ENTANGLEMENT, FASTER THAN LIGHT COMMUNICATIONS, CAUSALITY, etc.

Abstract: Faster Than Light Particle Transfer? Not Possible According To Special Relativity. But Faster Than Light Communications? Some Day, Probably. Using Quantum Entanglement… Not Particle Transport.

TYRANOSOPHER: Folklore based on a vague reasoning of Einstein says Faster Than Light Communications are impossible (a variant supposedly breaks the universe… see below). Having read Einstein carefully, yours truly determined that Einstein’s reasoning was flimsy (Albert himself hints at that in his original paper).

Most of Special Relativity stays intact if Faster Than Light Communication, FTLC are possible. ALL the equations, and thus the verifying experiments of Special Relativity stay intact. (See towards the end answers to objections).

Simplicia: Many people will write you off because you wrote off Einstein. They won’t read any further.

Tyranosopher: OK, I will detail in another essay my objections to the packaging of Special Relativity which forbids FTLC with great details. Below is just a sketch.

Now about Einstein: he is not God. Actually, there is no God. When I was young and naive, I approved (all) of Einstein’s critiques of Quantum theory, a theory to which he crucially contributed as number two, Planck being number one. Planck said emission of radiation was in grains, quanta, and explained two facts this way. Einstein explained that supposing absorption of radiation also came in quanta explained the photoelectric effect. Planck condemned the latter, but Einstein was right. Then other physicists contributed. The next huge conceptual breakthrough was De Broglie’s matter waves. Then CIQ (Copenhagen Interpretation Quantum) arose with correct physics, admirable math, but a sick un-realistic metaphysics. De Broglie objected and rolled out a realistic model of fundamental physics. Einstein seconded De Broglie, but they were overwhelmed by the launch of QED by Dirac. Then all sorts of strange and marvellous high energy zoo, then QFT, etc.

Nevertheless, after exchanges with Karl Popper, Einstein wrote the EPR paper on nonlocality, in 1935… EPR criticized Quantum Physics and its nonlocality from the “realistic” point of view. I am also all for Sub Quantum Physical Reality (SQPR), but I have an axiom neither De Broglie nor Einstein had. Science progresses one axiom at a time…

However, as the decades passed, and I deepened my understanding, I realized that Einstein’s admirable work was not as revolutionary and crazy as needed. 

Simplicia: The funny thing is that Einstein discovered nonlocality in the 1935 EPR paper. Which is one of the top ten papers in theoretical physics, and very hot today, as Quantum Computers use nonlocality.

Tyranosopher: Einstein was honest enough to not throw nonlocality out of the window. Maybe his conversation with the philosopher Karl Popper helped: Popper did contribute to the discovery of nonlocality. Einstein called nonlocality “spooky action at a distance”.

Simplicia: Now nonlocality is a proven experimental fact.

Tyranosopher: Yes the “SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE” which initially was a purely theoretical fact coming out of the axiomatics of Quantum Theory has been PROVEN over distances of many kilometers. One has to know the crucial difference of QUANTUM SPIN versus classical spin to see nonlocality clearly.

Chinese scientists have measured a minimum speed for this “spooky action at a distance”. I call it the QUANTUM INTERACTION, and assign to it a finite speed, TAU. This supplementary axiom contradicts Quantum Theory. 

Instead, classical Twentieth Century Quantum Physics says that Quantum Entanglement proceeds at infinite speed.

So this supplementary axiom of propagating finite speed nonlocality should be experimentally testable. I claim the proof of a finite speed for the Quantum Interaction is all around us: Dark Matter and Dark Energy are the results of this experiment, conducted for free by the universe itself. Amen.

Simplicia: What do you mean that nonlocality has been proven? Your friend Ian Miller, who is a physical chemist, denies a proof was achieved.

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Tyranosopher: I admire Ian, he is a renaissance man, but don’t understand his arguments in this particular case. There are countless variants and proofs under the label “Bell’s theorem” in a jungle of tweaked axiomatics. Ian uses the classical Noether’s theorem… which doesn’t apply to Quantum situations. For once I will use an authority argument. The Nobel was given to nonlocality in 2022, and should have been given at least two decades ago to Alain Aspect. That could have helped physics.

To understand the simplest quantifiable proof of nonlocality one has to know about Quantum Spin and what has been experimentally discovered. Quantum Spin does NOT behave like Classical Spin. Classical Spin can be measured in all directions simultaneously, but Quantum Spin can be measured in only one direction at a time, and that erases preceding measurement.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/11/10/proof-of-no-local-hidden-variables-from-magnets/

Building up on Einstein’s 1935 EPR, the simplest Quantum Entanglement which can be studied over a distance was elaborated by David Bohm in the 1950s and then studied in detail by a very small group of physicists, including CERN theoretical high energy physics head, John Bell, in the 1960s, to produce an experimentally testable inequality… which was given the Physics Nobel for 2022.

Simplicia: OK, many people have thought this instantaneous nonlocality could be used for Faster Than Light, FTL.

Tyranosopher:  Maybe. But one has to distinguish FTL and FTL Communication. FTL for massive objects is impossible, except by transporting a space bubble, which is pure science fiction of the extravagant type.

However if SQPR is correct and TAU is finite, one should be able, theoretically speaking, to create energy imbalances at a distance, after an elaborate technological setup, and thus create FTLC channels. 

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QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT SEEMS TO PRODUCE FTLC: 

Suppose we produce a state of total spin zero shared by two particles. (Particle streams, in practice.)

We keep one going in circles around Earth, and send the other to Proxima Centauri, 4 lightyears away.

Now say that, after 4 years, we measure the spin in the z direction in the Earth neighborhood, and we find |+>. Then we know that the other particle has spin |-> at Proxima.

So our measurement at Earth created a spin down at Proxima… Instantaneously. 

Now, with particle streams and synchronized clocks one could easily transform this into an FTL Morse code….

Except for one Quantum difficulty: we do not know how to get a |+> state to start with. We have the same probability to create a |-> state…We can’t make a stream of I+> states to start with, so we can’t type our FTL Morse code to start with! It’s as if we told a cosmic monkey in another room to type, but he can’t select letters. 

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Hence the impossibility of Faster Than Light Communications rests only upon claiming to know something we know nothing about: can one NEVER EVER prepare, and, or NEVER EVER select Quantum states before measuring them? In other words, do Quantum States have tails? 

There is a so-called “Non Cloning” [of states] theorem…But the “proof” has a loophole (it depends upon assuming a unitary operator, thus denying there are quantum tails, exactly what it wants to prove) In truth, it’s an experimental problem: if what the prestigious French physicist Devoret at Yale and his collaborators is true, it has been possible to prepare some (contrived) Quantum states… but, SO FAR, it has not been possible to prepare Quantum states which happen to be ENTANGLED.

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When some physicists pretend Faster Than Light Communications are impossible, they pontificate, because, in truth, we don’t know. And science doesn’t progress one pontifex at a time, but one correct intuition at a time. The intuitive case for FTLC is growing as the Quantum amazes us ever more.

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What we know is that something we thought to be completely impossible, SWAPPING QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT, is not only possible, but now so amply demonstrated that it is central to various developing Quantum technologies. 

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SQPR assumes particles have complex structures, a linear part (the guiding wave) and a nonlinear part (the “particle”), the entire structure being unstable and prone to contracting at TAU, the collapse and entanglement speed. 

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However, Quantum Swapping shows that, somehow, one can have Quantum Interactions without collapse, namely the propagation of QE.

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Thus it is starting to smell as if one could interact with a particle’s extended presence without inducing collapse, and then select the type we like…

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Simplicia: Hence FTLC should be possible?

Tyranosopher: FTLC through Quantum Entanglement would not contradict Relativity, because it would not change anything to light clocks, or for the equation Force = d(mv/(1-vv/cc))/dt. There would be no mass transport.

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It all smells as if FTLC will become possible. That does not mean that Faster Than Light matter transport should be possible. The latter is impossible without warp drives.

Simplicia: Wait, don’t go. It is well known that FTL Communication leads to the breakdown of causality, and thus, sheer madness. Consider the excellent video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0M-wcHw5A

Tyranosopher: Yes, beautiful video. Minkowski spacetime diagrams. Einstein didn’t like them, he didn’t like either Minkowsky or “spacetime”. It was reciprocal: Minkowsky, who was Einstein’s physics professor at Zurich Polytechnic, ETA, called Albert a “lazy dog” and made sure he couldn’t get an academic appointment. Instead a friend got Einstein a job at the Patent Office in Bern.

Simplicia: Can we get to the point? You don’t like spacetime as a concept, so what?

Tyranosopher: Notice that they draw these spacetime diagrams all over the galaxy’s real space, in various places, and then they draw a contradiction. 

Simplicia: Yes, so what?

Tyranosopher: Relativity was invented by Henri Poincaré to describe local effects. Basically local speed makes local time of the speeding object run slow. A fast traveling light clock goes slow when going along the direction of the speed, at the speed. From there after quite a bit of half hidden logic, plus Michelson Morley type experiments which showed the undetectability of speed within a ship cabin not looking outside (the original Galileo imagery), one deduced length also contracted, and so did the local time of the moving device.  

Simplicia: Thanks for the two sentences recap of Relativity.

Tyranosopher: The slowing down of the local time was amply confirmed with fast particle like muons, and in a slightly different context, GPS computations crucially depend upon time contraction of the orbiting satellites.

Simplicia: And then? Why are spacetime diagrams bad?

Tyranosopher: Spacetime diagrams are tangent space objects. They are, at best, local approximations. Extending a spacetime diagram to Vega has degraded meaning. Einstein knew this, he mentioned somewhere that General Relativity violates the constancy of the speed of light. And that’s fairly obvious as light could be put in orbit around a black hole. Now the silly ones cry that time would be in orbit around said black hole, and bite its own tail, etc.  Grandchildren would kill all their grandparents, etc. Silly stuff: they confuse local and global, although that’s the bedrock of differential geometry. Differential geometry is locally flat (aka “Euclidean”) and globally curved (or even twisted). But this is not even the worst…

Simplicia: How come this is all not well-known.

T: Long ago I gave a seminar along these lines at Stanford. Many of the best and brightest were in attendance, Hawking, Penrose, Yau, Susskind, etc. and not too happy from what I said. But my point about General Relativity making no sense without Quantum is viewed as trivially obvious nowadays.

Simplicia: So you are saying one can’t just rotate the spacetime axes of a moving spaceship and make deductions?

T: One can make deductions, but one can’t make deductions where local time of a moving ship becomes global time, as in the video I linked above. Earth can synchronize time with Vega, Henri Poincaré described how that can be done. But one can’t synchronize time with a moving spaceship (as those who claim to have demonstrated that FTLC breaks causality to). 

If one sends an FTL message to a moving spaceship, it does not get it in our past. It gets it in our future. Our past and our future are local… to us, and… Vega, if we synchronized time with Vega. A really silly mistake. 

Simplicia: Please stop insulting fellow intellectuals, or they are not going to be fellows anymore. And why did you link to a false video?

Tyranosopher: Right, let me rephrase this: it has been known since the onset of Relativity that at speed simultaneity is violated. So cause and effect can look inverted in a moving ship relative to what they are in a co-moving frame. That’s basic.The video misses the point, although it looks so reasonable, with great graphics.

Therefore, in the Special Theory of Relativity, causality can only be established and defined in the co-moving frame. (Same for mass, let be said in passing. Even the otherwise excellent Richard Feynman makes that mistake in his lectures. The video I linked above makes that mistake).

So claiming Faster Than Light Communications violates causality is erroneous! 

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Simplicia: If and when do you think we can realize FTLC?

Tyranosopher: We are tantalizingly close. Some physicists (Devoret) adorned with prizes, glory and long careers claim that they can detect the preparation of a Quantum jump, and even that they can revert it. If that’s true, and we can apply that kind of selection to Quantum Spin, FTLC could be installed with Mars before humanity lands on the planet.

Simplicia: Are you serious?

Tyranosopher: Absolutely. 

Patrice Ayme  

Proof Of NO LOCAL Hidden Variables From Magnets

Abstract: Looked at it the right way, the Stern Gerlach experiment with three consecutive magnets oriented various ways, show that there can’t be LOCAL hidden variables. No need, to exhibit nonlocality, for the precise, but obscure logic of the Bell Inequality. The argument here is less mathematically precise, but more intuitive.

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Stern-Gerlach Magnets (SGM) reveal an aspect of the Quantum, namely the quantization of (some sort of) angular momentum. SGM launched in 1922 the saga of Quantum Spin (it turns out to be connected to deep pure geometry which had been developed independently by Élie Cartan, a decade earlier). Drive an electron, or (appropriate) atomic beam through a SGM, and one will get two dots, one up, one down. Whatever the axis of the SGM [1]. (The SGM is just a magnetic field with a specific linear direction.) 

That means, at the emotional level that, at the smallest scale, spin, the electronic (sort of) angular momentum, or the orbital (sort of) angular momentum, reduce to UP and DOWN. First surprise. (This is actually the case of Spin 1/2, the simplest, such as for an electron; we are trying to learn the most from the simplest case.)

Say the first SGM is vertical (magnetic field along “z axis”) and a second SGM is horizontal (mag field along “x axis”). Call them respectively SGMV and SGMH. So SGMH produces LEFT-RIGHT beams. Put SGMH across the UP beam coming out of SGMV. One could call that beam SGMV (UP). Once goes through SGMH, one will get 50-50 LEFT-RIGHT. No surprise there.

Now say one selects the RIGHT beam coming out SGMH. Call that beam SGMH (UP; RIGHT)… because first the beam went up, then the beam went right.  

Naively one would expect, from classical mechanics, that SGMH (UP; RIGHT) to have kept a memory of its initial source as SGMV(UP). 

That would be to assume that beam SGMV (UP) and its descendant SGMH (UP;  RIGHT) to have kept some memory, in other words that some that the beams through the first SGMV and then the second SGM to harbor some LOCAL HIDDEN VARIABLES.

But that’s not the case. 

Indeed, please run SGMH (UP; RIGHT) into a second SGMV (that is a Stern Gerlach Magnet parallel to the first magnet SGMV… Call that second vertical Stern Gerlach Magnet SGMV2 One gets fifty-fifty UP and DOWN coming out of SGMV2. It is as if the initial Stern Gerlach, SGMV, never happened. (This set-up is presented in Feynman Lectures on Physics III, Chapter 6, Spin 1/2)

So if there were local hidden variables carried after SGMV that is in the beam SGMV (UP), they got somehow completely eradicated by getting into the beam SGMH (RIGHT).

So these proposed local hidden variables do not stay hidden inside the “particle”: an outside agent can erase them…. Thus those putative local hidden variables aren’t really “local” anymore: the environment impacts them, outside of the particle, and drastically so, just as the potential impacts the phase of an electron in the Bohm-Aharonov experiment… non locally.

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One can rerun the experiment, by using both beams SGMH (RIGHT) and SGMH (RIGHT), mixing them up. Then it turns out that SGMV2 deflects ONLY UP. So simply going through magnet SGMH, WITHOUT selecting a beam (either SGMH(LEFT) or SMGH (RIGHT)) doesn’t do anything: a collapsing of the Quantum space available to the Quantum wave, selecting either left or right space, is what does something.

Conventional Quantum Physics, newish, path integral version, phrases this by saying one can’t say which path has been followed [2] to keep the information SGV UP or SGV DOWN.  Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum (CIQ) simply says that selecting beam SGMH (RIGHT) is a measurement thus collapses the wave function… SQPR says roughly the same thing.

In any case, this eradication of the influence of SGMH on the “particle” by just keeping open the OTHER beam, which the putative local hidden variable “particle” is by definition NOT taking, is itself a NONLOCAL effect, thus once again demolishing the “LOCAL Hidden Variable” concept. (One could say that one beam is entangled with the other…)

The advantage of this conceptual approach is that it exhibits directly the nonlocality… without hermetic complications [3]. It also shows the interest of a more philosophical rather than purely formalistic approach to physics.

Patrice Ayme
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[1] Wolfgang Pauli in 1924 was the first to propose a doubling of the number of available electron states due to a two-valued non-classical “hidden rotation“. In 1925, George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit suggested the simple physical interpretation for spin of a particle spinning around its own axis… But clearly that doesn’t fit what is observed. Pauli built a mathematical machinery which reflected the observed GSM behavior. It turned out to be a particular case of deep mathematical work from the French mathematician Élie Cartan who was born and initially educated in the small Alpine coal mining village of La Mure, and rose through merit in the republican educational system. It’s a bit like taking the square root of space. I don’t understand it, neither did the extremely famous mathematician Atiyah…

It is easy to be blinded by the math. But actually the math describes an observed physical behavior. Now this behavior may arise from deeper geometrical reason 

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[2] In SQPR, the “particles” are preceded by the linear guiding waves. Blocking some of them triggers “collapse”. By selecting SGMH (RIGHT) one clearly collapses the linear guidance.

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[3] Stern Gerlach Magnets also directly illustrates Spin, as did in the first few lines above (magnetic field —> two dots!) The Pauli machinery is often how Spin is introduced in Quantum Physics courses, but that, philososophically is confusing the formalism derived from what is observed with the observation itself.

ENTANGLEMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS AT A DISTANCE: POSSIBLE. It Seems to be a Technological, NOT a Scientific, Problem!

 Abstract: Usual arguments against faster than light communications are flawed. Moreover, a way to make such faster than light communications using Quantum Nonlocality is surfacing…

The title will make pontiffs scream, and deride me as beyond the “fringe”. But I am writing for the future, not the past. Pontificating physicists hold that instantaneous communication at a distance are impossible. However, a closer examination shows that there is NO deep, DEMONSTRATED scientific principles at work in the denial that superluminal communications are possible.

Instead the proponents of impossibility of faster than light pretend we have demonstrated that nothing more can be said beyond the strictest interpretation of CIQ, the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum (this silliness started with an erroneous demonstration of the famous mathematician Von Neuman).

Such a matter of principle position is religiously superstitious, not based on experimentally demonstrated principles… And indications are that the preparation of Quantum Jumps/States can de detected, and reversed. If that is confirmed, it is entirely plausible that superluminal communications should be achievable by entangling particles which would have been transported classically previously… far apart, creating a superluminal telegraph.

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Doing physics correctly, and, more generally, doing thinking most correctly, consists in establishing what are the most significant facts and how to build the mightiest causal chains. A causal chain is mightier than another if it relates more significant facts.

Faster than light communications between mythological beings were natural. However in the 17C, Dutch astronomer Roemer discovered delays in the motion of Jupiter’s satellites best explained by a finite speed of light. Fizeau confirmed the finite light speed in the lab, using fast wheels with teeth, during the 19C… while the speed of light showed up in the equations of electromagnetism, Maxwell found out, to the point he concluded that electromagnetism was light. 

French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier determined in 1859 that the elliptical orbit of Mercury precesses at a significantly different rate from that predicted by Newtonian theory… in which the speed of gravitation was infinite, a simplification Newton found “absurd” to any “philosopher” versed in the observation of nature (how could there be any other?) Einstein and his collaborators integrated Laplace’s finite gravitational speed idea, in conjunction with the theory of Relativity, to produce a modified theory of gravitation, where gravitation travels at the speed of light.

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WANT BETTER PHYSICS? GET BETTER PHILOSOPHY!

Out of all this came a mood: no interaction can go faster than light. For weird reasons, all crows crowing the same, and mental confusion, the mentality which evolved in the herd of most physicists was that causality would be destroyed were any communication went faster than light. 

But a mood is no proof. 

Detailed considerations of the logics used by the herd found them coming short. Basically, Relativity is local, whereas communications at a distance are… at a distance, by definition (a philosophical point)… Thus, relativity does not apply, or at least, does not apply as an ABSOLUTE principle in the matter of causality: 

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2020/08/25/kill-locality-to-save-causality-and-objective-reality/

This is the Standard CIQ, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum is seriously nuts. Here it is above. So crazy many physicists prefer to it it the thoroughly demented Many Worlds Interpretation (MIW), which says an infinity of worlds is created during each interaction. An infinity of infinites infinitely happening? Not serious!

Quantum Physics says there is such a thing as QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. The basic reason is that Quantum Physics computes with waves. Those waves wave in various spaces, depending on the configuration of the situation (which are Hilbert spaces, and called “configuration spaces”, because they depict the configuration of the situation). What these spaces are supposed to is controversial (Schrodinger Cat Paradox): we need a theory ordering those spaces, but never mind…

After an interaction in some cases, two particles, Alice (A) and Bob (B), can be created which are “Quantum Entangled” (Schrodinger chose the word “entangled”, in English!) What “entangled” means is that the computation of what happens, probably, with these two particles, A and B, is described by a SINGLE wave.  A measurement consists of analyzing, thus destroying this common wave [1]. THUS, measuring a feature of A creates the same feature in B. The problem is that A and B can be ten light years away [2].

Popper and Einstein discovered this “EPR” situation. Ironically enough, Einstein, one of the founders of Quantum Physics, and an expert in fields, which are local, found Quantum Physics in contradiction with Locality. It is described that Einstein found that “spooky” interaction at a distance. However what Albert said in German was spukhafte Fernwirkung, which rather means “ghostly”, unreal… But in truth if the interaction at a distance didn’t happen, things as simple as angular momentum conservation would be violated. So it has to be there. And it is, experiments have confirmed.

Many self-described mainstream herd physicists insist that at-a-distance communications are impossible. However, their reasoning are faulty. First, as I said the argument that at a distance, faster than light would destroy causality is not correct, it rests on a shallow interpretation of Relativity, and a category mistake. But then those same physicists use what they view as the definitive argument that it cannot be done with present technology:

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How To Achieve Communications At A Distance: A Technological, Not Scientific Problem:

Suppose we could make it so that a particular feature of A (say spin in the x direction) would always come out the same. Then it would be the same at B, and thus we could communicate. Mainstream physicists say: oh, but God plays with dice, and it is impossible to prepare Quantum States. How do they know this? Oh, because Homo Erectus couldn’t do it, and was a friend of “God”? God or Godot? 

However that is purely a technological question. Scientists at Yale, professor Devoret and his laboratory, have claimed they can see Quantum Jumps being prepared, and can reverse those preparations.  This hints that we may be able to select Quantum States by deliberate action. All what’s left then to do to achieve at a distance communications is to select pairs of particle A and B with such states where we could entangle them. 

Some will sneer this is just one APPLIED physics lab. Now it turns out that as a recent Nature article has it, Quantum Tunneling takes time (it takes no time in strict CIQ). There again, it smacks of inner, SUB QUANTIC machinery at work (Sub Quantum Physical Reality, SQPR pointing its entangling nose…)

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So the impossibility of communications at a distance boils down to just one thing: the belief that God plays dice with the universe, as a matter of faith (ironically, Albert Einstein was explicitly against the notion, as he invented it, just to decry it; I say ironically as many of the disbelievers in superluminality on principle pretend to worship Einstein…).

How do those believers know that their faith is correct? Because they are on a personal basis with Dog?

Quantum entanglement experiments have been realized between an atom, say, and a photon. The Yale experimenters detected the preparation of a Quantum State Jump, and claimed they could reverse the preparation. Philosophically speaking, supposing the Yale experiments are thoroughly confirmed, as the nonlocality was, this means that the establishment of supraluminal networks is a matter of when, not if.

To go further in the philosophy of nature, this further demolishes the “It From Bit” philosophy of Wheeler and others. Wheeler was a famous physicist and Feynman PhD advisor… and also advisor of the guy who invented the Many World Interpretation…

To be more specific: what I allege above is that the state of the art of the edge of most probable science shows that superluminal communications is becoming just a technological problem (namely finding the right classically transportable materials to entangle and store).

But I am not pretending that that we will be capable of superluminally transport mass-energy. So, if what I am saying is right, a distinction would appear between pure information and mass-energy: information could go faster than light, but not mass-energy… at least for the foreseeable future (many thinkers have insisted there was no distinction between information and mass-energy, because, prior to this analysis, there was no way to transport information without transporting mass-energy).

I fear for my reputation not: Science advances, but the logic of mussels does not.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: In SQPR theory, the Quantum Interaction proceeds at finite speed. Thus, so will communications using the EPR and prepared states, as suggested above. But the speed will be much higher than light. Of course establishing such superluminal networks will be cosmically difficult.

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[1] Analysis comes from thoroughly dissecting: from the Greek, ana “up, back, throughout” + lysis “a loosening, a cutting through”… No wonder the deepest thinkers are deeply resented for their thoroughly cutting…

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[2] Distant particles which have interacted in the past, but not yet measured, remain connected, instantaneously sharing their physical states no matter how great the distance which separates them. This connection is known as Quantum Entanglement, and it underpins the way Quantum Physics turns locality into globality, the infinitesimally small do the grand and cosmic. .

Einstein thought Quantum Mechanics was ‘spooky’ because of the instantaneousness of the apparent remote interaction between two entangled particles, which seemed incompatible with some elements of Relativity.

Later, CERN Theoretical Physics head, Sir John Bell, formalised the Bohm variant of the EPR concept of nonlocal interaction by describing a strong form of entanglement exhibiting this spookiness. Bell entanglement is being harnessed in practical applications like quantum computing and cryptography.

FREE WILL SHOWS QUANTUM PHYSICS IS INCOMPLETE

Present Day Quantum Physics Is Entangled With Photon Awareness, While Contradicting Free Will, In A Most Peculiar Way…

Abstract: The Axiomatics of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum is written as if photons were aware of slits-at-a-distance… And as if photons acted accordingly (as if photons cared about slits!)… But the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum provides NO mechanism for photons to take care of slits. This is absurd in two ways. It’s as if an anthropomorphic Mr. Photon was supposed to be telepathetic. Another problem with the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum (“CIQ”) is that CIQ Quantum Physics, being deterministic, denies Free Will.

Conclusion: Quantum Theory is not the final story. Guiding Wave theories with delayed causality, such as SQPR, are necessary to reduce the nonsense.

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We act, we decide, we initiate actions. Can we insert this faculty for action of our own Free Will, this human agency, into the general picture of nature (“physics”) that we presently have? No! Because physics as we know it is deterministic… And we are not! (Quantum Physics, contrarily to its repute, is deterministic… as long as its nonlocal effects are not considered…) 

Thus the humanity-as-an-independent-agent question leads to the depths of the human mind and its relationship with physical reality, throwing up profound connections to the mysteries of entropy (disorder augments… something biology violates) and the arrow of time (time flowing one way… although fundamental physics flow both ways, contradicting even entropy as fundamental). Even reality gets questioned (what is it?) and consciousness (what could it be?) Surprising answers are readily discernible. 

“Quantum fields don’t have any agency. Atoms don’t, do bacteria?” asks physicist Sean Carroll from the California Institute of Technology. “I don’t know, but human beings do. Somewhere along that continuum it sneaked in.”

Quantum Determinism a la Copenhagen Means We Have No Freedom Of Choice

Well, it is not even as simple as believing “agency” sprouts between things more complicated than atoms and human beings. Let me make a ridiculously simple observation. 

Take the 2 slit exp. This phenomenon is the conceptual heart of Quantum Physics. If we take the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum (CIQ, pronounced “SICK”), at face value, something astounding occurs: it looks as if an electron, or a photon, has AWARENESS. 

Indeed, according to Einstein, a photon in flight is a localized concentrated “quantum” (Einstein wrote about “Lichtquanten”, light quanta; they got named “photons” 20 years later). 

The following is exactly what Albert wrote, in his otherwise beautiful Nobel Prize winning paper on the photoelectric effect, and has been viewed as definitive truth ever since: “Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING…” (I view this Einstein unsupported opinion as a grave error which the herd has made ever since… But I am going to proceed, for the sake of argument, as if this ridiculous idea were true, in the next few lines!)

When one cuts two slits in a screen, a photon (going through just one slit, according to Einstein) somehow knows about the other slit. How? Certainly not by having Mr. Photon look over at the other slit. So, then, what is the root, the nature of this photon “awareness”, Einstein and his followers want us to believe in? 

A photon is aware of the other slit: could such an elementary particle’s awareness at a distance be the fundamental “element of consciousness“? (I am sarcastically parroting terminology of Einstein in 1935, introducing the notion of “elements of reality”) 

A shallow philosopher could chuckle that all consciousness comes from sensation, which comes from senses… And obviously the photon has no senses… Except, somehow, according to Einstein and CIQ, the photon (or any fundamental particle) senses the other slit at a distance (always under Einstein’s locality-of-the-quantum hypothesis, which permeates modern physics, a pervading poison gas)… So, according to them, the photon has a sense, somehow. 

Experiments With Bouncing Droplets such as these three above, were started in Paris in the Twenty-First Century. They provide with the first analogy to guide De Broglie’s Pilot Wave Theory of 1927 and the much more sophisticated SQPR… A problem for the Pilot Wave Theories being that we have NO mathematical models… As mathematicians prefer often to focus on silly problems posed by infinities, the modern analogue of the worry an infinite number of sitting angels on pinheads posed to Middle Age Catholic bishops….

“The surface waves generated by the silicon oil droplets above are analogous to quantum mechanical waves that guide the dynamics of quantum particles. While the droplets move like quantum particles, they behave like quantum waves.”… says award winning photographer and physicist Dr Aleks Labuda, who took the picture above.

Guiding Wave (GW) partisans, such as yours truly, don’t have the problem of the telepathic, all aware photon endowed with Free Will: the Guiding Waves go through both slits of the 2 slit experiment, and thereafter “guides” the photon accordingly to the presence of these two slits. (The experimental models of the 2 slits, with bouncing liquid balls, exists… and thus have attracted great hatred from partisans of the Copenhagen Interpretation, such as from the grandson of Niels Bohr, himself a physicist. I will not put links, so as not to confuse readers…)

So, basically, if one rejects a strange photon “awareness”, implicitly assumed by CIQ, one is immediately led to Guiding Waves theories. To this people familiar with the Foundations of Quantum Physics may retort that a GW theory such as De Broglie-Bohm is indistinguishable from CIQ. Right. But I don’t think De Broglie-Bohm Guiding Wave can withstand the EPR 1935. Moreover, my own theory, SQPR, is distinguishable from CIQ: SQPR produces Dark Matter… CIQ doesn’t.

In any case, a GW theory is a mechanical, non local, field of awareness (Bohm makes it into a Quantum Potential). [1]

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With Quantum Physics, we find ourselves back into the ultra-deterministic setting of the Eighteenth Century… But now with a theory which claims to understand everything (whereas in the 18C-19C, some pieces were missing, and not just the two clouds on the horizon  Lord Kelvin saw in the distance…) So the Quantum should explain Consciousness, Free Will… As it explains the universe. But, clearly, it contradicts Free Will… EXCEPT, if one considers nonlocal effects. Nonlocal effects violate local determinism.

The preceding essay stands as a testimony of the usefulness of the philosophical approach to dig deeper into what physics should become in the (hopefully) near future [2]. Not that it was ever different each time physics jumped ahead. All revolutions in physics have been revolutions in philosophy… and the most general revolutions in philosophy often preceded revolutions in physics and science in general [3]. For example, the Renaissance of the Eleventh Century preceded the Buridan (and his schools!) astronomical, physical and mathematical revolution after 1350 CE. In turn it may have accelerated the Fifteenth-Sixteenth Century philosophical Renaissance which clearly led to the Seventeenth Century scientific and technological revolutions, an ambitious protest against more modest understanding.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] One thing that makes SQPR different from De Broglie-Bohm (DBB), is that SQPR supposes the Guiding Field proceeds, expanding or collapsing, at an extremely fast… but NOT infinite… speed. Another is that the Guiding Field carries minute, but non zero mass-energy. Both effects together predict the Dark Matter effect… Also SQPR makes Quantum Entanglement a mass-energy conveyor, hence non-magical, another deviation from both CIQ and DBB…

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[2] Quantum Computers exploit the Foundations of the Quantum… but not through the brute force of Quantum Field Theory and its (glaringly very incomplete and haphazard) “Standard Model” ….the one with no model for Dark Matter or Dark Energy. So Quantum Computers bring the foundations, such as Quantum Entanglement, crucial for their operations, into focus… Hence expect foundations to become ever more crucial in the common Zeitgeist…

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[3] This is particularly blatant reading Descartes, who justified his enormous advances in mathematics with a cocktail of philosophical and psychological observations of the most judicious types. Just as I question infinity, Descartes questioned the sort of proofs mathematicians had been satisfied with for two millennia… and did something about it (by inventing Algebraic Geometry)….

CONSCIOUSNESS, ATOM OF THOUGHT, Atom of Computing: All Found In Electrons?

Consciousness: we know we have it, we know many other animals have it, but we don’t know what it is.

Before we can answer this, a question naturally arises: so what is it, to know what it is? What is it, to be? “To be” is something our consciousness knows, when it perceives it. But we also need to know when something “is” to know when, how and if our consciousness is. 

In order to simplify our thinking on this arduous subject, existence entangled with consciousness, consider our most fundamental, hence simplest, theory. Consider Quantum Physics. Surely “existence” is defined there, as Quantum Physics deals with what is most fundamental. Take the simplest examples: photon, electron. What is an electron? In Quantum Physics, an electron is what one electron does. Isn’t that enlightening?

Shouldn’t consciousness be, what consciousness does?

Initially, electrons were just negatively charged particles. At least, so it was until Bohr. Then the description of the electron became much more complex. It turned out that electrons did occupy only some energy levels. Then came De Broglie, who said electrons did as waves he attached to them did. And it was found, indeed, that electrons did so. PAM Dirac then proposed the simplest “relativistic” equation for the electron (a more complicated, second degree PDE had been proposed before and couldn’t be made to predict what was observed). That requested something called “spinor space”…. Then in turn predicted electronic spin and the anti-electron, and both were observed.

(Important aside: the French mathematician Cartan had invented spinors earlier in pure geometry. Yes, invented: he built-in his brain the relevant neurological connections, that is, the relevant geometry.)

Thus what we now call the electron has become higher dimensional in logical space (logical space is the space spanned by independent axioms; I just made it up; that means there is a connection between logic and geometry… thus, in particular, arithmetic and geometry…).

By adding axioms to its description, the concept of electron has become richer… The electron is a richer concept in our consciousness.

Confronted to 2 slits, the electron acts as if it were choosing where to go, after them. Is that, not just a computation, but a primitive form of consciousness? What consciousness is made of? Hard to say for sure, at this point, but certainly a guess worth exploring: any theory of consciousness may have to take this, that the electron acts as if it were conscious, into account. 

We evolved as living beings, and the more complex we became, the more conscious. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s law of increasing complexity applies, and is exemplified, by the evolution of consciousness.. Consciousness is probably a law of physics, not an accident of history.

Some say:’oh, well, consciousness may not be that important’. Well, first at least three different phyla evolved it, independently, on Earth, vertebrates being only one of them. (As all trout fishers know, trouts act as if they were conscious, that’s why the experienced ones are so hard to catch, when the water is clear…)

But there is a much deeper objection to considering consciousness unimportant: what is the connection of consciousness to thinking? Could the atom of consciousness be the atom of thinking…. And precisely defined as Quantum Computation?

Indeed, consider programming as presently done with electronic computers: one thing after the other, just so very fast, yet, it is fundamentally desperately dumb. Present day computing, pre-Quantum Computing, can result in desperately slow computations. Whereas the electron can compute instantaneously (says a hopefully naive Quantum theory) that problems too complicated for our (pre-Quantum!) computers to handle, and find out, where the low energy solution is. That’s the superiority of Quantum Computing: tremendous, instantaneous, stupendous computation, right.

So, what looks like a type of consciousness, found in the translating electron, is not just an incredibly efficient way of computing, it is at the core of the efficiency of the world. Could it be the most primitive form, the atom of thinking?

Identifying fundamental quantum and fundamental thinking is an idea whose time has come… Philosophically speaking, in the most practical manner, it means that discursive logic will never cover the last mile…

Patrice Ayme

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Very Tangential Observations:

1. Albert Einstein ascribed properties to the photon, and the electron, which I claim, have not been observed (thus leading physics astray, straight into the Multiverse). However the ulterior formalism sort of implemented Einstein’s design (which is older than Einstein), attributing (sort of, or maybe not) a strict position to elementary particles… and was found to give excellent  results (namely QED, QCD, the “Standard Model”…) But Ptolemy too, gave good results. Thus, now, elementary particles are endowed with properties which, if I am right, are fake… It has often happened in science that a fake, or grossly incomplete theory will masquerade as true for a very long time: math is full of them (Non Euclidean geometry, etc.).
2.  The example of Non-Euclidean geometry is revealing: it was abandoned for brain-dead Euclidean geometry… Why did those Hellenistic regime Greeks opt for that silly form of mathematics? Because their superiors, various kings and tyrants, prefered silly. Because geometry in the plane was easier, a case of looking for the keys only below the lampost, because it’s simpler, and one is drunk. Let’s not repeat the mistake of having only simple thoughts, in the case of pondering consciousness, just because our superiors prefer simple thoughts, and are drunk on their power… Soon to be extinguished in great balls of nuclear fire…

Socrates On The Lake Of Selfishness

I write complicated essays using knowledge which is all too often so esoteric as to leave readers frozen in disbelief. This is the times of brainmolded masses (an attempt is made to get out of it by using Trump as a ‘human Molotov cocktail’). (“Brainmold” is a useful neologism: we are beyond ‘brainwashed’. Appropriately molded brains never need to be washed. They are always clean, approved by our rulers.)

Oftentimes a simple cartoon can go to the heart of the matter, giving a more marking sketch of a particular point. Such is the case with Socrates, a fundamentally inhuman philosopher, prominently driven in his actions, Plato wrote, by sex, drink, food, and delirious sophistry to better drown the subjects at hand. As long as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle enjoy a quasi-divine status, civilization will be at bay (Nietzsche nearly said). But enough said, sometimes it’s easier to drown that to drone on. Here we drown:

Socrates In A Nutshell. What’s Wrong With Him? The Big Picture.

[From “Existential Comics“.]

Highest, and deepest reasons are not about the next micro-step done right. If it were so, ants would be the most reasonable organisms. Highest, and deepest reason is about getting the big picture right. Humanity is a social phenomenon, where we learn not from the gods (as Socrates believed), but from the wisdom piled up by others. Thus, taking care of others is taking care of wisdom.

Somebody sent me mysterious messages I could not answer directly, coming to the defense of Socrates, telling me Plato was the real fascist, and that he, Plato, built up a fake Socrates, etc. Whatever: intellectuals have been in love, not to say awe, with Plato’s Socrates, fake or not. The fact the general amnesty was in the end overridden, just for Socrates, after the latter was to his old tricks, show that the “real” Socrates was surely anti-democratic, just like the “fake” one.

Socrates depended upon his rich friends, boyfriends, and lovers’ money, the money of Athens’ golden youth. That makes his critique of the Sophists all the strangest, and reflecting an hypocritical mood.

Verily, when thinking depends upon money, civilization turns into barbarity.

Nobel laureate says his scientific breakthrough on the accelerating universe ‘would not be possible’ today. Saul Perlmutter says that there is a ‘fundamental misunderstanding’ of the purpose of research: ‘the current funding climate means researchers are “very good at not wasting any money and also not good at making any discoveries”. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 after leading one of two teams that simultaneously discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Speaking at the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit at Berkeley on 28 September, Professor Perlmutter said: “In the modern-day context there’s a tendency to ask: ‘What is it that you are planning to research? When will you finish it? And what day will your discovery be made?’”

Perlmutter said that it took 10 years for him to make the discovery that led to the Nobel prize, during which time he was working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is supported by the US government’s department of energy. “I don’t think this particular project I’m describing would have happened in today’s funding environment. I think that would be very difficult in a world where you are managing every last cent and making sure you don’t waste any money.”

We are coming onto a world where machines will do the work. A world in which machines will do most of what constitute work now. What will humans do, what should they do? They should think as deeply as possible, and that means as sincerely as possible. Socrates’ refusal to see when people, or a civilization, his civilization was drowning, is not the most educational paradigm to emulate.

The age of robots & Artificial Intelligence will also be that of the deepest thinking, or won’t be. Because never have been the problems we can solve and have to solve, been as complex. The sustainability of the biosphere itself depends upon the deepest thinking imaginable, or won’t be. To strive towards the deepest methods, we have to eschew the Socratic method of cutting hair into pieces, somewhere out there, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Hypo-crisy means to be under-critical. By refusing to address what the problem really is, by claiming no animal knows anything,  Socrates is not just ridiculous, he insults the very concept of brains, and thus civilization itself. That puts him roughly at the level of the Islamist State, and this is exactly what a jury of 2,000 of his peers in Athens decided.

Patrice Ayme’

Is “Spacetime” Important?

Revolutions spawn from, and contributes to, the revolutionary mood. It is no coincidence that many revolutionary ideas in science: Chemistry (Lavoisier), Biological Evolution (Lamarck), Lagrangians, Black Holes,, Fourier Analysis, Thermodynamics (Carnot), Wave Optics, (Young, Poisson), Ampere’s Electrodynamics spawned roughly at the same time and place, around the French Revolution.

In the Encyclopedie, under the term dimension Jean le Rond d’Alembert speculated that time might be considered a fourth dimension… if the idea was not too novel. Joseph Louis Lagrange in his ), wrote that: “One may view mechanics as a geometry of four dimensions…” (Theory of Analytic Functions, 1797.) The idea of spacetime is to view reality as a four dimensional manifold, something measured by the “Real Line” going in four directions.

There is, it turns out a huge problem with this: R, the real line, has what is called a separated topology: points have distinct neighborhoods. However, the QUANTUM world is not like that, not at all. Countless experiments, and the most basic logic, show this:

Reality Does Not Care About Speed, & The Relativity It Brings

Manifolds were defined by Bernhard Riemann in 1866 (shortly before he died, still young, of tuberculosis). A manifold is made of chunks (technically: neighborhoods), each of them diffeomorphic to a neighborhood in R^n (thus a deformed piece of R^n, see tech annex).

Einstein admitted that there was a huge problem with the “now” in physics (even if one confines oneself to his own set-ups in Relativity theories). Worse: the Quantum changes completely the problem of the “now”… Let alone the “here”.

In 1905, Henri Poincaré showed that by taking time to be an imaginary fourth spacetime coordinate (√−1 c t), a Lorentz transformation can be regarded as a rotation of coordinates in a four-dimensional Euclidean space with three real coordinates representing space, and one imaginary coordinate, representing time, as the fourth dimension.

— Hermann Minkowski, 1907, Einstein’s professor in Zurich concluded: “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

This remark rests on Lorentz’s work, how to go from coordinates (x, t) to (x’, t’). In the simplest case:

C is the speed of light. Lorentz found one needed such transformations to respect electrodynamics. If v/c is zero (as it is if one suppose the speed v to be negligible  relative to c, the speed of light infinite), one gets:

t = t’

x’ = x – vt

The first equation exhibits universal time: time does not depend upon the frame of reference. But notice that the second equation mixes space and time already. Thus, philosophically speaking, proclaiming “spacetime” could have been done before. Now, in so-called “General Relativity”, there are problems with “time-like” geodesics (but they would surface long after Minkowski’s death).

Another problem with conceptually equating time and space is that time is not space: space dimensions have a plus sign, time a minus sign (something Quantum Field Theory often ignores by putting pluses everywhere in computations)

In any case, I hope this makes clear that, philosophically, just looking at the equations, “spacetime” does not have to be an important concept.

And Quantum Physics seems to say that it is not: the QUANTUM INTERACTION (QI; my neologism) is (apparently, so far) INSTANTANEOUS (like old fashion time).

As we saw precedingly (“Can Space Be Faster Than Light“), the top cosmologists are arguing whether the speed of space can be viewed as faster than light. Call that the Cosmic Inflation Interaction (CII; it has its own hypothesized exchange particle, the “Inflaton”). We see that c, the speed of light is less than CII, and may, or may not be related to QI (standard Quantum Physics implicitly assumes that the speed of the Quantum Interaction QI is infinite).

One thing is sure: we are very far from TOE, the “Theory Of Everything”, which physicists anxious to appear as the world’s smartest organisms, with all the power and wealth to go with it, taunted for decades.

Patrice Ayme’

Tech Annex: R is the real line, RxR = R^2, the plane, RxRxR = R^3 the usual three dimensional space, etc. Spacetime was initially viewed as just RxRxRxR = R^4.]What does diffeomorphic mean? It means a copy which can be shrunk or dilated somewhat in all imaginable ways, perhaps (but without breaks, and so that all points can be tracked; a diffeomorphism does this, and so do all its derivatives).

Non-Linear Us

Nature is not nature, ever since there are humans, and they think. Earth has been terraformed, made into a garden, a human garden, in the last few million years. By ours truly.

Neanderthals started to used coal (lignite), 80,000 years ago.They also domesticated (that is, modified) European wolves, and invested in real estate, by exterminating Cave Bears.

Thus, following “nature” is a non-linear activity, as, by following nature, we also follow the new nature we deconstructed and rebuilt, that is, we follow ourselves.

Linearity Is The Penultimate Mathematical Simplification

The simplest thing is to view all causes as constant. The next simplification is to view them as linear. After that quadratic, cubic, and all powers etc… The exponential, an infinite sum of powers with fast decreasing coefficients, grows as fast, at any point, as its own value. So it’s all over nature.

“Following nature” thus does not just mean hugging trees. It also means dealing with trees the old fashion way: cutting and burning them, to favor plants and animals human beings were involved with (fires in Indonesia are contributing at least one gigaton of carbon to the atmosphere in 2015, making them an appreciable source of CO2). “Following nature” also means using genetic engineering on plants and beasts alike.

Nature has been artificial from even before the rise of civilization. Prehistoric men in Europe already conducted advanced and successful surgeries, from trepanations, to amputations, complete with anesthetics and antibiotics (parts of that knowledge got completely forgotten during the European Middle Ages… to this day!) “Facts” nowadays are all what influences humans, because they, in turn, change nature. Including hopes, systems of mood (“austerity!”, “Islam!”).

The fundamental calculus assigned to (say) Stoics, is the fundamental calculus of humanity. To mostly quote Massimo P’s “New Stoicism, Part IV”:

“physics” (i.e., natural science and metaphysics), “logic” (i.e., logic, epistemology and psychology), and “ethics” (i.e., ethics)… the first two are instrumental to the third one: one cannot decide how to live (the proper domain of ethics) if one doesn’t know how to reason well (logic) and doesn’t also know whatever we can know about the reality of nature (physics). This implies that whenever our understanding of physics changes we need to update our beliefs accordingly, and then examine (via the use of logic) whether and to what extent that also affects our ethics.”

Human evolution discovered, so to speak, this virtuous spiral of understanding and behaving. The species modified itself accordingly, it became that spiral. it is now more energetic than ever.

One cannot read morality straight out of scientific facts, because facts are about the world, and the world is about what we constructed. Thus the calculus of human hope, desire and risk evaluation has to be factored in… And it keeps on changing, the more it reflects on the agitated waters of its darkest soul.

Fundamentally, then, the human species is immensely adaptative (see future Martians): to act, human agents consider human minds, and what their activities wrought (nature). We can call ourselves new names, but our new game is the same as our old game: changing the rules as we see fit, the more we learn, and the more we change nature.

There is no general theory of non-linear mathematics. How could there be? It would be as having a theory of us. Yet we are all about the changes we decide. And how do we decide? This is not an obvious question, it has hounded fundamental physics, ever since the EPR paper of 1935. It is so non-obvious that it is the last loophole to check in the Non-Local aspect of the universe. See the New York Times, October 21, 2015: “Sorry, Einstein. Quantum Study Suggests ‘Spooky Action’ Is Real.”

To quote from there: “the National Science Foundation has financed a group of physicists led by Dr. Kaiser and Alan H. Guth, also at M.I.T., to attempt an experiment that will have a better chance of ensuring the complete independence of the measurement detectors by gathering light from distant objects on different sides of the galaxy next year, and then going a step further by capturing the light from objects known as quasars near the edge of the universe in 2017 and 2018.”

Translation: our presumed influence on the universe is so vast, subtle and pernicious, that quasars apparently receding much faster than the speed of light, are called to the rescue of physicists who want to make sure they reach beyond man, to an unspoiled universe.

We are everywhere we look, at least in our terrestrial neighborhood. Everywhere we reach, human influence has already changed everything. It’s not just about the melting icecaps.

Patrice Ayme’

REALITY: At Your COMMAND, FASTER Than LIGHT

Feynman:”It is safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics.” 

Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Nature: “That’s how the world works.”

Wilzcek (Physics Nobel Prize): “Naïveté is doing the same thing over and over, and always expecting the same result.”

Parmenides, the ancient Greek philosopher, theorized that reality is unchanging and indivisible and that movement is an illusion. Zeno, a student of Parmenides, devised four famous paradoxes to illustrate the logical difficulties in the very concept of motion. Zeno’s arrow paradox starts and ends this way:

• If you know where an arrow is, you know everything about its physical state….

• The arrow does not move…

Classical Mechanics found the first point to be erroneous. To know the state of a particle, one must know not only its position X, but also its velocity and mass (what’s called its momentum P). Something similar happens with Quantum Physics. To know the state of a particle, we need to know whether the state of what it has interacted with before…  exists, or not. According to old fashion metaphysics, that’s beyond weird. It’s simply incomprehensible.

The EPR Interaction: Zein Und Zeit. For Real.

[The Nazi philosopher Heidegger, an ex would-be priest, wrote a famous book “Being And Time“. However, rather than a fascist fantasy, the EPR is exactly about that level of depth: how existence and time come to be! And how those interact with our will…]

With that information, X and P, position and momentum, for each particle, classical mechanics predicts a set of particles’ future evolution completely. (Formally dynamic evolution satisfies a second order linear differential equation. That was thoroughly checked by thousands of officers of gunnery, worldwide, over the last five centuries.)

Highly predicting classical mechanics is the model of Einstein Sanity.

Aristotle had ignored the notion of momentum, P. For Aristotle, one needed a force to maintain motion (an objective proof of Aristotle’s stupidity; no wonder Aristotle supported, and instigated, fascist dictatorship as the best system of governance). Around 1320 CE, the Parisian genius Buridan declared that Aristotle was completely wrong and introduced momentum P, calling it “IMPETUS”.

May we be in a similar situation? Just like the Ancient Greeks had ignored P, is Quantum Wave Mechanics incomplete from an inadequate concept of what a complete description of the world is?

Einstein thought so, and demonstrated it to his satisfaction in his EPR Thought Experiment. The EPR paper basically observed that, according to the Quantum Axiomatics, two particles, after they interacted still formed JUST ONE WAVE. Einstein claimed that there had to exist hidden “elements of reality”, not yet identified in the (Copenhagen Interpretation of) quantum theory. Those heretofore hidden “elements of reality” would re-establish Einstein Sanity, Einstein feverishly hoped.

According to Einstein, following his friend Prince Louis De Broglie (to whom he had conferred the Doctorate) and maybe the philosopher Karl Popper (with whom he corresponded prior on non-locality), Quantum Mechanics appears random. But that randomness is only because of our ignorance of those “hidden variables.” Einstein’s demonstration rested on the impossibility of what he labelled “spooky action at a distance”.

That was an idea too far. The “spooky action at a distance” has been (amply) demonstrated in the meantime. Decades of experimental tests, including a “loophole-free” test published on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org last month, show that the world is like that: completely non-local everywhere.

In 1964, the physicist John Bell, CERN’s theory chief, working with David Bohm’s version of Einstein’s EPR thought experiment, identified an inequality obeyed by any physical theory that is both local — meaning that interactions don’t travel faster than light — and where the physical properties usually attributed to “particles” exist prior to “measurement.”

(As an interesting aside, Richard Feynman tried to steal Bell’s result, at a time when Bell was not famous, at least in the USA: a nice example of “French Theory” at work! And I love Feynman…)

Einstein’s hidden “elements of reality” probably exist, but they are NON-LOCAL. (Einstein was obsessed by locality; but that’s an error. All what can be said in favor of locality is that mathematics, and Field Theory, so far, are local: that’s the famous story of the drunk who looks for his keys under the lamp post, because that’s the only thing he sees.)

Either some physical influences travel faster than light, or some properties don’t exist before measurement. Or both

I believe both happen. Yes, both: reality is both faster than light, and it is pointwise fabricated by interactions (“measurement”). Because:

1. The EPR Thought Experiment established the faster than light influence (and that was checked experimentally).
2. But then some properties cannot exist prior to “EPR style influence”. Because, if they did, why do they have no influence whatsoever, once the EPR effect is launched?

Now visualize the “isolated” “particle”. It’s neither truly “isolated” nor truly a “particle”, as some of its properties have not come in existence yet. How to achieve this lack of existence elegantly? Through non-localization, as observed in the one-slit and two-slit experiments.

Why did I say that the “isolated” “particle” was not isolated? Because it interfered with some other “particle” before. Of course. Thus it’s EPR entangled with that prior “particle”. And when that “particle” is “measured” (namely INTERACTS with another “particle”), the so-called “isolated” “particle” gets changed, by the “spooky action at a distance”, at a speed much faster than light.

(This is no flight of fancy of mine, consecutive to some naïve misinterpretation; Zeilinger and Al. in Austria, back-checked the effect experimentally; Aspect in Paris and Zeilinger got the Wolf prize for their work on non-locality, so the appreciation for their art is not restricted to me!)

All these questions are extremely practical: they are at the heart of the difficulties in engineering a Quantum Computer.

Old physics is out of the window. The Quantum Computer is not here yet, because the new physics is not understood enough, yet.

Patrice Ayme’

NON-LOCALITY

Non-Locality, acting at a distance, without intermediaries, is the stuff of legends in tales for little children. A sorcerer does something somewhere, and something happens, or is felt, somewhere else. Newton himself rejected it. Isaac said the gravitation theory which he had helped to elaborate, was “absurd”, precisely because of it implicitly used “act upon another at a distance”:

“It is inconceivable that inanimate Matter should, without the Mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual Contact…That Gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to Matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance thro’ a Vacuum, without the Mediation of any thing else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”—Isaac Newton, Letters to Bentley, 1692/3.

Du Châtelet Discovered Energy, Infrared Radiation, Correcting Newton On His Confusion Of Momentum (Buridan) and Energy, Which She Established

[Yes, one of civilization’s most important physicists and thinkers was a woman; but don’t ask the French, they never heard of her… because she was a woman.]

However Émilie Du Châtelet pointed out that: “…hypotheses eventually become truths for us if their probability increases to such a point that this probability can morally pass for certainty…. In contrast, an hypothesis becomes improbable in proportion to the number of circumstances found for which the hypothesis does not give a reason. And finally, it becomes false when it is found to contradict a well-established observation.” (Du Châtelet’s Lectures on Physics, 1740. Notice the subtlety of the thinking.)

Every Quantum process contradicts Locality, thus, Émilie Du Châtelet would say, Locality is a false hypothesis.

Gravitation got better described (not much) by making gravitation into a field propagating at the speed of light. It is not a trivial modification: it immediately predicts gravitational waves. If two huge star like objects (such as pulsars) rotate around each other, they should generate such waves, they should carry energy away, and those two objects ought to fall towards each other at a predictable rate. Said rate is indeed observed, thus Einstein’s gravitational equation (obtained by talking a lot with others, such as Hilbert, Grasso, etc.) seems correct.

Einstein’s main motivation for his theory of “General Relativity” was that he wanted to explain inertia (why fast rotating planets develop a bulge at the equator, or more generally an acceleration VV/r). That worry, called Mach’s Principle, actually originated 100% with Newton. Newton put water in a pail, twisted and twisted and twisted a rope from which the pail was suspended, and let go: the pail rotated faster and faster, and the water inside crawled up.

Einstein basic wishful logic was that: gravitation = inertia (he called that the “Principle of Equivalence”). So, by making a theory of gravitation, Einstein would make one of inertia, and become a giant among giants (of Du Châtelet’s caliber, say).

Silly. Silly idea, doomed to fail.

Why silly? Once gravitation was made into a field, Einstein and company made it into curvature in a manifold (called “spacetime”; the basic idea was elaborated by genius Riemann, two generations earlier, although implicitly attributed to Einstein by the ignorant ones).

So gravitation is locally determined: once at a point A, gravitation, that is, curvature of spacetime, is determined in a(ny) neighborhood of A (call it N).

The distant stars do not influence N much, if at all. Yet, inertia is clearly determined by the distant galactic clusters.  Einstein could not understand this.

But now physicists understand better Einstein was deluded, and (Soviet physicist) Fock’s critique that Einstein’s General Relativity is just a theory of gravitation is universally (albeit silently) accepted.

So let me repeat slowly, as I suspect many readers will not understand this either: inertia, as far as present day physics can see, is a Non-Local effect. Inertia has been Non-Local, ever since Buridan discovered it, seven centuries ago (1320 CE; time flies!)

Einstein completely failed at understanding inertia. Einstein even failed to realize that it was a Non-Local effect, although that is completely obvious. So he came out obsessed by Non-Locality, while being angry at it (so he was open to the Non-Local objection of philosopher-physicist Sir Karl Popper! Hence the EPR paper, more or less lifted from Popper.)

All this to say that I am not shocked by Non-Locality: I just have to go out, and look at the stars, move about, and I see Non-Locality.

Many, if not most physicists are horrified by Non-Locality.

Philosophically, though, being afraid of Non-Locality makes no sense. Once I was broaching Quantum Physics with my dad. I explained what I understood of the problem of Non-Locality to him.

My dad did not know much physics, but he was a scientist. Admitted to the famed ENA (the school of conspirators from which the present leaders of France come from), he declined it, and, instead, following the path of his own father, an amateur-professional geologist, he himself became a (highly successful) non-academic geologist (he discovered Algeria’s fortune).

My Dad said: ”Non-Locality is obvious. To think things would get ever smaller, just the same, made no sense.”

With this philosophical perspective, the following arise: physical space is not made of points (although Quantum Field Theory is, one of its many problems).

When physicists talk about Non-Locality, they feel the urge to get into the “Bell Inequality”. But it’s a convoluted, over-specialized, contrived way to get at Non-Locality (I say this, although I respect the late John Bell as much as I despise Feynman when he tried to steal Bell’s work… Although, in general I do respect and love Feynman, especially in light of his appreciation for my own ideas).

Bell theorem says that some Local Hidden Variable theories imply an Inequality that Quantum Physics violate. So Bell’s is a work which predicts that something false is not true.

My approach to Non-Locality is made for Primary School. It goes first through:

• The Uncertainty Principle:

Suppose you want to know where an object is. Suppose all you have is touch. So you kick it. However, if you kick it, it goes somewhere else. That’s the Uncertainty Principle.

Why touch? Because light is touch. It turns out that light carries energy and momentum. Anybody who lays in the sun will agree about the energy. To demonstrate the momentum of light requires a bit more experimental subtlety.

Could you kick the object gently? No. That’s where the Wave Principle kicks in. Waves ignore objects which are smaller than themselves: they just turn around them, as anybody who has seen a twenty meter tsunami wave enter a Japanese port will testify.

So, to detect a small object, one needs a small wavelength, high frequency wave. However the energy of a Quantum wave (at least a light wave) is proportional to its frequency.

So the more precise the determination of (position of) the object, the higher the frequency of the wave, the greater the energy and momentum conferred to the object, etc.

• Conservation of Momentum: 

One has axioms, in physics, as in mathematics. Modern physics axioms include the conservation of energy and momentum. Newton knew of the latter, and confused it with the former. A French woman, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet discovered (kinetic) energy (”force vive”). As she also discovered Infrared radiation, she obviously could have done more when she died from a fever, at age 43, after giving birth to her fourth child. (Her lover Voltaire, also a physicist quipped that:” Émilie du Châtelet was a great man whose only defect was to be a woman”)

Fundamental hypotheses in contemporary physics are conservation of energy and momentum (something the Multiverse violates, thus, into the bin of silly ideas).

• The Non-Local Interaction:

So say two particles, such as a positron-electron pair, are created together and have total momentum zero (a completely realistic situation: machines do this, for medicine).

Knowing the momentum of (say) the electron E, gives that of the positron P (the vector is exactly opposite to that of the electron). Classical and Quantum mechanics say the same.

So, without having disturbed P (it could be next to Beta Centauri, 4 light years away), we know its momentum. Should one measure it later, one will find it as said. (The latter experiment, retrospective checking of entanglement was actually accomplished by the Austrian Zeillinger and his team!)

However, the basic set-up of Quantum Physics says that the measurement create the state (my formulation, you will not read that in textbooks, although it’s clearly what Bohr wanted to say, but he did not dare, lest his academic reputation gets vilified: he had only a Nobel Prize in physics, after all…).

So the state of P, maybe a few light years away, was created by measuring E.

How come?

The basic Quantum set-up was designed for laboratory experiments, not Cosmological Quantum effects. So it did not need to consider all the consequences of this.

Following Du Châtelet, I will say that we are in obvious need of a new hypothesis, the QUANTUM INTERACTION (ex “Collapse of the Wave Packet”). It explains what we observe (instead of trying desperately to say that we cannot possible observe what we observe).

Following Newton, I will say it is absurd to suppose that the effect of E on P is instantaneous. So this Quantum Interaction goes at a speed I call TAU (it’s at least 10^10 the speed of light: 10,000,000,000 times c).

New physics coming to a Quantum Computer near you.

And of course , said new physics will have giant impacts on philosophy (be it only by presenting new models of how things may be done), or Free Will (is it really free if it takes its orders from Andromeda?). This is going to be fun.

Patrice Ayme’