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There is physical time, which is a local classical notion, given by light clocks (the classical aspect of the Quantum!) This is the “Ortzeit”, local time of Lorentz and Poincare’, central to Relativity.
Then there is neurological time, which is given by brain construction, and it is not very clear what the latter consists of, except surely Quantum Physics will be involved at the quantum entanglement level. (Because quantum entanglement and nonlocality is all over basic chemistry and biology.)
So the confrontation between mind and physical time, Sein und Zeit, to sound savant like Heidegger, may actually be the old connandrum of the Quantum… the contrast between classical particle (a photon going back and forth between mirrors) and the nonlocality of entanglement… the soul, the famous wave particle duality!
Biology has lots of quantum physics in plain sight (Albany H flowers, 2023.)
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Adulation for great thinkers is perfect, as long as proper attributions are given correctly enough to describe the logic of invention… Adulation can be used as a Trojan Horse for expanding knowledge and discovering the arcane laws of metathinking.
However, in the case of Einstein, and also other heroes of the Anglosphere, such as Newton, Darwin or Godel, or Watts, fake attributions have distorted the cognitive picture. Those five scientists made major discoveries, but they were very far from making all the discoveries attributed to them.
Lamarck (and Cuvier, and others) established scientifically the long-guessed evolution theory,(while competing fiercely about evolutionary mechanisms… both were right, probably)… two generations before Charles Darwin (who recognized, as newton did, hiis predecessors). No wonder: France was the land of Revolution and England was where the Anglican Church explicitly forbade the teaching of evolution.
Newton was an important brick in the wall of Classical Mechanics as he (more or less) demonstrated that the laws of mechanics plus Bouillaut/Bullialdus Formula for gravitational attraction were equivalent. But the mechanics and calculus revolution had started in Paris, under Buridan and his students (including the Oxford computational school…) three centuries earlier.
Godel is singled out in the debate on the Foundations of Mathematics… But there are at least a dozen of important names: Buridan, Oresme, Cardano, Descartes, Fermat, Leibnitz, Newton, Euler, Laplace, Cauchy, Cantor, Russell, Brouwer… and dozens of others, sometimes even more important as they were the true originators (in particular around Cardano). By insisting on Godel, one insists on a single aspect of mathematics, namely that math is made of never ending rabbit holes (I fix that with my ultrafinitude).
(t−vx/cc) is what Poincaré defined as local time in 1900. Not only Poincare discovered this, but he realized it meant that length contracted in the direction of motion (the contraction itself was a discovery made by the Irish physicist Fitzgerald (and Lorentz) to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment).
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Local time theory was a reinterpretation and extendion by Poincare of Lorentz’s work on the spacetime transformations necessary to keep the equations of electromagnetism independent of uniformly moving frames. This work was published in 1895 by Lorentz when Einstein was still a child [1]. By 1905, when Einstein published his work on Relativity, all the equations had been published.
Local time theory was a rephrasing by Poincare of Hendrik Lorentz’s work on the spacetime transformations necessary to keep the equations of electromagnetism independent of uniformly moving frames. Published when Einstein was still a child. By 1905, when Einstein published his work on Relativity, all the equations had been published.
“Relativity” was Poincaré’s and so was E = mcc, which showed that light carried inertial mass (Cours a la Sorbonne, 1899).
Poincaré is the one who said first that the fact that the speed of light was everywhere measured to be the same (from Michelson and Morley experiment of 1887), and thus it was a physical law. Einstein read it in Science and Hypothesis (La science et l’hypothèse, published 1902, modified 1903, when Poincaré realized electromagnetism a la Maxwell was 100% true after French experimenters confirmed it following rumors to the contrary…).
The term “Relativity” was indeed used by Henri Poincaré even earlier than in his 1904 book titled “Science and Hypothesis” (French: “La Science et l’Hypothèse”) [2]. Poincaré himself said that Einstein’s work was a nice rephrasing of relativity (to be honest, it was a tidy exposition relative to what was before, but not as tidy as one can now do!)
Poincaré is the one who said first that the fact that the speed of light was everywhere measured to be the same (from Michelson and Morley experiment), and thus it was a physical law. Einstein read it in Science and Hypothesis.
Gravity waves in relativity were published by Poincaré in 1905.
The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion.
— Henri Poincaré, 1904
Einstein and his friends (and collaborators, Besso, etc.) spent years studying Poincaré’s Relativity
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Einstein was a genius at seeing the work of others and improving its presentation. This is not to be despised. He did this with Brownian motion, the quantum, Bose-Einstein statistics, and he recognized the importance of De Broglie’s work, and, according to Popper, of Popper’s contribution to the fact the quantum is nonlocal. Popper was a philosopher and Bose an Indian physicist who realized that photons like to gather.
The idea that force could be viewed as curvature in the appropriate space was revealed by Riemann in 1854 in his famous Habilitationsschrift. It has been hanging around ever since. It works well with gravity, but not so much with the other forces, because the quantum messes up with energy-momentum, the more localized it gets, thus the right side of the Einstein gravity equation: Curvature = Energy…
So what did Einstein really contribute personally? The idea that the Quantum of electromagnetic energy of Planck could be absorbed as a packet, explaining the photoelectric effect (Nobel work). Further work on viewing gravitation as a curvature of spacetime (with Hilbert and other friends). And paradoxically the nonlocality of quantum mechanics (which he demonstrated by trying to prove that the quantum was spooky at a distance).
Einstein presented clearly the postulates of relativity and light-speed invariance as foundations of Relativity (Einstein, 1905, §3). Einstein showed that the equation of a spherical lightwave in one frame, xx + yy + zz = cctt has the same form when x and t are Lorentz transformed (it is hard to believe that Poincaré, the world’s top mathematician didn’t know this…) A spherical wave propagating with the speed of light in one frame, Einstein remarked, is thereby another spherical wave propagating with the speed of light in a second inertial frame. As the British mathematical physicist Ebenezer Cunningham pointed out a two years later, form-invariance of the lightwave equation is all that is required for the derivation of the Lorentz transformation, along with a linearity constraint (Cunningham, 1907).
Einstein was a great physicist, but was not as much a revolutionary as legend had it. Einstein’s work was not as original as the local time theory (misattributed to Einstein). And, although Einstein was one of the founders of quantum theory, the original idea of the quantum came from Planck.
Ironically, nonlocality, which “spooked” Einstein, he said, may have been Einstein greatest original contribution…
Quantum Field Theory, which surfaced in the 1920s was deeply revolutionary in a way Einstein never was. Now of course, QFT had many genial contributors, starting with De Broglie (“everything is a wave”)… But then Einstein is the one who gave De Broglie his thesis, basically (the top PhD com of De Broglie threw its nads and asked Einstein to decide on what they called the De Broglie’s “circus”).
Einstein himself once was asked by a French literary genius why he never had a notebook to write his ideas down, and Albert replied (paraphrasing): because new ideas are so rare, I can’t forget them. Ideas are a bit like the theory of types of Russell: they come in many different types…
Civilization class ideas are very rare… And Einstein, after all, stumbled on nonlocality… so well, he fell flat on his face…
Patrice Ayme
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[1]: Lorentz referred to as “Ortszeit” (Lorentz, 1895), and which Poincaré (1900a, 273), following Alfred Liénard, called “temps local”, or local time. In Poincaré’s mind, Lorentz’s local time took on an operational meaning, as the time read by a clock in uniform motion of velocity v with respect to the ether, synchronized by crossed light signals with other identical comoving clocks…
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[2] Henri Poincaré, in his book, 1904:
The Principle of Relativity.—Let us pass to the principle of relativity: this not only is confirmed by daily experience, not only is it a necessary consequence of the hypothesis of central forces, but it is irresistibly imposed upon our good sense, and yet it also is assailed… Indeed, experiment has taken upon itself to ruin this interpretation of the principle of relativity; all attempts to measure the velocity of the earth in relation to the ether have led to negative results.
…experimental physics has been more faithful to the principle [of “RELATIVITY”] than mathematical physics; the theorists, in accord with their other general views, would not have spared it; but experiment has been stubborn in confirming it [the principle of relativity]. The means have been varied; finally Michelson pushed precision to its last limits; nothing came of it. It is precisely to explain this obstinacy [of nature]…
The most ingenious idea was that of local time. Imagine two observers who wish to adjust their timepieces by optical signals; they exchange signals… The watches adjusted in that way will not mark, therefore, the true time; they will mark what may be called the local time, so that one of them will be slower than the other. It matters little, since we have no means of perceiving it. All the phenomena which happen at A, for example, will be late, but all will be equally so, and the observer will not perceive it, since his watch is slow; so, as the principle of relativity requires, he will have no means of knowing whether he is at rest or in absolute motion.
Unhappily, that does not suffice, and complementary hypotheses are necessary; it is necessary to admit that bodies in motion undergo a uniform contraction in the sense of the motion. One of the diameters of the earth, for example, is shrunk by one two-hundred-millionth in consequence of our planet’s motion, while the other diameter retains its normal length.
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Abstract: That photons delocalize in flight was so obvious, Huyghens described them as waves four centuries ago. That’s reinforced both from the math of Quantum Mechanics, and traditional diffraction math. Let alone 2023 Quantum Entanglements of Pions. Time to erect bolder hypotheses to try to understand what’s really going on.
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That a photon is received as a photon, a single localized energy-momentum jolt, or quantum, explains the photoelectric effect’s characteristics, so we should accept that localized impact. This was Einstein’s hypothesis, and because it explains the photoelectric effect, one should assume it to be true. Einstein deserved his Nobel… And indeed, since then many experiments, including those of Nobel Haroche, have dealt with the single photon impacting or influencing something… In a very localized way.
HOWEVER, localization on impact doesn’t mean that, in “flight” the photon, or any particle is localized as much [1]. It just means that the photon behaved as if it had… “collapsed”. Einstein assumed localization in flight, I call it Einstein’s error. Modern QFT has discreetly strayed away from Einstein, as the “particle” has become an excitable Quantum Field (hence nonlocal) subjected to renormalizing perturbation theory. Moreover, Basic Quantum Mechanics assumes delocalization, but then claims only the math delocalize, not the whatever-is-going-on physically, about which CIQ (Copenhagen Interpretation Quantum) can say nothing.
Yes, maybe CIQos can say nothing, but smarter minds can make hypotheses, and then try to find out if observed effects derive from these hypotheses… Details that normal Quantum mechanics does not predict, like Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
The evidence, from diffraction, is to the contrary of the gratuitous and unnecessary Einstein’s in-flight-localization hypothesis. Both from the grossest observations (namely deflection by a pinhole/slit) and from the way the mathematical treatment of said pinhole/slit works… Because those classical mathematics of diffraction work, indeed, but they assume DELOCALIZATION… to make the computation. So the computation’s result being correct, one feels inclined to believe that its mathematical axiom, delocalization, is also correct… as a physical axiom.
As seen below the usual classical computation for diffraction assumes re-emission, thus delocalization, all along the throat of the slit:
Patrice Ayme
[1] SQPR assumes that “particles” in flight don’t really exist (de facto, so does QFT). The “particles” instead are of type NL + L, where NL is the NonLinear part, and L the Linear part (corresponding to the amplitudes of traditional Quantum Mechanics). L guides NL during dispersion (outward momentum from the singularization/particle state… the opposite of collapse, when the momentum goes towards the singularity). A mathematical description may involve a wave acceleration proportional to its amplitude… So that L can become unstable and grow into a NL, after interacting with another L from another “particle”.
How localized is NL? The Quantum Eraser experiment of Kim and Al., in 1999, indicates that NL is somewhat localized, at least in its apparatus… But it’s very far from a particle. Moreover, as NL feeds L, so to speak, one expects NL to get ever more nonlocalized…
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QUANTUM PHYSICS IS THE SIMPLEST ROOT OF CLASSICAL REALITY IMAGINABLE
Abstract: Quantum Mechanics is the simplest imaginable description of the world obtained by reducing all what is known from Classical Mechanics to its simplest parody. Simplest space, simplest math, simplest equations, etc. The organizing metaprinciple of QUANTUM PHYSICS IS Classical MECHANICS MADE AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE. We will focus on the simplest, two state systems.
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Simplicia: Physicists usually describe Quantum Mechanics as “weird”. You are the first one to claim Quantum Physics is NOT weird.
Tyranosopher : In his famous Lectures on Physics, Feynman describes Classical Mechanics as a “shadow” of Quantum Mechanics, or a mnemotechnical trick. Well, he was wrong, there is more to it than that. It took me many decades of deep study of the Quantum to find that in truth, arriving from the first approximation of Classical Mechanics, Quantum Physics is not philosophically weird, but the LOGICAL ROOT of Classical Mechanics. Let’s suppose you were God, and you wanted to devise the simplest barebone theory as a basis for Classical Mechanics… What would you find? Quantum Physics!
Simplicia: God is useful after all! What do you mean by barebone?
Tyranosopher: Logically barebone: the fewest and simplest axioms animated by the simplest logic. Take for example angular momentum. Classically, Angular Momentum can take any value in any direction: a classical massive object can rotate this way or the opposite, and more or less, along any axis, and can be measured again and again, ad vitam eternam: that’s a lot of freedom.
Simplicia: To make Angular Momentum barebone, if you were God, what would you do?
Tyranosopher: Instead of Angular Momentum having any value, you would decide, as God, that Angular Momentum could have JUST TWO VALUES: clockwise, or anti-clockwise. Then, instead of being able to point its axis in any direction, as God, you would decide ONE SINGLE direction is enough. And moreover, you measure it JUST ONCE. So barebone Angular Momentum takes only two values, and in only one direction, one time: and it turns out that this is the simplest version of Quantum Spin. When Quantum Spin is reduced to a two state system (automatically entangled).
And it is what the Stern Gerlach theorem reveals for silver atoms. Similarly for photons.
Simplicia: What do photons and silver atoms have in common?
Tyranosopher. Photon polarization and silver atoms are both two states’ systems. Apply the simplest mathematics to them, and you get the same mathematical, hence physical result. So they both exhibit nonlocality, entanglement, etc.
Simplicia: What are these “states”?
Tyranosopher: Quantum States are the outcomes of experiments with set-ups sensitive to Quantum effects. The presence of states is all very relative, or as Quantum Foundations theoreticians say, CONTEXTUAL. There is a theorem saying one cannot have non-contextuality.
Simplicia: Please elaborate.
Tyranosopher: Once again, suppose you are god, and you look at angular momentum or polarization. As I said, the simplest situation where something non-trivial happens is if you have built, or found, a device with two outcomes only: spin up, or spin down. Or polarization horizontal, or vertical. Each of these two distinct outcomes is called a state. Label these two distinct outcomes: I+> and I->. Then what’s the simplest non-trivial computational setup you can invent?
Simplicia: A vector space where I+> and I-> are the basis vectors?
Tyranosopher: Exactly. Let’s consider H, the complex vector space with basis I+> and I->.
Simplicia: Why complex?
Tyranosopher: Because you are God and you want to use the largest commutative field and that’s the complex numbers, called C. There all algebraic equations can be solved, with the help of the square root of (-1), called i. Turns out that this has all immediate deep physical meaning
Simplicia: Complex numbers, also called imaginary numbers, are natural?
Tyranosopher: Yes the number i corresponds to the rotation by pi/4, an angle of ninety degrees, around the origin in the plane.
Simplicia: What’s the connection of complex numbers and (i) with physics?
Tyranosopher: A photon is characterized by its momentum, which is a vector p which points in a direction, and has a frequency E. (hE, p) is the energy-momentum of the photon. It tells you where the photon is going and with how much energy. However, that does not characterize the photon fully. Experiments already conducted by the Vikings show that the photons have polarization.
Simplicia: The Vikings were physicists?
Tyranosopher: They navigated the North Atlantic, going from islands to islands, all the way to America. They needed to know where the sun was, say at noon, to know where the north was. The weather is often so cloud covered there, that one can’t say where the sun is, for weeks on end. Fortunately, the Vikings had stones which gave the direction of the sun. That’s because the atmosphere partially polarizes sunlight.
Simplicia: So the complex numbers characterize polarization?
Tyranosopher: A photon is made of an electric field paired to a perpendicular magnetic field, both perpendicular to momentum p. It’s enough to know where the electric field points to know the polarization. A complex number gives you polarization.
Simplicia: Why can’t a single real number give you that, like, you know, the angle?
Tyranosopher: Complex numbers give you more information. Let’s backtrack. God is trying to build the most powerful yet most complex mechanics possible. By considering complex numbers, you augment the power, but also the simplicity, because all algebraic equations, the ones with powers, are solvable. So, in an important way, C, the complex plane, is simpler than the real line R. Physically speaking it also turns out that quantum waves multiply, to make quantum amplitudes, which are probability waves, and probabilities multiply, but only as complex waves.
Simplicia: So let’s recapitulate. You reduce angular momentum to simply + or -, plus or minus… instead of a continuum of numbers. You also reduce the direction of angular momentum to a single one, the one along which you measure it. You then build a vector space with I+> and I-> as base vectors, and you simplify maximally by choosing complex numbers instead of real numbers.
Tyranosopher: Absolutely. Isn’t it funny that complex numbers are actually both simpler and more powerful than real numbers? Complex numbers live in a plane and contain in their description light itself!
Simplicia: Are you identifying the complex plane with light?
Tyranosopher: Take a complex plane P, brandish it in space, and pick up a (complex) number N in it. That represents all the information we have on a photon.
The perpendicular to P through its origin gives you the direction of the photon, the norm c of N gives you the frequency and the angle a of c gives you the polarization. So the information (P, c(exp ia)) gives you the photon fully. You can’t do that with real numbers
Simplicia: Photons are points in flying complex planes?
Tyranosopher: Yes, but we are not finished.
We have this complex vector space H = C (I+>, I->)… that means it has two basis vectors. Consider a vector v in that space. It has coordinates in function of I+> and I->; the square of the norms of those coordinates are real numbers. They express the probability of v being in state I+> versus in state I->.
Once again the guiding meta-principle here is the same: make it the simplest for getting a non-trivial result, depicting reality which is what we know, namely that any experiment will give either I+> or I->.
Then we introduce another ingredient: that light and matter behave in a wave-like fashion. So make the coordinates of v into waves depending upon space and time. Also, at the simplest, when v is operated upon, it will give another vector w. To go simplest again from v to w, one should use a linear operator.
Simplicia: Is that the famous “matrix mechanics”?
Tyranosopher: Exactly.
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Simplicia: What of weird effects like tunneling, and Quantum Entanglement?
Tyranosopher: Tunneling comes from the wavy nature. It would require a bit more elaboration to explain as one needs to introduce energy and how it affects waves. Basically, not all of a sudden, hence (probability of presence) waves penetrate a bit, that’s tunneling.
Simplicia: And what about nonlocality?
Tyranosopher: The nonlocal nature of Quantum Entanglement is in plain sight. The simplest is two particles sharing the same two state spin system with total spin zero. :Choose an axis of measurement, call it Z. Then measuring gives the spin of the other particle along Z automatically even 4 lightyears away. But choosing Z was an act of will. So will acted 4 lightyears away.
Simplicia: Minds change the universe light years away?
Tyranosopher: Yes, indeed. Sub Quantum Physical Reality assumes that the propagation of that change is progressive.
Simplicia: What if the distances are too great?
Tyranosopher: Then entanglement fails, and, or Dark Matter and, or Dark Energy are created. That’s what I say.
Simplicia: Does spacetime make some sort of foam at the smallest scale?
Tyranosopher: It’s worse than that. It’s a topological foam, and it’s nonlocal. There again, as God, you would have been confronted with the following problem: how to describe the infinitesimally small?
Simplicia: By making the infinitesimally small ever smaller.
Tyranosopher: That was tried in biology. It was called the homunculus theory: a human being would start as a tiny reproduction of itself. In truth what happens is that bacteria divide, so they never get that small, and animals… more generally eukaryotes, start with molecular (DNA, RNA) and cellular formations which enter in a constructive dialogue with the environment (some of which is self-created). So basically sophisticated life doesn’t start as itself at all, but in a nonlocal way. Same thing for spacetime and particles.
Simplicia: Does Quantum Entanglement hold objects together?
Tyranosopher: It has been difficult to find when, where and how an object switches from Quantum behavior to Classical behavior. It is imaginable that Quantum Entanglement holds objects together. After all the more massive an object, the higher the probability that an entangled state will collapse. Collapse is the glue.
Simplicia: How so?
Tyranosopher: De Broglie associated a matter wave to every single massive object.
Simplicia: Are photons massive?
Tyranosopher: Yes they are, in the sense of inertial mass. Poincaré published and taught in 1899 that a photon has inertial mass m = E/cc. That’s coming straight out of electromagnetism. Photons of course have no rest mass, because they are never at rest. But they contribute to gravity as E/cc, from the axiom: inertial mass = gravitational mass (Einstein called that the “Principle of Equivalence”).
Simplicia: Let’s go back to matter waves.
Tyranosopher: An object of mass M has wavelength L = h/M, where h is Planck’s constant. A deep question is how that L is generated. Clearly L should be equal to a sum, what is called an integral in mathematics: Sum(m(i)), where m(i) are the zillions of zillions of particles constituting M: all the gluons, quarks, photons, electrons inside. However, the sum should be extended to entanglement itself. I mean what’s called the “particles” are actually the states. Most of the time Quantum systems are actually delocalized Quantum fields.
Simplicia: Are Quantum Entanglement and Delocalization the same?
Tyranosopher: No. QE is an example of delocalization. Sometimes
Simplicia: What happens to mass during these delocalizations?
Tyranosopher: Good question! The experience has not been made. Einstein postulated, in 1905, as an axiom that a photon was localized always… and this may have led him to the EPR thirty years later, and introducing the doubt of “spooky action at a distance”… He was a bit arguing with himself.
From the introduction section of Einstein’s March 1905 quantum paper “On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the emission and transformation of light”, Einstein states:
“According to the assumption to be contemplated here, when a light ray is spreading from a point, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever-increasing spaces, but consists of a finite number of “energy quanta” that are localized in points in space, move without dividing, and can be absorbed or generated only as a whole.“
This statement has been called the most revolutionary sentence written by a physicist of the twentieth century. However, it’s probably not completely true, and I have called it “Einstein’s Error“. First, Quantum Field Theory, and even QED, its predecessor, which Einstein tried, but failed to learn, has replaced “particles” by (delocalized) Quantum Fields: no more localized particles at a point. Moreover, and worse, if one believes the Quantum amplitudes that one computes with have some physical reality, as SQPR, Sub Quantum Physical Reality, believes, Einstein is not completely correct, and the difference is Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. Indeed, in SQPR, Sub Quantum Physical Reality, some mass-energy is spread out. Experimentation will have to decide, although the existence of DM and DE is massive proof enough for me. But this is all speculative, whereas deducing Quantum from Classical, as the maximal non-trivial abstraction from Classical, the original subject of this essay, is not.
Simplicia: Feynman often put philosophy is a bad light.
Tyranosopher: Feynman, like, Mach, Boltzman, Planck, Einstein, De Broglie, and all great physicists, was a philosopher. Dirac deduced his equation for the electron field according to the principle of abstraction from Classical Mechanics and simplicity. Dirac looked for the simplest Partial Differential Equation the square of which would be the relativistic mass-energy-momentum formula for an electron. That’s the Dirac equation! It produced correct quantum electrodynamics, spin and anti-matter! It was deducted according to the general machinery I advocate! So in a way the method I exhibited here to deduce Quantum Physics had already been used, at least in particular cases.
Simplicia: Is your own SQPR deducted similarly?
Tyranosopher: Yes, from classical obvious to fully abstracted and still obvious. Newton said, in a private letter, that it was madness to suppose that the gravitational interaction was instantaneous. A century later, Laplace filled in the idea, making gravitation into a field, and thus predicting gravitational waves. SQPR assumes that Quantum Entanglement, like Delocalization in general, is a field with finite speed: present Quantum Mechanics assumes that QE and nonlocality propagate at infinite speed. This finite speed assumption produces Dark Matter and Dark Energy quasi-instantaneously.
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Conclusion: This is as it should be: after all, Classical Mechanics is the appearance, the first order approximation, and Quantum Physics what generates that appearance. One can deduce Quantum Physics from Classical Mechanics. One just has to expand the notion of “deduction” beyond what Feynman was familiar with. A love of wisdom helps with science, as it allows us to expand what logic means.
Patrice Ayme
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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.
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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Hencethe 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:
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 candetect 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
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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 ***
[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.
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Finally! The most surprising discovery of the last two centuries in science was not the Quantum (that had been sort of anticipated by the Greeks who thought they had demonstrated the existence of atoms, literally non-divisibles; the photon is the atom of light…), nor was it DNA (the discovery that there are laws of inheritance is hundreds of thousands of years old, and make ever more specific with time, as humans learn to breed characteristics, etc.).
NONLOCALITY was an enormous surprise because it contradicted everything… even mathematics, come to think of it deeply enough.
The old approach, which had become crystallized by the ancient Greeks was that the world was made of indivisibles, atoms in nature, points in mathematics. So granular nature and extreme precision.
As my own dad once told me on his own, while I described the Quantum to him, in English translation:”the idea that one can get ever smaller and nothing changes can’t possibly be true”.
What NONLOCALITY says is that if one gets small enough, one ends up somewhere else!
This shatters the expectation that smaller is no different. Instead:
1) smaller is somewhere else.
2) Properties and matter as we expect it, do not exist at a small enough scale. REALIZATION NEEDS LOCALIZATION.
(the mathematics of QM requires this. Einstein and company objected to the notion, as they put it, that the “Moon does not exist if no one looks at it”… That was an exaggerated objection; there is a qualitative difference between a very small object and a very large one… At least in SQPR; the drawing from the Swedish Academia is also exaggerated… However, it makes the general idea, clear, in first approximation:
This gives the rough idea: the smallest properties, when at the Quantum scale, do not exist until an interaction has occurred. A lot of open question are connected to this: what of energy-momentum? Does it spread all over, or stays concentrated as in what I called Einstein’s Greatest Error? SQPR has an in-between position: most, but not all, of the enrgy-momentum stays concentrated. It is this lack which created Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
“for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
Entangled states – from theory to technology
Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have each conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated. Their results have cleared the way for new technology based upon quantum information.
The ineffable effects of quantum mechanics are starting to find applications. There is now a large field of research that includes quantum computers, quantum networks and secure quantum encrypted communication.
One key factor in this development is how quantum mechanics allows two or more particles to exist in what is called an entangled state. What happens to one of the particles in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other particle, even if they are far apart.
For a long time, the question was whether the correlation was because the particles in an entangled pair contained hidden variables, instructions that tell them which result they should give in an experiment. In the 1960s, John Stewart Bell developed the mathematical inequality that is named after him. This states that if there are hidden variables, the correlation between the results of a large number of measurements will never exceed a certain value. However, quantum mechanics predicts that a certain type of experiment will violate Bell’s inequality, thus resulting in a stronger correlation than would otherwise be possible [0].
John Clauser developed John Bell’s ideas, leading to a practical experiment. When he took the measurements, they supported quantum mechanics by clearly violating a Bell inequality. This means that quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a theory that uses hidden variables [1].
Some loopholes remained after John Clauser’s experiment. Alain Aspect developed the setup, using it in a way that closed an important loophole. He was able to switch the measurement settings after an entangled pair had left its source, so the setting that existed when they were emitted could not affect the result [2].
Using refined tools and long series of experiments, Anton Zeilinger started to use entangled quantum states. Among other things, his research group has demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation, which makes it possible to move a quantum state from one particle to one at a distance.
“It has become increasingly clear that a new kind of quantum technology is emerging. We can see that the laureates’ work with entangled states is of great importance, even beyond the fundamental questions about the interpretation of quantum mechanics,” says Anders Irbäck, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
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Clauser (and others with him, not mentioned by Nobel Com. took entanglement seriously. At the tme it was viewed as a curiosity, not really physics. As a top physicist in my department said:”Serious people don’t do these things, it just gives headaches!”
Personal notes: [0] This depends upon the fact that measuring the spin of a particle in one direction affects the measurement of the spin of the same particle in another direction… which is certainly not the case in Classical Mechanics: if one finds the rotation of a particle in direction x it does not affect a subsequent measurement in direction y…
[1] Nobel Com should have said: quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a theory that uses LOCAL hidden variables.
And what does “LOCAL” mean? Topology as defined using the speed of light for metric. In other words, nonlocal hidden variables are permitted, and this is what SQPR, a SUB QUANTUM Physical Reality uses.
[2] Aspect thus showed that there was such a thing as a QUANTUM INTERACTION, and it propagates faster than light. The big question is how fast. In excess of 10^23c
The notion of Quantum Interaction is important. Once one agrees (with Newton) that no interaction can be instantaneous, and once one has identified Quantum Collapse with it, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are near instantaneous deductions.
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Anyway, here it is: Nonlocality has become official!
Patrice Ayme
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L = h/P is the De Broglie hypothesis, where L is the wavelength of the matter wave, P is the momentum of the object, and h is Planck constant.
The relationship was known in the case of the photon [1].
What I viewed as a mystery: the validity of the formula for any object. It seemed to me to make all particles, and all masses sort of fundamental. How could that be? Meanwhile, the mystery of mass got thicker. I heard of the Higgs, it’s mostly a gimmick to create mass out of friction from an assumed universal field, now supposedly observed… for particles which in the Standard Model which wouldn’t otherwise have any. How much of the mass of a nucleon is produced by simply harnessing E = mcc is unknown to me, but could be most of it.
De Broglie matter waves, simplest version. In general p, the momentum is relativistic, and “mv” is just the slow poke version of it… So all I am saying is that the zillions of linear parts of all these waves add up… OK, I should make my own drawing, severely more sophisticated: this one gives the impression that the linear tails (the outside, guiding parts) of the wave is nonlinear… In SQPR, the center is highly nonlinear, and the outer, guiding part ready to transform itself in Dark Matter, given the right geometry
Then SQPR appeared. In SQPR, waves are everything, but they are additive, nonlinear… And they are all what space is.
So visualize an object O. It’s made of a zillion elementary particles, call that number Z, each actually an elementary wave, expanding, entangled, then nonlinearly collapsing, then expanding again after that interaction, entangled with all over, etc. In the average, though, the expanding quantum waves of all these objects will have momentum p/Z and mass, m/Z. This clarity of mind escapes Quantum Field Theorists (QFTists), because their version of space is haunted by so-called “vacuum energy”… for which there is only anti-evidence (namely the universe exists; if vacuum energy existed, the universe won’t, because it would be collapsed all the time! [2])
Now SQPR says those linear parts all add up, as an average p/Z and constitute then a mass of m, momentum p. It’s all very simple, but now it sounds intuitive… A return of intuition in physics, would be welcome, instead of complete insanity…
Patrice Ayme
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[1]. Planck had discovered E = hF, where F is the frequency of light. Einstein proposed to generalize it to quanta of light (“Lichtquanten”) in flight, and explained immediately the photoelectric effect that way (he got the Nobel for that; by the way, SQPR immediately explains Dark Matter)
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[2] One evidence for the vacuum energy is the “CASIMIR EFFECT”… which is thoroughly demonstrated in very practical nanophysics. I explained once how to make it produce much energy. Nobel S. Weinberg in his book on Gravitation rolls out Casimir as a proof of vacuum energy (instead, I roll out the universe to disprove vac energy!) However, it turns out one doesn’t need the full vac energy to explain Casimir…
See:
The Casimir Effect and the Quantum Vacuum R. L. Jaffe Center for Theoretical Physics, Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Abstract. In discussions of the cosmological constant, the Casimir effect is often invoked as decisive evidence that the zero point energies of quantum fields are “real”. On the contrary, Casimir effects can be formulated and Casimir forces can be computed without reference to zero point energies. They are relativistic, quantum forces between charges and currents. The Casimir force (per unit area) between parallel plates vanishes as α, the fine structure constant, goes to zero, and the standard result, which appears to be independent of α, corresponds to the α → ∞ limit.
SQPR has its own version of the vacuum: it’s truly empty, devoid of mass-energy. All the space that is physical is made of matter waves… Matter waves and pieces thereof all have mass-energy, making them real.
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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)….
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Of Those For Whom Despising Others Fosters One’s Sense Of Existence:
Aaronson, a renowned Quantum Computation expert thought funny to pretend that what he studies (programming Quantum amplitudes) is the end-all, be-all of the universe. So this is out in a cartoon, complete with arrogant child and even more stupid mom. Although the fact the mom is stupid is not revealed by the cartoon, quite the opposite. When does she go wrong?
Besides having no eyes to speak to, or from? So here is the cartoon. It starts pretty well. It ends up as badly as possible, with plenty of lies about Quantum Mechanics and unsupported assertions that consciousness has nothing to do with Quantum Mechanics (when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, including that QM is at the core of biology). Anyway here is the silly cartoon, from a respected Quantum Computational authority:
I condescend and lie, therefore I think, hence I exist? Too many physicists have succumbed to that temptation, due to their otherwise modest position in society.
There is a partially correct message above not well known by the unwashed multitudes: yes, Quantum Mechanics compute with complex amplitudes. Why is that? Let me reveal it: consider light. It’s the simplest Quantum phenomenon,and it requires Complex Numbers to be described as compactly as possible. Light is made of entangled electric and magnetic fields at an angle to the propagation direction. More precisely: E is the electric field vector, and B is the magnetic field vector of the EM wave. For electromagnetic waves E and B are always perpendicular to each other and perpendicular to the direction of propagation. The direction of propagation is the direction of E x B.
Electromagnetic waves are the solutions of Maxwell’s equations in a vacuum, which abstract the experiments pioneered by at least half a dozen physicists (Monge, Ampere, Faraday, Fresnel, etc.).
E (and thus B!) can rotate, or be in any directions, as long as they are perpendicular to each other and light wave propagation. However one can also fix E, by letting the light through a grid. This is a standard experiment, it’s use in polarized sunglasses, etc. However it’s very deep, deeper than Aaronson can understand, or that present physics understand: this means the light is somehow extended… If if it’s a single, proverbial photon.
Any light wave coming from the left. The first vertical grid forces the E electric field of the light vertically (any other direction gets captured by the vertical grid). The second horizontal grid kills the vertically polarized light.
In general, the electric field E can adopt any direction or rotate. To depict this mathematically, there is a handy instrument: the Complex Number field, which is the one and only generalization of the Real Number field [1]. Light is also the simplest Quantum phenomenon known. Thus, to fully depict the simplest Quantum, one needs Complex Numbers. More Quantum will naturally mean more Complex Numbers.
Aaronson claims that “physicists had a customs when describing these matters with outsiders, they want to avoid being… too graphic too explicit … too *gulp* mathematically correct“.
The Schrodinger Cat, and nonlocality are caused by “talking to outsiders”? This is what Aaronson says explicitly lower down in the cartoon. This is hogwash bullshit. Physicist didn’t understand much of the very basics of the Quantum Mechanics they were in the process of inventing. Even the most trivially blatant features of Quantum mechanics were not understood for more than a generation, although they were the first thing one wrote on the subject. Let me explain.
The basic equation (De Broglie-Schrodinger) reads basically as:
i(change W relative to time) = (change acceleration of W) + (W)(A)…
More “mathematically”: i dW/dt = ddW/dxdx + AW
Where W is a complex wave, and A a potential W interacts with (say the electromagnetic field for an electron) [2].
It’s obvious from this most basic equation, that W reacts to the potential A. However, it took 33 years or so to notice this: Bohm and Aharonov did it… and all the big geniuses of Quantum Mechanics, even Einstein and De Broglie, let alone Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauli, Born, the hyper arrogant Von Neumann, Dirac, etc… Didn’t notice it.
Notice Aaronson describes physicists as “insiders“. In other words, physicists make a tribe… just like many philosophers around “French Theory” have claimed…
However, the real truth is that physicists were too ignorant to describe WHY the COMPLEX Quantum Wave well to “outsiders“, because there was not enough inside the heads of these insiders. But here I come.
So I take my right arm, and project it forward, like your standard Kung Fu master. I open three fingers. My index points in the direction of motion of my arm, ready to punch inside the eye of the tribal physicist “insider”. My major points perpendicular to the index (because physicists insiders get my symbolic finger; it also represent the E field above). My thumb, representing the B field, is perpendicular to the other two extended fingers. At this point the whole assembly of these three fingers progressing forward can be described by three real numbers. But then I impose a rotation of the entire hand: there is your Complex Numbers field. The rotation requires the complex numbers
Some could sneer that one complex number is a pair of real numbers with weird multiplication rules, so we don’t really need Complex Numbers, bla bla bla… But Mathematics is not just a language: mathematics is the most compact, most efficient language: it does that by compactifying the logic maximally.
What does Patrice mean by “compactifying the logic”? How to measure that? Simple, count the symbols: the fewer symbols, the most compact… [3]
***
Aaronson claims that “classical events have probabilities and quantum events have amplitude“. That’s false. They have probabilities too (from the square root of the norm squared of the amplitude). Before Aaronson showed he had no modesty, didn’t know the history of physics and was a tribalist. Now he throwing through the window not just the philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, but also the entire Theory of Measurement, and what the refined analysis of what an “event” is.
A basic axiom of Quantum Mechanics is that an unobserved event is not an event. As long as one has “amplitudes”, the quantum system computes quantum mechanically, but one had no “event”. “Event” happens after the collapse, when there are no more amplitudes. I call that singularization. Other more or less equivalent concepts are “collapse” and “decoherence” (collapse frightened the children so they opted for decoherence as they became snowflakes).
So what Aaronson presents as the one and only axiom of Quantum Physics is actually a self-contradicting ERROR.
So why does Aaronson speak only of amplitudes? Because it’s all he needs for his job, computer programming. Forget physics: Aaronson doesn’t seem to know the difference between “amplitudes” and “waves”: waves have “amplitudes”, but do not reduce to “amplitudes”. Moreover, Quantum waves don’t behave like classical waves with their (only) local behavior: Quantum waves are global. In the author’s own SQPR,, the waves propagate at an enormous speed, tens of trillions of trillions times faster than the speed of light (so they appear “instantaneous” as the present Quantum mechanical axiomatics has it…)
The (so-called “Heisenberg”) Uncertainty Principle is a direct consequence of De Broglie hypothesis. Yet, the basic idea is pre-Quantum… Or rather Quantum in the pure electromagnetic sense… as I said, the very basics of Quantum mechanics is electromagnetics, thus optics. Let me explain a bit more.
To find out where something is, one shines a light on it, one hits it, say, with light. However the light’s precision is greater, the shorter its wavelength (otherwise light turns around objects for the exact same reason as radio waves do). But the energy of the light is proportional to its frequency which is inversely proportional to its wavelength. So the more precise one tries to ascertain where an object is, by looking at it, the greater the kick one imparts to it. It’s obvious one will get an uncertainty, and, at this point, one doesn’t even need De Broglie’s equation, the relation between wavelength and momentum, but plain 19th century physics, mostly that light has momentum… the very same property tremendous genius Jules Henri Poincaré used in 1899, to demonstrate E = mcc, the famous mass-energy relationship usually attributed to fluffy parrot Einstein, then a young brat who tried to make us believe he invented all of physics besides telling God how to organize the universe (as Quantum Founder and nobel Niels Bohr told him).
To get the best numbers of the exact inequality, one needs De Broglie…
Notice that what is important here is WAVES, not just amplitudes. And the relationship between momentum, energy, and wave frequency, direction. Right the waves are complex and they have amplitudes.
By the way, Waves are not all one needs for Quantum Mechanics: SPIN, for example comes from a different logical source, purely geometrical. Spin was discovered by another tremendous French genius, Elie Cartan, before World War One. A generation later, Spin surfaced in Dirac’ s fertile mind: Dirac wanted the most simple equation possible to describe the electron… That required a new space, to enable spinors to live on it… (The mathematics of all this are not well understood at the deepest level; it’s a bit as if one took the square root of space, I have not much clue beyond that, nor does anyone else…)
Aaronson also claims that Quantum nonlocality is just a matter of amplitudes. Well, it’s not. Between the EPR paper of 1935 and Bell’s inequality of 1966, there were 33 years during which physicists were perplexed more than perplexed: they ignored nonlocality all together (until Bohm-Aharonov). Experimental tests started much later, and some physicists have received the greatest prizes for it … Albeit not the Nobel… which was attributed for realizing the Bose-Einstein condensate, some 70 years after it could become theoretically imaginable…
With the end of his silly cartoon, Aaronson demonstrates he doesn’t know physics (the beginning is pretty good though…), and it is teaching lies.
Aaronson demonstrated that he may have had a condescending mechanical mom without eyes, and the arrogance simpletons comes with, by definition.
***
Authorities (such as politicians, economists, media owners and physicists in position of authority) have several reasons to lie. Yes it manipulates people but more precisely:
It prevents people to access to truth, thus power.
It confuses people, leveraging on 1).
It fills the public with awe, because, confused and powerless, they view the authoritative figure as quite a bit of a magician, because lying enables the authority to apparently master the (otherwise) incomprehensible.
In manipulating We The People into submission, it is crucial not to reveal that the incomprehensible has been made incomprehensible by the authorities, by deliberate design of an immense distraction (following the misleading Aaronson, good luck trying to deduce nonlocality from “amplitudes”: there are “amplitudes” in my bathtub, but that doesn’t make nonlocal… So this is an impossible task, which Aaronson pretends to have mastered; economist and politicians, bankers and other high finance types, even ecologists on government payroll, do the same. day in, day out, 24/7: outrageous lying, to confuse the multitude)
All too many “intellectuals” in recent decades have been for sale…
Teaching Quantum Physics to all is teaching the universe as it is to all. Knowing Quantum Physics enriches one’s arsenal of understanding schemes, all over. So teaching it correctly is a mission civilisatrice. When humanity is more intelligent in the future, it will be in part because of this. For example the meta observation that everything is made, in the small, of waves is most enlightening, and impact sensibilities…
Thus la trahison des clercs, here lying about the nature of the Quantum, while posing as an “insider” is the sort of pseudo-intellectual posturing humanity really doesn’t need. This sort of deliberately dishonest and malicious posturing has brought deplorable racism such as imposing the notion that fearing Wahhabism is racist… and has distracted from the most major problems at hand such as global plutocratization and the man-made mass extinction.
Patrice Ayme
***
***
P/S: A friend of mine, a professional university researcher in Quantum Computing, long working for a GAFAM, sent me the cartoon above, in an apparent slight to my essay on brain modularity making consciousness necessary. I am grateful as the paper was intelligently stupid.
***
[1] Quaternion make a non-commutative division algebra.
***
[2] i is the square root of (-1), a rotation by 90 degrees in the complex number field. I put Planck constant = 1… As I am limited by the WordPress software, I denote the second (partial) derivative relative to space as dd/(dx)(dx) which is what it is… but different from the usual symbolic… which also use the psi Greek letter instead of W…
***
[3] Maxwell equations initially covered an entire page. Now they can be reduced to nine symbols: dF = 0 and d*F = A.
To understand that, you have to learn more advanced differential geometry: exterior differentiation, the * operator, etc. But will admit, that’s compact… And thus in the only sense that makes sense, MOST intuitive.
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AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
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EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
0
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
0
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
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AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
Philosophy and science: the human adventure. Philosophy is not as popular as it should be, as it supports not just civilization, but human evolution. It matters what we love. Philo-Sophy: Love of Wisdom. But what is love, and what is wise? We humbly examine all the issues we can possibly imagine having to do with defining love, and wisdom. Plus Oultre!
Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
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