ideas - but the important thing is to come down and check out any resulting conclusions v e r y carefully. Not just, like, "wow, man, this quantum shit is weird so I can believe any weird shit I like".

 

[ZWord]

You spend nearly four hours avoiding the answer to a very simple question - because, clearly, you could see that it was leading to a challenge to your magickal belief system.

There would be, at a guess, thirty or forty more questions to go through to get to the beginning of a proper discussion of your claims about physics. You gave up at the second.

So will you stop making absurd claims about physics supporting your quasi-religious beliefs?

i spent no time at all avoiding the answer to a very simple question. I was utterly astounded to discover through the medium of your alterego gurrier, that you were asking me an utterly banal and utterly irrelevant question, the answer to which was contained within the question itself. The terms in which you put the question were designed to confuse and confound me.

Will you please stop making your absurd claims about science supporting your ridiculous and outdated materialist/naive realist worldview.

I realise you probably have profound psychological reasons for wanting to think it's all bullshit, but that's not my problem.

I said when you first started asking your ridiculous question, I didn't want to be patronised by you, or allow you to dictate the terms of the discussion. if you've got a viewpoint, I'm sure you're capable of expounding it, and explaining it, without needing me to fill in the gaps by answering questions we both know the answers to.

i still don't understand why you don't just put your viewpoint across and explain it, .. best explanation I can think of is that you can't.

 

[laptop]

your alterego gurrier,

I revise my earlier, charitable conclusion.

That's classical paranoid thinking and probably is organic.

 

[ZWord]

Fuck off.

You utter utter cock. And if you aren't the same person, you certainly seem to able to think with one mind.

 

[laptop]

I confessed we were a conspiracy, out to get you.

 

[ZWord]

Well it's odd, I only started on this to second what Merlin Wood said about you, on the basis of previous experience, but you amply proved it on this one. But then you're probably just playing a role like Tony Blair.

 

[gurrier]

 

[laptop]

'Sfunny, that's just what I was thinking

E2a: Er, wot?

 

[gurrier]

'Sfunny, that's just what I was thinking

Oh I know. I've just downed a few tabs and took a trip through the looking glass

 

[laptop]

I've just downed a few tabs and took a trip through the looking glass

I seem to have been through the looking glass all evening without benefit of Dr Hoffman's wonderful discovery Er, I mean we have. No, I can't be your alter ego if you're tripping and I'm not. Unless we're two quasi-separate entities in telepathic communucation

Usual meet-up round the back of the MI5 building on Thursday, then? The geese are flying South early this winter.

 

[gurrier]

Usual meet-up round the back of the MI5 building on Thursday, then? The geese are flying South early this winter.

The bison will drink at the watering hole before dawn.

 

[laptop]

The bison will drink at the watering hole before dawn.

F=G*m1*m2/d^2 (δd/δt<<c)

Apples keep falling on my head / And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed / Nothin' seems to fit

Will Six be bringin the usual case of champagne?

 

[merlin wood]

merlin w - go back and read the Talbot and shut up, ffs. You still haven't grasped that I was replying to the original poster. I've tried to read your outpourings and it's clear that you're impervious to argument about your beliefs.

It's just necessary to point out for the sake of other readers that your attempt to invoke QM is dishonest. It's much like the snake-oil salesmen (and all those I've come across are men) with their "tachyonised water" and shit.

Among the many things that Zword clearly hasn't grasped the implications of are the finite speed of light - the universe is not one big thing because most of it doesn't know about the rest of it.

Both of you - if you're so much wiser than the quantum mechanicists - do some. Learn the maths.

Who knows, you could end up a well-known nutter like Jack Sarfatti, who just got a paper into the arXive (though last time I looked it was on revision 20 and he was starting to wibble about how the maths wasn't the point after all, it was the poetic truth of the thing).

The fact is that there are LOADS of different and conflicting ideas out there about quantum mechanics. So try Wikipedia for a start for a good short summary on the different types of interpretation.

But no-one I know of has taken David Bohm's non-local causal interpretaion for a walk by constructing a cause and effect quantum hypothesis like I have and then found support for this just from ordinary and available large scale natural evidence and Big Bang cosmological theory, and one reason is that physicist generaly are tied up with mathematical equations.

Whereas no such maths will ever sufficiently explain how matter in any form can be and remain subatomically organised out of its component parts as described by the Pauli principle and the Schrodinger/Dirac equations.

 

[Crispy]

But no-one I know of has taken David Bohm's non-local causal interpretaion for a walk by constructing a cause and effect quantum hypothesis like I have and then found support for this just from ordinary and available large scale natural evidence and Big Bang cosmological theory, and one reason is that physicist generaly are tied up with mathematical equations.

Too fucking right they're tied up with equations. It wouldn't be science without them. You can't call it 'evidence' without doing the maths. It's like saying "dolphins look like fish. therefore they are fish" - the method is superficial, and uncountable sci-fi writers have come up with reams of similar 'theories' that help explain their faster-than-light drives or telepathy. It's science-lite and passes no muster.

 

[ska invita]

Too fucking right they're tied up with equations. It wouldn't be science without them.

If there is a next unobserved dimension affecting these results, and this dimension could be observed and quantified, then the maths could be done.

However as it is unobservable then the maths becomes impossible.

But if evidence arises that suggests the existence of such a dimenesion (evidence that clearly exists and contradicts current knowledge) then it isnt automaticaly false because the maths cannot be done at that time.

=====================================

-Laptops line of questioning of how fast are the particles seperated seems very much a red herring - they could be seperated 2km/h, the effects measured occur after the seperation, right?

- Laptop criticises the original article: there is much written on the subject, a lot of it far more complex - I especially posted this one as it was accessible and outlined the key ideas, a point I made in the post itself.

-Drawing on the names of Aspect and Bohm (who mean nothing to me personally) was not an attempt of using names for justification (as Laptop accused), it was to talk about their work and try and understand it a little better.



I dont think ZW or MW are 100% convinced about what the results of these experiments really mean, but they obviously pose big questions... why not try and think about what those answers might be?

The only person 100% convinced about anything is, not for the first time, laptop, whose reductionist and materialist methodological approach is clearly sacred to him.

Finally:
-I have a basic question - where do the entangled events take place in nature? Theoretically, is the "communication" observable in nature?

I started this thread to share knowledge and learn something ~ lets see if we can get back to that, yeah?

 

[laptop]

Laptop's line of questioning of how fast are the particles seperated seems very much a red herring - they could be seperated 2km/h, the effects measure occur after the seperation, right?

It was the first in a series of questions.

To recap/rephrase the next question and merge it with Q3:

• Alice wishes to use entanglement to communicate with Bob.
• She prepares two entangled particles.
• She sends one off to Bob - at not more than the speed of light (A to Q1).
• Then Bob observes his particle and knows the state of Alice's particle.
• In what sense has communication occured faster than light?

Observe that Alice can't change the message after she sends the particle off. So the act of communication starts when she sends it off and completes when Bob gets around to observing it.

Not sure about your final question - do you mean "does entanglement happen in nature?" or your earlier question "when does entanglement happen?" ("When" becomes an interesting question when things are moving at or near the speed of light - you have to specify whose "when".)

 

[ska invita]

Well laptop - Isee what you are saying. Im no scientist - a real layman - but surely if it is as simple as you say then the whole phenomenon is a sham.

But do you think such a basic point would have been overlooked?

I have come across a range of scientific writting that clearly finds the issue problematic and confusing, and is leading to a whole range of new expirements.

If it is wrong on the grounds that you say, I would have thought that would have been spotted straight away.

 

[ska invita]

"Observe that Alice can't change the message after she sends the particle off"

- I thought the spins do change, after the seperation - and they change instantaneously. Have i got that wrong?

 

[laptop]

Well laptop - Isee what you are saying. Im no scientist - a real layman - but surely if it is as simple as you say then the whole phenomenon is a sham.

But do you think such a basic point would have been overlooked?

I have come across a range of scientific writting that clearly finds the issue problematic and confusing, and is leading to a whole range of new expirements.

If it is wrong on the grounds that you say, I would have thought that would have been spotted straight away.

I think the problem is that the discussion is led by theoreticians, who are deeply puzzled, and by freelance science writers who make their livings turning that puzzlement into headlines and intros that mere editors can grasp (and pay for)

QM is deeply worrying. It's worrying in general because it's so alien to any "commonsense" explanation - that is, any explanation that makes sense to us, grounded as we are in our senses, which deal with things on the scale of a metre or so and a second or so.

But it's theoretically more worrying when it comes up with this "non-locality". That apparently challenges what you could call an axiom of physics. I say "apparently" for two reasons: firstly because the appearance depends on a common-sense picture of what's going on; and secondly for a reason that I can't properly express right now but which I hint at in that question "whose 'when'?".

So the theoreticians get carried away with this worry and forget - it seems to me - that they're not actually proposing any form of communication that Alice, Bob, Brahma or Gaia or can use.

Then there's the quite separate problem of people who have some kind of vision - a typical drug experience of the universe being "all one", say - and follow a line of argument that goes "QM is weird, so I can believe weird thing X". The universe may or may not be "all one" in several senses, but the interesting thing is finding out how so, not proclaiming revelation.

Soon, I'll run the above account past a mathematical physicist or two to see what they say.

 

[laptop]

I thought the spins do change, after the seperation - and they change instantaneously. Have i got that wrong?

Yes, you have

The spins have no value until an observation is made. Which isn't the same as saying that they change The QM picture really does include Schrödinger's cat being alive-and-dead-(and-not-either).

I think my postcard analogy - was it earlier in this thread? - works pretty well.

Alice takes a red card and a blue card and puts them in opaque envelopes.

The envelopes have no colour (bit of licence here to approximate the QM oddness).

She entrusts one, selected at random, to the Royal Mail.

On arrival, friend Bob opens the envelope and "instantly" knows what colour Alice's card is - days later.

 

[Jonti]

... under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart."

I'd like to know about this a bit more - how could they tell they where "communicating"? What kind of communicaton are we talking about?
Any info on it would be of interest - also any thoughts about the holographic universe would be fun too.

You are asking about some pretty far-out ideas. The Bell inequality is not the only way into this wierdness, but it's important as it does finally demolish the attempts to save locality.

Other ways into the wierdness involve thinking about Schrodinger's Cat; and contemplating the interference patterns which build up on a screen over time, even if only one photon at a time is allowed to traverse the apparatus. Schrodinger's Cat is, of course, a thought experiment. But interference patterns built up a single quantum (photon) at a time are routinely demonstrated.

It's long been an axiom of science that influences are mediated. Crudely, stuff has to bump into stuff for influences to propagate. It's not good enough to do a rain dance and say "My dance made it rain". We want to understand the mechanism by which the dance caused the rain. Fair enough, you may well agree.

That's locality for you, and it has proved a most durable and robust way of looking at things. One has to try very hard to contrive a situation where non-locality can be *demonstrated*. After about a century of trying (!) this has at last been achieved. That's the Good News. The Bad News is that there are few (if any) mainstream media writers capable of explaining what this means. The Really Bad News is that this does not stop 'em from turning a buck churning out nonsense on the topic. Heh! after all, who will know the difference?

First off, it means very little to most people. I'm serious. One has to be pretty well steeped in scientific materialism (the world's most successful philosophy *ever* in terms of practical power and utility) to understand why the finding is pushing a great paradigm change. A child will happily accept that Santa Claus immediately knows the contents of note composed for his attention! But an engineer or scientist needs to know how this happens (and tends to stop believing in Santa Claus as a result ...)

What non-locality means, is that the universe is all of a piece. That is, generally speaking, one cannot affect a part of it, without affecting all of it. But that does *not* mean that we now know how to build hyperspace telephones that would allow instant communication across the Cosmos. Nor does it mean we can, even in principle, build such devices.

Laptop has explained the reason for this in post 80 of this thread, and elsewhere. It comes down to the fact that the type of non-locality we have is rather weak. Although everything is indeed of a piece, one cannot control *what* will happen at the distant location in response to actions here. That means it cannot be used to transmit information. Our type of mon-locality in principle cannot be used to make hyperspace telephones possible.

Of course his explanation is just an analogy -- in particular, in real life each individual card (ops, photon) does not have any colour (ops, spin) defined for it until it is observed or measured. That's well wierd! But the salient point is that the card (photon) must either be red or blue (up or down) -- and both cards are not the same colour (spin).

The analogy shows how a measurement here can indeed immediately give us a sort of knowledge about what would also be measured there (non-locality). When Bob opens his envelope, he *knows* what Alice found. But Alice cannot use this method to communicate any message to Bob. She cannot arrange that Bob will meet her at the patch of yellow snow where the Huskies go (if he gets a blue card); or that the Feds are onto them and the meet is off (if he gets a red card). Alice cannot control what card she has; and she cannot control what card Bob gets.

The type of non-locality we have seems rather subtle in its workings.

 

[spiralx]

When we get a relativistic (i.e. field theoretical) version of Bohmian mechanics than can expain pair creation and annihilation then it'll be easier to judge the theory's merits.

 

[ska invita]

Thanks for that post Jonti - Your analysis is one I agree with: I dont think that we can make hyperspace telephones, although attempts are being made at utilising this non-locality event
http://www.physorg.com/news63037231.html
http://p2pnet.net/story/2927

- But I am not sure about laptops argument - the logic of what he was saying is that it is non a non-local event. His argument, as I understood it, is that you have an entangled quantum eventm you untangle it and then you seperate it (as fast as possible), and that gives the illusion of it happening simaltaneously. Thats what I thought he was trying to say.

If he was trying to disprove the possibility of data transfer through this model, thats something else.

Are we all agreed that this is a non-local event that has been observed?

If so, that is good enough for me: I can then listen to plenty of hypothetical or theoretical ideas and understand them as such - as you say Jonti, it completely upsets a materialist version of science and nature - my impression was that Laptop was questioning this very aspect of it - i.e., it non-locality.

+you describe the type of non-locality event observed as "subtle" - I think i follow why - however I think it is fair to say that materialism and reductionism has been so credible for so long because it can be apllied so extensively: no one would dispute that - however, we are reaching a point in history where reductionism and materialism have been relatively exhausted, and we seem now to be running up against new barriers and frontiers - I think it is predictable that these will have a subtle or well hidden nature, if you see what I mean;
-------------------------
Jonti, you explenation of "Alice's cards" was helpful to me: could you explain this bit though:" in real life each individual card (ops, photon) does not have any colour (ops, spin) defined for it until it is observed or measured."

How so?

 

[Crispy]

The thing is, the spin/colour/flavour/whatever of any particle is unknown and superposed until you observe it. And it is random (but when you sum it all up, you get determinate classical physics). So determining the properties of one entangled particle is like determining the propoerties of two entangled particles at the same time. But it's still random. And you can't use it to transmit information, because you can't "watch" one particle to wait and see if the other particle has been observed, because that's an observation in itself.

So non-locality exists, but it can't possibly have any effect. If we didn't know that the particle was entangled, we'd never know that it was, because it behaves in exactly the same way. Sure, another particle 5 trillion miles away would now definitely be in a certain state if observed, but it would have just as much chance to be type A as it would type B. If you entangled 1000 particles, you'd still have 500 of one and 500 of the other.

 

[gurrier]

When Bob opens his envelope, he *knows* what Alice found. But Alice cannot use this method to communicate any message to Bob. She cannot arrange that Bob will meet her at the patch of yellow snow where the Huskies go (if he gets a blue card); or that the Feds are onto them and the meet is off (if he gets a red card). Alice cannot control what card she has; and she cannot control what card Bob gets.

If Alice and Bob have a pre-existing arrangement, they could use the cards to solve a coordination problem. e.g. whoever gets the red card does x, whoever gets the blue card does y. Which provides communication of a sort, albeit limited to that specific type of problem.

The other thing to bear in mind is that although, as an observer from outside the system, we know that alice's observation of the card means that we know the colour of bob's card, neither alice nor bob can know that the other one has observed their card and thus they both still have to observe their individual card to know the colour of the other. It is only from outside the system that the collapse of one particle's state of quantum uncertainty into a definite state is known from knowing that the other particle has been observed. Within the system, we still have to observe each particle to learn its state or else communicate the result of the first observation back to the person who possesses the second particle - which is again bound by the speed of light.

 

[gurrier]

If so, that is good enough for me: I can then listen to plenty of hypothetical or theoretical ideas and understand them as such - as you say Jonti, it completely upsets a materialist version of science and nature - my impression was that Laptop was questioning this very aspect of it - i.e., it non-locality.

This is a misunderstanding of materialism. Quantum effects are part of a materialist view of the universe since they are observable and do not rely on any hypothetical entities.

 

[merlin wood]

Too fucking right they're tied up with equations. It wouldn't be science without them. You can't call it 'evidence' without doing the maths. It's like saying "dolphins look like fish. therefore they are fish" - the method is superficial, and uncountable sci-fi writers have come up with reams of similar 'theories' that help explain their faster-than-light drives or telepathy. It's science-lite and passes no muster.

But then for some reason you just happened to delete the end bit of my message, crispy. So the full text goes:

The fact is that there are LOADS of different and conflicting ideas out there about quantum mechanics. So try Wikipedia for a start for a good short summary on the different types of interpretation.

But no-one I know of has taken David Bohm's non-local causal interpretaion for a walk by constructing a cause and effect quantum hypothesis like I have and then found support for this just from ordinary and available large scale natural evidence and Big Bang cosmological theory, and one reason is that physicist generaly are tied up with mathematical equations.

Whereas no such maths will ever sufficiently explain how matter in any form can be and remain subatomically organised out of its component parts as described by the Pauli principle and the Schrodinger/Dirac equations.

>>>>

While I could add to this: So while the Pauli principle and
the Schrodinger/Dirac equations can explain much about the visible and chemical properties of matter they do not of themselves explain how it is that they can apply to atoms or molecules. This being especially so given that a hugely powerful electomagnetic, electrostatic or charge force can be measured to act so as to attract between electrons and protons and repel between electrons and other electrons.

So you can just ask how is it that electrons remain in their orbitals around the nucleus given the measurable action of this force. It can't be the momentum of these objects or they would need to travel faster than light.

Is it the uncetainty principle somehow? Well if it was this doesn't explain how it is that for electrons to obey the Pauli exclusion principle they need to be entangled in composite states. And this is where Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance' and the Aspect type experiments come in.

And then if you think about the Schrodinger/Dirac equations you could resonably consider that it's the wave property of electrons that prevents electrons from falling in the atomic nucleus.

But then the physicist could ask: where's the the maths that could show that it is this wave that does the trick and explains how this is so? And of course there's no such maths. Although Bohmian mechanics can show to some degree how it could make sense to describe this wave property as a cause that keeps electrons in their orbitals.

However, if you think about the general problem of how atoms and molecles can remain the way that they are you can conclude that it's just not going to be any measurement, calculation or mathematical formula that would help to provide a sufficient cause and effect explanation. And hence the diagrammatic hypothesis I've developed in my blog article.

 

[Crispy]

Sorry, I'm going to selectively quote again...

First, quickly:

So you can just ask how is it that electrons remain in their orbitals around the nucleus given the measurable action of this force.

Orbitals? Electrons do not orbit, as you should well know.

However, if you think about the general problem of how atoms and molecles can remain the way that they are you can conclude that it's just not going to be any measurement, calculation or mathematical formula that would help to provide a sufficient cause and effect explanation. And hence the diagrammatic hypothesis I've developed in my blog article.

Then it's not science. Science requires measurement, calculation and formulae. Your 'theory' is as much use as saying 'the pixies did it', because it offers no predicitve power and no quantitative explanations. It's great sci-fi, and I can just imagine some starship captain using his insight of it to boost warp power by 20% and evade the alien battlecruiser. But, and I'll shout it again, it's not science.

I don't want to stop people speculating about these things, but I do want people to be aware that there is actually a very well defined line between science and magic, and I find your hypothesis to be on the latter side.

 

[Jonti]

Jonti, you explenation of "Alice's cards" was helpful to me: could you explain this bit though:" in real life each individual card (ops, photon) does not have any colour (ops, spin) defined for it until it is observed or measured."

How so?

Yes, that's the hard bit. But it's the same hard bit that comes up in the "diffraction patterns that are built up one photon at a time" experiments.

But I'd like first to comment on terminology. I would not say the Bell inequality completely upsets the materialist view of nature, or materialism generally. QM is a materialist theory, and the results of the experiment are completely in accordance with theory. What is upset is the Classical (local) view of nature. A small point perhaps, but non-locality is a *result* of scientific materialism. Non-locality is a finding of materialism.

If I understand Laptop's posts correctly, he was showing how one would have to proceed to use the entangled pair of particles idea practically. That is, first entangle you particles. Then separate them. Then take a look to fix the state of the local particle -- and bingo, one knows the state of the other, distant, particle. This shows that the "instant communication" is more apparent than real. Information has not come instantly from the distant particle, not at all. The act of communication began with the original act of entanglement -- and ended when we measured the state of the local particle (so determining the state of the distant one). This all took a considerable time -- long enough for the distant particle physically to move to its new location.

Seen this way, the "instant communication" turns out to have required a very lengthy set-up period. A bit like an instant coffee whose instructions for use commence "first plant a coffee bush ...".

Anyway, back to the hard part ...

It turns out, as a matter of fact, that when we look into the realm of the very small, we find that things are strangely unformed and ambiguous. We find we cannot say that this particle is presently here, heading there at such and such a speed. We can say it might be here, heading there at such and such a speed. And we can say, very accurately indeed, how likely that is. The same is true of other properties of our quantum particle, such as "spin" and all the others.

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. So we say that the "spin" (or "location" or "velocity") of the quantum particle is undefined. Scientific theories cannot give any certain reality to these quantum properties (or indeed anything else) unless and until they have some effect. They are only more or less probable until then.

That's why, to improve the analogy, Laptop's cards must be thought of as being neither red nor blue till they are examined. Their properties are not defined until they interect with the wider world and so affect that wider world in some way! Only at that stage do their properties become actual rather than probabilities. Either card could turn out to be either colour (say, with a 50% probability), it really could. Yet, examine one of the cards and immediately we know what we would find if we examined the other. Yes, even across the universe. That's the mysterious, non-local, bit.

The Bell inequality experiments show that there is no alternative but to accept this. It's not an artifact of the experimental process. It's not a limitation of our theories. *Any* theory would have to allow for this type of behaviour to occur -- or, in other words, that's How Things Really Are.

 

[merlin wood]

Sorry, I'm going to selectively quote again...

First, quickly:


Orbitals? Electrons do not orbit, as you should well know.



Then it's not science. Science requires measurement, calculation and formulae. Your 'theory' is as much use as saying 'the pixies did it', because it offers no predicitve power and no quantitative explanations. It's great sci-fi, and I can just imagine some starship captain using his insight of it to boost warp power by 20% and evade the alien battlecruiser. But, and I'll shout it again, it's not science.

I don't want to stop people speculating about these things, but I do want people to be aware that there is actually a very well defined line between science and magic, and I find your hypothesis to be on the latter side.

Where's the maths in Darwin's Origin of the Species then?
and models and diagrams can do a hell of a lot more than any maths to explain how the DNA molecule works or any other biological or physiological process for that matter.

But anyway, in my blog article I do also say that there should be measurement and mathematical calculation in the development of the cosmological hypothesis, and probably a quite lot of it too, it's just that i personally am not up to it.

It's just my general point that you can reasably argue non-mathematicaly from the experimental and observable natural evidence that a non-local causal account could make more sense than any theory involving the natural organisation that assumes the action of the forces alone.