QUANTUM NON LOCALITY.

ONE & THE SAME, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

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Abstract: Why Quantum Physics violates locality. Twentieth-second century primary school version.

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 LOCALITY: What does locality mean? It means that what happens at a point is determined by what is happening in a neighborhood of that point within a small enough distance, as determined by light. Moreover, it means that the universe U is made of points: U = Union points. Points, by definition, are singletons (they have no elements in the sense of set theory), and they have dimension zero: nothing belongs to a point.

 SPACETIME: Generally the universe is called “spacetime”. However, this concept, spacetime, introduces the assumptions of Einstein’s Special Relativity, as boosted by Minkowski, established before Quantum Physics.

 In particular the spacetime hypothesis assumes that the universe is a product of what is called in mathematics the “real line”, which assumes, among other things, what is called a T2, Hausdorff topology. Two different points are separated by different neighborhoods (to use the appropriate concepts from general topology).

 Quantum Physics violates both LOCALITY and SPACETIME.

 How do we know this? When one analyzes the smallest processes, one finds that, in plenty of cases, the SMALLEST PROCESSES, THE INDIVISIBLE PROCESSES, SPREAD IN TIME OVER ARBITRARY BIG REGIONS, ON THEIR OWN (THAT IS WITHOUT ANY INTERACTION WITH THE REST OF THE UNIVERSE). Are they then big, or are they small? Verily, therein a mystery of the Quantum.

 In this innocuous concept I just uttered, they spread as big as they want, although being as small as there is, one finds the entire origin of Quantum non locality. No need for fancy mathematics, or even any equation. The idea is as dramatic as can be.

 Indeed, non locality boils down to a matter of definition. As the indivisible process spreads out, it stays one, well, by definition. It means that touching it anywhere is like touching it everywhere.

 When two particles comes out of such an indivisible process, they are called “ENTANGLED”. The semantics gets in the way. What we do not have is actually two particles, but two possible experimental channels, which can be widely separated, where, if we experiment, two particles will show up, and widely separated, if the channels are so.

 Thus we see that the two channels are entangled, and touching one is also touching the other.

 What are some of these cases where the smallest, indivisible processes spread out macroscopically? Well, they are so common, that they seem to be the rule, not the exception: 

 Diffraction (the 1 slit experiment) is such a case: the slit is small, diffusion gets big. Arbitrarily big.

 The famous 2 slit experiment is another case: the slits are close by, the interference screen is at a large distance. Hey, the 2-slit could be a galactic cluster. A cluster made of galaxies, each 200,000 light years across. 

 Any fundamental process where two particles separate after interacting. (In particular the simple set-up of the Einstein Podolski Rosen thought experiment, such as the Bohm total spin zero variant.)

 It is highly likely that such an effect is used all over biology, to transport energy close to 100% efficiency over macroscopic distances (an allusion to the fact that this is not only about pure science, but the economic fall-out will be considerable, once this is so well understood that we can dominate the processes involved).

 Not all Quantum processes spread all over space. Bohr got the Nobel for his patchy, haphazard atomic theory which worked, because electronic matter waves self interfere coherently onto themselves (these matters waves, the de Broglie waves, are called orbitals, and they make the body of atoms, what we call matter, and sharing orbitals is much of what we call chemistry).

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 Thus we have found the following, from the most basic set-up of Quantum theory:

 A Fundamental Quantum Process, is one, until interacted with, even if it is spread over space. This is what Quantum Non Locality is all about.

 Some crystals can make out of one photon, two photons with opposite polarizations, and they could then be sent in two different channels, a light year apart.

Parallel transporting along the two channels the polarization directions, we would always find them opposite. A more subtle relation between the polarizations holds, and was found to be true even when the polarization angles are moved randomly during the photons flight time (Aspect experiment, for which Alain Aspect got the Wolf Prize in 2010).

 By making all sorts of supplementary hypotheses about local hidden parameters and local measurements of polarizations, though, on finds that should not be the case. This contradiction is called the Bell Inequality (I like Bell very much, and I approve of his quest, which is also my quest. I apologize for his many admirers, by presenting his efforts in an arguably demeaning light).

The preceding, most simple way to look at Non Locality, gives an excellent reason to not do that: the logic of the Quantum is as simple as it gets: as long as I am left alone, says the Quantum, I am one. And indivisible.

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 What does it all mean? First Einstein and company in their “EPR” paper, talked about “elements of reality”. They did NOT talk about ELEMENTS OF SPACE. They did not have the notion. I will argue they should have, but of course, the fact that they did not have it was central to their (erroneous) reasoning. 

 Einstein and company wondered how a particle could communicate with another, even across light years. Wrong amazement. Particles are not “communicating“. Actually, they are not “particles” to start with.

 For decades I have advocated a radical solution, as exposed above, aligning the definition elementarily: the two particles are one and the same, they are in the same place at the time of the Quantum interaction, and stop being so, as a result. The topology used in physics, the same that the dinosaurs used, the T2, separated topology, is not appropriate to the real universe. OK, it was appropriate for pterosaurs. But it’s not appropriate, across the universe. BTW, the pterosaurs, the best fliers, by far, that this planet has known, went extinct, although they were obviously very smart.

 Is this the end all, be all? Quantum Physics a la Bohr reigns, and nothing else can be said? No. If the bare bone theory above is true, the entire theory of spacetime is false: space is not made of points, and it is constructed interactively. The case of time is even more so. Imagine there are no heavens made of points, only the sky you make, etc. Thus more has been said. 

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Patrice Ayme

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 Note 1: An enlightening analogy: The question of using the Quantum set-up to transmit information superluminally, or what Einstein called “Spooky Interaction At A Distance” has come up. The preceding, as it is, sticking to strict Quantum theory, demolishes both views, with crushing simplicity.

 How? OK, let’s make an experimental metaphor. Suppose we have an infinitely rigid bar between the two entangled particles: each time we experiment with one, we turn the bar, and so it turns at the other end too. Simple. Some will say: ha ha ha, but then I can look at the bar, and I see the bar turn, and so information has been transmitted. Not so fast. We are dealing with as elementary a Quantum process as possible, which means the particle was not observed, before the bar turned. So we see the bar turn, but we do not know if it was, or not, turning before. To tell if a signal was sent, one has first to define a state where one can say no signal was received.  

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 Note 2: I was a rough to the point of inaccuracy with the Bell Inequality above.  There is a subtlety, which can be seen easily say in the case of spin. Spin measurements in various directions are not independent of each other. Thus, if one measures spin in the close channel, a measurement of spin in another, random direction in the distance channel will show that influence, and a local determination of spin in the distant channel by parallel transport will not exhibit this. BTW, introducing the notion of parallel transport in the conversation, which is the whole point of the “local hidden parameter” debate is from yours truly.

 Note 3: And let’s not forget to smile about the naïve who developed frantically supersymmetric superstrings super budgeted super having-nothing-to-do-with reality… While forgetting to think about the fundamentals as described above.

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OMNIPRESENCE

HOW THE 2-SLIT EXPERIMENT TEACHES US TO THINK.

Abstract: Quantum Physics is teleological. As simple as that. You read it here first. That this has not been pointed out so simply before, illustrates another theme of the essay below, namely that the wisdom of the Quantum has not reached the masses yet.

This has an amusing consequence: people simply do not know how to reason correctly. The models of logical thinking they have been taught are inspired by the naïve classical physics, the automata, the Turing Machine. Well, sorry folks, the world is not like that. That is what Quantum Physics shows. The world is not flat, the world is not round, the world is not curved, the world is Quantum. This has consequences even in the way one should think about politics, sociology, economics…

Some will scoff, and sneer that all the logic they need is found in Hollywood. Not so. We have global problems, and they have to be thought of globally. Quantum Physics shows us the way of correct thinking, and it is global: omniscience, and omnipresence, that’s what the Quantum is all about.

If you want to learn about energy, you better learn about waves. And this is not just a lousy joke about nuclear energy and tsunami waves.  Life is all about energy, all about waves, and neither can be put in a box, or then just so. (An allusion to the Casimir effect, a manifestation of vaccum energy; all these carry in metaphors and analogies to the everyday world!)

A concluding perspective on how babies learn, how we learn fundamental things, illustrates how our minds themselves are entangled with the Quantum.

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WRONG YESTERDAY DOES NOT MEAN WRONG TOMORROW:

A lot of the received wisdom in philosophy is plain wrong. This has nefarious effects all over. Ironically a lot of what is wrong has to do with notions which used to be taken for granted in the Middle Ages, because of the super properties of the mythical God, and the son he tortured. They came short.

OK, let me be explicit: take teleology, and teleonomy. Tele means “far off” in Greek. Teleology would be logic at a distance, teleonomy, allotment, or management, at a distance. Philosophers cringe when confronted to those concepts, because Aristotle was notoriously wrong believing in their existence.

Here is Aristotle in —Physics, Book II, ch.8, 199b: “It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe an agent deliberating… The best illustration is a doctor doctoring himself: nature is like that. It is plain that nature is a cause, a cause that operates for a purpose.”

More down to earth, philosophers in the last few centuries, made the simpler observation that it is not because we do not observe that an agent is present, that there is one which is present. Call that scarcity of reasoning. It proved most fruitful.

The Middle Ages believed a lot in mysterious influences, some hidden, some at a distance. The Devil, the Good Lord and various saints and archangels were the prime agents. That distracted from observing the most elementary facts, and reasoning out of them. Why to try to understand the “natural” world, when there is no such thing, because Allah, Devil and Djins control everything? (Another of my low blows at Islam!)

When the God craze subsided, the most elementary facts were finally observed. Aristotle’s physics was promptly found to be wrong, when not outright delirious. So philosophers and their pets decided that anything which smacked of the old superstitions, for example influences at a distance, were the mark of the primitive mind, and that they were counter-productive. But it is not because we do not observe an effect sometimes, that it is not present, most of the time.  

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LOCALIZE ME NOT; AT A DISTANCE IS SPOOKY, BUT REAL:

How did the erroneous wisdom evolve? An example is the derivation of local logic, and more generally, local everything.

To understand the physical world, physicists made a number of hypotheses, to simplify the analysis of what they were considering. In particular, physicists assumed that the world was local. That worked very well. But, once again, it’s not because something works sometimes, that it works always.

As it turns out, in the deepest sense, locality never works, as I will show. If, each time a photon goes somewhere, or any particle goes somewhere, or any fundamental process happens, locality is violated, then locality is violated always, and everywhere. And this is what happens.

What does “local” mean? To find out what is going to happen at a point x, one analyzes what is happening in a neighborhood, around x. This is the crucial assumption of field theory (gravitation, electromagnetism, gauge fields). This locality assumption, made in physics for centuries, has informally filtered throughout modern decision making.

However, the world works this way only in the first, grossest approximation. Intrinsic to Quantum Mechanics is what Einstein called: “SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE“. Einstein and a number of collaborators, including the philosopher Karl Popper, evolved reasonings exhibiting situations in which measurements on one particle would imply an effect on a particle at a distance (this is called the EPR effect). The effect has been verified experimentally since, and the Wolf Prize in physics was given to Alain Aspect for so doing (2010).

Einstein and Popper were trying to prove Quantum Mechanics wrong, or incomplete. They failed. In particular Einstein naively thought that the “spooky action at a distance” could not be, thus all along the other particle had determined properties. And thus violated the uncertainty relationships, which a whole slew of physicists, such as Lande’, another Nobel Prize winner, hated. Indeed Non Locality and Uncertainty Relationships are related (this has just become again a hot subject of research).

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WAVES, PARTICLES, & DE BROGLIE SYNTHESIS:

OK, let’s backtrack. I will resist going back all the way to the Greco-Romans, because they had nothing intelligent to say on the subject. However, in the Seventeenth Century, Huyghens, an originally Dutch physicist financed by Louis XIV of France (!), presented a wave theory of light. Later, Newton came up with a particle theory. However, in 1800 CE, Young a polymath medical doctor, came up with the TWO SLIT experiment, which seemed impossible to explain with Newton’s particles. Poisson came up with the Poisson’s dot, a bright spot in the shadow of a sphere, where the waves meet and constructively build up. And it was verified. Later Maxwell’s electromagnetic waves were found, by Maxwell, to be moving at the speed of light, and Maxwell proposed to identify them with light.

Then came Hertz, with the photoelectric effect, which he discovered in his lab. Hertz, like Riemann before him, promptly died, and it was left to Einstein to “heuristically” propose that the photoelectric effect showed that light was made of packets of energy. Planck, 5 years earlier, had “explained” away two contradictions of theoretical physics, by assuming that light was emitted in packets of energy hw, where h was a mysterious constant, and w the frequency of the light. The difference was subtle; Einstein had got one step further.

Then Bohr used Planck’s idea that energy differences E corresponded to radiation (= light) of frequency w, according to hw. He also proposed that the orbital period of the electron would be inversely related to the frequency of the radiation emitted at an orbit of period T, as it would be in classical mechanics. It worked. Bohr’s theory predicted that only some electronic orbits were possible, where the angular momentum was a multiple of h…

Next came de Broglie, a medievalist, and a prince, who decided to study physics theoretically, just as his brother was studying it experimentally. De Broglie proposed that any particle was associated to a wave. The waves could only interfere constructively in particular orbits, thus de Broglie’s axiom implied immediately Bohr’s finding of particular orbits. De broglie waves, if taken at face value, also implied the uncertainty relationships (a wave cannot be located within less than half a wavelength at most). Abstraction is all about finding the correct axioms.

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TWO SLIT EXPERIMENT DEMONSTRATES NON LOCALITY:

Let’s go back to the 2-slit experiment. According to De Broglie, the 2-slit experiment should have worked with electrons, and it did. Just to make the situation as simple as possible, let’s consider photons. The 2-slit experiment shows that the photons tend to show up in places, where their waves constructively interfere, and avoid those where they destructively interfere.

This happens even when only single photons pass through the slits. That means that somehow the single photon is aware of both slits. So the photon is not a point: if it’s a packet a la Einstein, that packet somehow can compute the position of both slits, and move accordingly. It has an extended nature. THE PHOTON IS NON LOCAL.

This simple observation is rarely made, straight out of the 2-slit experiment. Why? Because physics students are taught to learn by rote the Born interpretation of De Broglie’s waves. Instead of real matter waves, Born interpretation views them only as probability waves. De Broglie disagreed very strongly with that.

De Broglie’s was not an opinion to neglect: De Broglie thesis, widely advertized as early as 1923, contained much of Quantum theory, including the Schrodinger equation. His prestigious thesis jury in Paris, with some Physics Nobel on it, did not know what to make of it, because it was so bold and out of this world. Finally they sent the thesis to Einstein, who was enthusiastic (and did not try to steal the ideas). It was published in 1924. De Broglie’s work is often ignored because of a triple bias: his ideas were too deep, he doubted Quantum theory the way it developed later, and he was not of the Anglo-Germanic persuasion that the Americans think is only worthy of appreciation (at least in physics). 

Born’s equation of matter waves with probability waves is rigorous, but not philosophically compelling: one could do the same on a beach: instead of looking at crashing waves as made of matter, one could consider them to be probability waves. Actually one could extend that skeptical philosophy to all phenomena, and view everything, and everybody as a probability wave. Obama would be a statistical probability wave surfing in plutocratic space… (Laughter, please! OK, I did not think so either…)

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THE PHOTON IS NON LOCAL:

We can just sit here, and meditate: how can that be? Well, nobody knows. In such a sentence, on the foundations of the world, every single term is unknown: what does “photon” means? What does “local” mean? What does “is” mean? Nobody knows. In the depths, everything becomes obscure…

However in a strange logical loop, Quantum Physics may indicate how to solve the riddle, by an whole integrated reasoning. I will try to explain that later. The author has his own embryonic theory, the Totally Objective Wave, which is the closest to De Broglie’s extremely deep, and possibly correct ideas (here, again, nobody knows, it does not matter how many Nobel Prizes they got).

But this is the not the object of this essay, which is to consider the philosophical consequences of what is known for sure: QUANTUM PROCESSES ARE NON LOCAL. All and any Quantum Process is out of the integrated whole: the entire accessible geometry is globally determined by the waves, and out of that pop the possible outcomes. (This is described in the conventional approach, using all prepared mathematics, as: Geometry + Waves > Hilbert Space >  Eingenstates > possible outcomes.)

That determination is done ex-temporally (time plays no role). OK, let’s give the simplest example. When the 2-slit is set-up, the geometry is determined: we know where what all the possible interference patterns are. The only missing ingredient is the wave frequency of the photon. Once that is plugged in, we know the probability pattern of future photon presence.   

Thus Quantum Processes analyze all the available geometry at a glance. Out of that pops the solution. It is as if QUANTUM PHYSICS IS TELEONOMIC (management of the geometry at a distance). This allows incredible efficiency. Unsurprisingly, biology uses Quantum computation, to be as efficient as possible. This has been demonstrated for photosynthesis and vision. Soon it will be all over our explanations for life. The soul itself will come into this explanatory scheme.

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I THINK, THEREFORE I QUANT:

Classical mechanical metaphors can only go that far, in the non classical world that we have. The Quantum provides with a wealth of analogies and metaphors, when not outright reasonings, which could be used all over the mental landscape.

Contrarily to legend, life is closer to the Quantum than it is closer to the mechanical. It is more dependent upon it. One could even argue that the definition of life is harnessing the Quantum to circumvent the classical. If this is true, it would mean that Quantum computers will be alive, and will achieve a form of consciousness.

The well known slogan:”Think global, act local!” is a good summary of a lot of what the Quantum does. We need to start thinking globally, because that is the only way to think.

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MY BABY TOLD ME THE TRUTH:

I have a twenty month baby, multilingual and all that. The baby understands amazingly complicated sentences, and figures out words she never met before. (Then she repeats them 50 times for good measure.) How does she do it? I was mystified by her ability for quite a while. My mom declared it was all about genetics, but that did not help my urge to understand the amazing nature of the new soul.

Well, refined observations showed the following. The baby understands words, sentences and ideas from the context always. She figures out the globality of what is going on, and then determines probable meanings out of it. [Then she quickly figures out little experiments to check if she guessed right, such as pointing towards an object, and repeating the word for it (but her more sophisticated experiments are immensely more complicated, so complicated that they may escape even a keen observer).]

Notice that the baby’s mind works identically to much of Quantum Physics. She apprehends the globality, and uses it to find positively interfering solutions. Is it possible that the baby figured out Quantum Physics, and then thought that was a great way to get things done? Of course not. She does not need to figure that out.

It is very simple: she has a Quantum mind.  If you want to see Quantum Physics at work, you can close your eyelashes slightly, in sunshine, and observe interference patterns. Or you can go the closest baby, and observe her, observing the world. She is a Quantum mind.  That’s how she knows.

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 Patrice Ayme   

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Note: One commenter sneered once that I should just read  the book called the “Hidden Reality”, instead of being unintelligible. That well written, often very interesting and ridiculously biased book is about the silly idea that there are parallel universes (a contradiction in adjecto). The preceding remarks were about physics more fundamental than the multiverse babble. I have to point that out, because it is sure to be a question in some people’s mind.

The multiverse challenged believe that when a photon hit a screen a (countable) infinity of universes is created. That’s simply moronic. Imagine the accused at a tribunal been asked why he killed his victim, and responding that it is not really a problem, because murder did not happen in a parallel universe. He would be sent to a mental asylum.

But there is worse: the preceding considerations about non-locality, which is the real mystery of Quantum Physics, is left untouched by the multiverse derangement. In other words, multiverse types “explain” with the craziest logic what needs no urgent explanation, while ignoring the greatest riddle, which is in plain sight.

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DARK ENERGY DEMON

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR UNIVERSE CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK HOW BIG IT IS.

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Abstract: A spotted recapitulation of gravitation and basic cosmology is offered, as an historical progression, using the occasion to show that the history of ideas meanders, and why. Dark Energy is presented.

In combination with the non locality of Quantum Physics, Dark Energy leads us to believe that the universe we know could be animated (so to speak) by a universe we cannot see. (Whereas most of the essay is standard fare, its last few paragraphs constitute some new physics.)

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LET THERE BE DARK:

Dark Energy is a paradigm shattering discovery in physics. It’s blowing the universe apart, and that has various consequences.

What is the basic story? Dark Energy is a mysterious force, a form of anti-gravity, which pervades the universe. One has to go back a bit to understand the novelty of the situation. The ancients believed the universe was more or less fixed. Then, following Giordano Bruno, it was realized that the universe was full of distant stars.

The theocrats tortured and burned Bruno alive for this insight, because they wanted everybody to cling to the metaprinciple that all old beliefs and ways are correct… the safest way to insure that the masses would not suspect that Christianity was just a myth. Clinging to old beliefs, and old ways, as if they were always correct, always serves the oligarchies in power. (A picturesque manifestation of clinging to the past, hence of an oligarchic mental clamp down, is that the USA, is clinging to antique measuring units, that nobody else uses anymore, an indication that the USA is losing its grip on the cliff of reason.)

The French astronomer Ismaël Boulliau suggested that Kepler was wrong about the gravitational force. Kepler had declared that the gravitational force holding the planets in place decreased inversely to distance. Boulliau held instead that the force decreased as an inverse square law. He deduced this in analogy to light. This is interesting in two ways: Isaac Newton acknowledged Boulliau’s discovery of the inverse square law, using it as an argument that his adversary Hooke was lying, about having had the idea first. Thus Isaac was less chauvinistic than many to be born in centuries since, who have insisted Newton invented everything, including the principle of inertia (due to Buridan, circa 1320 CE), and the inverse square law.

I do not make such snide remarks out of base feelings. It is just the opposite. It is important to understand how ideas appear, grow, and morph. Or how they get suppressed. The body of knowledge gathered by Buridan was a victim of the an eruption of fascist theocracy, a full century after his death (which soon caused two centuries of religious wars and terror).

It is important to understand that intellectual fascism is frequent, a master driver of history, and thus a clear and present danger. When there are masters, and they decide that some knowledge is dangerous, they can, not only suppress it, but suppress loudly all and any knowledge beyond the task at hand their slaves are ordered to do.

 

This suppression of spontaneous intellectual activity, and general curiosity, often replaced by an obnubilation with team sports (as Juvenal smirked 19 centuries ago) makes “We The People” closer in intellectual temperament to sheep. It’s primordial to teach them to bleat and enjoy nothing more than herd mentality and being fleeced now and then. Thus, the insistence on the exceptionalism of the USA: “We Are The United States Of America”, a form of bleating. Right now some in the USA want to resurrect the espionage Act of 1917, which basically punished free speech (although, of course, the Supreme Court of the USA found that it did not.)

Another important point in exposing an accurate history of ideas is that really new ideas are hard to come by. Because of a weird seduction of the fascist instinct, the tendency to elevate heroes one can adulate, those who write history have the misleading habit to make it into mythology, a bit like Homer. They pile up most of the creation of ideas on a few characters, the super heroes. It is handy for hero worship, and it facilitates memory, but it does not reflect the real creative process, which is more diffuse and democratic.

To realize how new ideas truly arise, not from The One, but out of a more democratic process, has implications for the growth and maintenance of civilization: looking for a small elite of patented geniuses is not the way to do it. But then, of course, when power becomes fascist, it enjoys, and needs, to show to the masses, that superlative thinking is highly elitist, in a way fully compatible with the grandeur of the fascist leaders. Newton having invented it all was a perfect reason to trust the other geniuses leading the Anglo-Saxon empires.

Notice also that Boulliau made an analogy to light: that analogy is one of the main ingredients in Einstein’s gravitation. It is also one of the key ingredient of “Quantum Gravity”. This highly speculative theory argues that because light is made of particles, the photons, and they carry the electromagnetic force, so should gravity be carried by its own particles, the gravitons. Science does not exclude simplicity, in first approach.

The question of why the universe was not collapsing upon itself ought to have been already blatant in conventional astronomy, but nobody paid any attention to it. Instead stability of the universe was viewed as God-given, to the point that Einstein, the sacred genius, contrived an anti-gravity term in his gravitational equation, just so that the universe would stay suspended, like the rock islands of the planet Pandora in the movie “Avatar”. It was about as pretty, and as justified.

Unfortunately for Einstein, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble in Los Angeles discovered in the 1920′s, using what was then the world’s most powerful telescope, that galaxies receded from us the faster, the further they were (another astronomer had already discovered the Doppler shifts, in Arizona).

So the far universe was far from static. It was as if there had been a big explosion, and the debris were galaxies flying away from each other. When one looks at galaxies further and further away from us they move away faster and faster, closer and closer to the speed of light. From the Doppler effect, galaxies appear redder and redder (it’s called the cosmological redshift), until they fade away because they move too fast (the distance at which they disappear from sight is called the event horizon). Parts of the universe far enough from us could move away at more than the speed of light (at least if the expansion is everywhere true and we can’t see the whole universe). That the speed of light is constant in Relativity ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as Einstein himself pointed out. (Or he uttered words to that effect, more exactly.) More precisely, constancy of light speed is a local phenomenon in space, which puts no limit on the speed of space, a global phenomenon.

Einstein whined that he would have predicted the expansion of the universe, if not for that anti-gravity that he added on because he had believed, with all very serious people, in the universe’s stability (the anti gravity term that Einstein had added in his gravitational equation is known by honorable people as the “Cosmological Constant“).

Einstein called this failure of his guesswork his “greatest blunder”. Whatever. The instability of the universe ought to have been already clear, well before that. Any philosopher could have suggested it, let alone an astronomer. And maybe some thought about it. However, nobody had dared to suggest it before Hubble, and he came up with the proof. The hard work was done by Hubble.

As it is turning out, anti-gravity seems to exist, indeed, and it is Dark Energy.

Science is about indomitable facts, not just the flights of fancy that allows us to guess more facts than we already have. Einstein introduced, and then removed, his cosmological constant. Now it has been re-introduced, to describe what is seen. But it’s all about tweaking an equation so that it is not blatantly contradicted by the observed facts.

The initial discovery of anti-gravity, so called Dark Energy, came when it was observed that supernovae (and the local pieces of universe they were attached to) were accelerating away from each other faster than standard cosmology held to be true.

This has an interesting physical and philosophical consequence: in the fullness of time far away galaxies will recede away from our local group of galaxies (which are in tight orbits around each other). Hence, after dozens of billions of years, they will get out of sight. Of course, by then the sun will have exhausted its thermonuclear fuel, collapsed, blown apart as a red giant, and collapsed again, crushing itself into a white dwarf. But let’s suppose, for the sake of the argument, that a race of astronomers appear, 50 billion years in the future. They will observe that the universe reduces to the local galactic group. They will have no idea of its true size.

At least the little scenario above is conventional wisdom, as faithfully depicted by Brian Greene in the New York Times. Notwithstanding, watch it, because here I come… I am a specialist of hidden conspiracies, and how to detect them nevertheless. If the Nazis and their plutocratic collaborators in the USA did not escape, nor will the universe.

So I am going to focus on a conspiracy in physics, non-locality. Conventional physics assumed that the physical universe was made of points, and finite bits (atoms). The idea came from the Greco-Romans. Perhaps the main subtlety of Quantum Physics is that it is not so. Philosophically, it’s not too surprising: how to define points if physical objects are made of bits? If points are the ultimate bit of reality, what are they made of? Intimately related to this is the nature of space.

Quantum Physics changed the conceptual game completely, by acknowledging that these concepts are related. It remains to be seen whether they transmogrify into each other, as I believe.

After a quantum interaction (or, as Feynman put it, a “fundamental process“), the products of the interaction are ENTANGLED. (To be precise the probability waves representing the products have merged into a single probability wave; I prefer “Quantum Interaction”, because some fundamental processes, such as planets crashing into each other, have nothing Quantum about them, so Feynman’s semantics is imprecise.)

Where does this come from? OK, to simplify the discourse, to bring it to a higher level of abstraction, I will identify particles and the probability waves describing them to each other. That’s what abstraction does: identifying differences, from a common essence.

When propagating, particles are waves. When they crash somewhere, though, the whatever-was-propagating crash as a point, not as a wave. This is the mystery of so called “wave-particle duality“. There is no contradiction: propagation = waves, and end of propagation = particles. But there is a mystery: how does the wave becomes a particle, and conversely? This used to be called the “collapse of the wave packet“, and caused most geniuses of physics serious headaches. So now the expression has been replaced by the more nebulous wording of “decoherence“. However, this metamorphosis [wave <-> particle] is the central practical notion, and difficulty, in constructing a quantum computer, and also the deepest problem in physics.

So let’s suppose an interaction is such that it will give two particles, A & B, in the end (the most basic type of interaction, if we ignore the possibility of self interaction). After the interaction, when the products are in flight (so to speak), they are represented by one wave. Just one single wave. That wave has NO notion of physical distance. So this math, or, rather, this absence of math, tells us immediately that we are inside a physical point. (Warning: in my own theory, this is not exactly what happens; but this is what the standard formalism of Quantum Physics says, although most physicists are too afraid for their neurons, to contemplate the notion; another way to phrase the absence of distance is by saying that time is only a one parameter group of transformation.)

One says (loosely) that the “particles A and B” are entangled. Then if one interacts with A (say), one destroys that single wave which entangled A and B. Thus one destroys it for B too. Even if B is twenty galaxies away. That effect, known as the EPR (Einstein Podolski Rosen), frustrated Einstein deeply. He called it a “spooky interaction at a distance“. Einstein, following Newton, hated interactions at a distance. Faraday’s field theory, with a help from Maxwell, had removed that difficulty for electromagnetism, and Einstein’s gravitation theory tried to mimic it.

Entangled particles are common in classical physics, and they are no problem: two billiard balls which have hit each other are the arch typical example. In classical physics, if one knew the position and speed of the two balls before collision, and of one of them after the collision, one can tell what the position and speed of the other are, and that all along.

In Quantum physics, the situation is seriously different. This is related to the fact that one cannot know the position and moment of a (small enough) particle simultaneously. In that case, if one measures either, it affects the other. And it’s like that all over Quantum Physics. To make it worse, as Niels Bohr correctly insisted, in Quantum Physics, the experimental device changes what it measures. .

Now imagine again that interaction creating two entangled particles. If one measures A, one has to use experimental device X. For example we force A through a polarizer X. Results will differ according to which direction X is pointing.

Initially we had just one wave, Wave (A,B). Then we interact with A, using X. So what we have now is no more Wave (A,B), but [Wave (A,B) + Wave (A, X)]. The wave has changed! It has changed for B! And B maybe two million parsecs away! (That’s further than our sister giant galaxy, Andromeda.)

So let’s recapitulate. Entanglement is the greatest mystery of physics. After interacting, two particles, A and B, will often share properties as just one probability wave. Thus measuring one of these properties on A will immediately have an EPR effect on B (by the way, biology uses this EPR to transport energy cleverly and effortlessly! So although I talk galaxies here, to make some aspects of the situation more obvious, non-locality in Quantum physics is central to life itself… and obviously central to consciousness many of the apparent features of which it shares.)

Now let’s suppose A and B interacted, and billions of years passed by. Suppose they end up in different places in cosmological space which separated from each other according to Hubble, and even more so, according to Dark Energy. Then suppose finally, after all these eons, that a little green monkey interacts with A. It will have an effect on B, in a part of the universe, that little green monkey does not even know exist.

Physics progresses a lot by thought experiments. Aristarchus’ (320 BCE) and Buridan’s (1320 CE) speculations about the heliocentric theory are famous. More generally most of theoretical physics is a set of mathematically assisted thought experiments. Maxwell is famous (among other things) for “Maxwell Demon”, a tiny creature selecting fast particles, and thus creating a hot container (heat is speed). It’s a cute picture, and Maxwell wanted to use it to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics That law says that entropy, that is disorder, always augments.

However, one had to be careful to consider the entire system… and to include the demon, though, who heats up, and generally blows up, so Maxwell’s idea was incorrect, although it has led, ever since, to a lot of refinement in thinking on the whole subject.

I have my own demon, and it’s not tiny, but cosmic, as the true devil of course is. So suppose a lot of Dark Energy operated for a long time, blowing the universe apart, and our galactic group is isolated in an apparently empty universe: nothing else can be seen. So we started from our present universe (call it U15, for 15 billion, a concession for Big Bang naivety). And now we are contemplating U100, the universe 100 billion years later, restricted, in appearance, to our local group.

Now suppose super intelligent little blue crabs starting from Neo Earth, have colonized the entire local galactic group. Could they tell their apparently isolated U100 universe is a small part of a much larger universe, for example U15, most of which is completely out of sight?

Enters Tyranosopher’s demon. That demon measures all the particles of the local group (how to do that? Ask Maxwell!). In the Quantum sense (so there are still indeterminacies). At that point the evolution of the local group is fully predictable (up to Quantum indeterminacies).

Meanwhile, let the little green monkey, who is out of sight, somewhere in the rest of U15, act on A. Then B, in turn, acts up. There is no limit on how much that could be scaled up: zillions of A and B pairs could be involved. So the green monkey could make zillions of Bs act up.

Would that be detectable? Yes. Once the Tyranosopher demon has catalogued the entire local group, if the action of green monkey is large enough, Tyranosopher demon will find more indeterminacy than normal physics would predict.

Bring that logic to bear on our present universe. Suppose that, however hard we tried, however meticulous our own demon was, cataloguing all the interactions leading to decoherence, we could not fully account for all the decoherence we observe. What would that tell us? That the part of the universe we cannot see is interacting with us. (Notice in passing that the situation is analogous with Black Holes, which are pretty much defined, conceptually speaking, by their event horizon.)

Can one apply the idea to Dark Energy? Yes. According to the (loose) philosophy of Quantum Field Theory, interaction are associated to particles. In the case of Dark energy we have an interaction out of nowhere, just space. Exactly what we would expect if EPR interactions were creating particles at a distance, from somewhere else in the universe.

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Patrice Ayme

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Technical note: Simplicio: “OK, so the demon catalogues everything, and then a particle shows up, call it C. How do you know that it comes from the action of the forever invisible Green Monkey, and is not simply due to a local entanglement, which, as such, would not have showed up in the prior classification by the demon?” Tyranosopher: “Because then the demon, during the classification which discovered C, would find a particle D, which was not there before (D is entangled with C).  Simplicio: “What if D has been taken away by Dark Energy too?” Tyranosopher:”Impossible if the demon cataloguing is frequent enough, as the particle D could not have escaped (it’s roughly limited by the speed of light, c). Simplicio: “And what of single particle diffracting?” Tyranosopher:”Well, this is a thought experiment. By waiting long enough for  light to cross the local group, one should be able to exclude those.”

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P/S: Out Of The Window with Causality, Light Speed, etc: It should be pretty obvious that the preceding has bearing on the various superstitions, and first order mistakes, surrounding relativity, in particular pertaining speed of light and causality (both independently, or as they relate with each other).