REALIZATION NEEDS LOCALIZATION. NONLOCALITY Gets Nobel Prize

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.

4 October 2022

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 to

Alain Aspect

Université Paris-Saclay and

École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

John F. Clauser

J.F. Clauser & Assoc., Walnut Creek, CA, USA

Anton Zeilinger

University of Vienna, Austria

“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.

***

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.

***

Anyway, here it is: Nonlocality has become official!

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’

Free Will & Quantum

It is natural to suspect that those who evoke the Quantum at every turn are a bit deranged. Has a Quantum obsession replaced God? God died, but not the need to obsess? (Dominique Deux made a wry remark in that direction.)

Nietzsche himself is an example. Having “killed” (his father’s) “God“, Nietzsche obsessed about the (Indian based) “Eternal Return of the Same”, something from the Zeitgeist. Henri Poincare’ soon demonstrated some dynamical systems roughly do this (although I certainly do not believe all Solar Systems will; recent observations have confirmed my hunch: many Solar Systems are very unstable, the Sun-Jupiter harmony may be rare…)

Quasar & Host Galaxy [NASA-ESA Hubble]

[The picture, from 1996, is poor, as the Quasar is very far. We need another telescope, but plutocrats don’t want it, because they would have to pay more taxes, thus rendered unable to treat the Commons as dirt as much as they desire. Yet, in spite of the plutocratically imposed low resolution, one can see the mighty ultra-relativistic jets arising from the Quasar’s core.]

Obsessing about the Quantum is obsessing about the true nature of Nature. As it turns out it’s much simpler and magical than the classical picture.

Nature is the Quantum writ large. Relativity, the Standard model, the Big Bang: these are all amusements of dubious veracity. The Quantum is the Real Thing. And it’s everywhere. Most people just don’t know it yet.

Even Biological Evolution Theory, or Free Will, are going to be revealed to be within the Quantum’s empire.

There is something called “Free Will Skepticism” as massaged in Gregg Caruso Scientia Salon’s essays, and his (celebrity) TED talk. It is not so much skepticism about the existence of Free Will, but skepticism that those who loudly believe in “Free Will” have a constructive, progressive attitude in the society of the USA.

Ultimately, the problem of Free Will will have to tackle the problem of what are exactly the free agents in Quantum Physics.

Well, nobody knows for sure. What the free agents are is the central problem of Quantum Computing, and the high energy physicists’ wild goose chase for high energy processes went the other way, for two generations, so we don’t know what determines the evolution of the Quantum systems.

High energy processes are of interest only in high energy places, none of which are found where the biosphere lays. In other words, much physics, high energy physics used the Quantum, but did not try to figure it out.

Not knowing what the free agents, if any, of Quantum Physics are imply that we do not know what determines the evolution of the simplest processes.

The simplest processes are, by definition, the Quantum processes.

As long as we do not really know what controls simplest systems, talking about whether there is Free Will, or not, is shooting the breeze.

Free Will is even a problem in Quantum Non-Local analysis.

On-going experiments on non-locality. In some hard core physics labs. Those experiments aim to turn around the problem that we may have no Free Will.

The situation is this: doing a measurement at point A was found to have an influence at point B. The influence propagates orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light (as the formalism of basic Quantum Physics theory predicts).

French physicist Alain Aspect was able to show this with crafty optico-acoustic devices (he got the Wolf prize for this, and, clearly, ought to get the physics Nobel). The question remained, though, that maybe Alain Aspect himself was a pre-determined phenomenon deprived of Free Will.

To check this, Aspect’s experiment is going to be re-run with distant quasars in charge (rather than just some French guys). MIT physics department is doing this.

Free Will is the last major loophole of Bell’s inequality — a 50-year-old theorem on Spin that, as it is violated by experiments, means that the universe is based not the (topologically separated) laws of classical physics, but on Non-Locality.

Actually this is all very simple. (No need for the fancy high school math of Bell’s theorem, a particular case of Non-Locality with spins.)

Two quasars on opposite sides of heavens are so distant from each other, that they would have been out of causal contact since the (semi-mythical) Big Bang some 14 billion years ago: there are no possible means for any third party to communicate with both of them since the (semi-mythical) beginning of the universe…

Now, of course, if my own version of the universe is true, and the universe is actually 100 billion years old, the “loophole” re-opens…

But of course, as a philosopher, I know perfectly well that I have Free Will, and, as a momentarily benevolent soul, I extend the courtesy to Alain Aspect.

The universe is Non-Local, even my Free Will is Non-Local, it does not have to be like long dead gentlemen thought it should be.

Patrice Ayme’

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT: Nature’s Faster Than Light Architecture

A drastically back-to-basic reasoning shows that the universe is held together and ordered by a Faster Than Light Interaction, QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. Nature is beautifully simple and clever.

(For those who spurn Physics, let me point out that Quantum Entanglement, being the Fundamental Process, occurs massively in the brain. Thus explaining the non-local nature of consciousness.)

***

The Universe is held together by an entangled, faster than light interaction. It is time to talk about it, instead of the (related) idiocy of the “multiverse”. OK, it is easier to talk idiotically than to talk smart.

Entanglement Propagates, Says the National Science Foundation (NSF)

I will present Entanglement in such a simple way, that nobody spoke of it that way before.

Suppose that out of an interaction, or system S, come two particles, and only two particles, X and Y. Suppose the energy of S is known, that position is the origin of the coordinates one is using, and that its momentum is zero.

By conservation of momentum, momentum of X is equal to minus momentum of Y.

In Classical Mechanics, knowing where X is tells us immediately where Y is.

One can say that the system made of X and Y is entangled. Call that CLASSICAL ENTANGLEMENT.

This is fully understood, and not surprising: even Newton would have understood it perfectly.

The same situation holds in Quantum Physics.

This is not surprising: Quantum Physics ought not to contradict Classical Mechanics, because the latter is fully demonstrated, at least for macroscopic objects X and Y. So why not for smaller ones?

So far, so good.

In Quantum Physics, Classical Entanglement gets a new name. It is called QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. It shows up as a “paradox”, the EPR.

That paradox makes the greatest physicists freak out, starting with Einstein, who called QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT “spooky action at a distance”.

Why are physicists so shocked that what happens in Classical Mechanics would also be true in Quantum Physics?

Some say John Bell, chief theorist at CERN, “solved” the EPR Paradox, in 1964. Not so. Bell, who unfortunately died of a heart attack at 64, showed that the problem was real.

So what’s the problem? We have to go back to what is the fundamental axiom of Quantum Physics (Note 1). Here it is:

De Broglie decreed in 1924 that all and any particle X of energy-momentum (E,p) is associated to a wave W. That wave W s uniquely defined by E and p. So one can symbolize this by: W(E,p).

W(E,p) determines in turn the behavior of X. In particular all its interactions.

De Broglie’s obscure reasoning seems to have been understood by (nearly) no one to this day. However it was checked right away for electrons, and De Broglie got the Nobel all for himself within three years of his thesis.

Most of basics Quantum Mechanics is in De Broglie’s insight. Not just the “Schrodinger” equation, but the Uncertainty Principle.

Why?

Take a “particle X”. Let’s try to find out where it is. Well, that means we will have to interact with it. Wait, if we interact, it is a wave W. How does one find the position of a wave? Well the answer is that one cannot: when one tries to corner a wave, it becomes vicious, as everybody familiar with the sea will testify. Thus to try to find the position of a particle X makes its wave develop great momentum.

A few years after De Broglie’s seminal work, Heisenberg explained that in detail in the particular case of trying to find where an electron is, by throwing a photon on it.

This consequence of De Broglie’s Wave Principle was well understood in several ways, and got to be known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

(Uncertainty of Position)(Uncertainty of Momentum) > (Planck Constant)

[Roughly.]

The Quantum Wave, and thus the Uncertainty, applies to any “particle” (it could be a truck).

It is crucial to understand what the Uncertainty Principle says. In light of all particles being waves (so to speak), the Uncertainty Principle says that, AT NO MOMENT DOES A PARTICLE HAVE, EVER, A PERFECTLY DEFINED MOMENTUM and POSITION.

It would contradict the “particle’s” wavy nature. It’s always this question of putting a wave into a box: you cannot reduce the box to a point. There are NO POINTS in physics.

Now we are set to understand why Quantum Entanglement created great anxiety. Let’s go back to our two entangled particles, X and Y, sole, albeit not lonely, daughters of system S. Suppose X and Y are a light year apart.

Measure the momentum of X, at universal time t (Relativity allows to do this, thanks to a process of slow synchronization of clocks described by Poincare’ and certified later by Einstein). The momentum of Y is equal and opposite.

But, wait, at same time t, the position of Y could be determined.

Thus the Uncertainty Principle would be violated at time t at Y: one could retrospectively fully determine Y’s momentum and position, and Y would have revealed itself to be, at that particular time t, a vulgar point-particle… As in Classical Mechanics. But there are no point-particles in Quantum Physics:  that is, no point in Nature, that’s the whole point!).

Contradiction.

(This contradiction is conventionally called the “EPR Paradox”; it probably ought to be called the De Broglie-Einstein-Popper Paradox, or, simply, the Non-Locality Paradox.)

This is the essence of why Quantum Entanglement makes physicists with brains freak out. I myself have thought of this problem, very hard, for decades. However, very early on, I found none of the solutions by the great names presented to be satisfactory. And so I developed my own. The more time passes, the more I believe in it.

A difficulty I had is my theory created lots of cosmic garbage, if true (;-)).

At this point, Albert Einstein and his sidekicks (one of them was just used to translate from Einstein’s German) wrote:

“We are thus forced to conclude that the quantum-mechanical description of physical reality given by wave functions is not complete.” [Einstein, A; B Podolsky; N Rosen (1935-05-15). “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?”. Physical Review 47 (10): 777–780.]

The EPR paper ends by saying:

“While we have thus shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible.”

This is high lawyerese: even as vicious a critic as your humble servant cannot find anything wrong with this craftily composed conceptology.

Einstein had corresponded on the subject with the excellent philosopher Karl Popper earlier (and Popper found his own version of the EPR). This is no doubt while he was more circumspect that he had been before.

Let’s recapitulate the problem, my way.

After interacting, according to the WAVE PRINCIPLE, both widely separating particles X and Y share the SAME WAVE.

I talk, I talk, but this is what the equations that all physicists write say: SAME WAVE. They can write all the equations they want, I think about them.

That wave is non-local, and yes, it could be a light year across. Einstein had a problem with that? I don’t.

Those who cling to the past, tried everything to explain away the Non-Locality Paradox.

Einstein was a particular man, and the beginning of the EPR paper clearly shows he wants to cling back to particles, what I view as his error of 1905. Namely that particles are particles during fundamental processes (he got the Physics Nobel for it in 1922; however, as I will not get the Nobel, I am not afraid to declare the Nobel Committee in error; Einstein deserved several Nobels, yet he made a grievous error in 1905, which has led most physicists astray, to this day… hence the striking madness of the so-called “multiverse”).

The Bell Inequality (which Richard Feynman stole for himself!) conclusively demonstrated that experiments could be made to check whether the Quantum Non-Local effects would show up.

The experiments were conducted, and the Non-Local effects were found.

That they would not have been found would have shattered Quantum Physics completely. Indeed, all the modern formalism of Quantum Physics is about Non-Locality, right from the start.

So what is my vision of what is going on? Simple: when one determines, through an interaction I, the momentum of particle X, the wave made of X and Y, W(X,Y), so to speak, “collapses”, and transmits the fact of I to particle Y at faster than light speed TAU. (I have computed that TAU is more than 10^10 the speed of light, c; Chinese scientists have given a minimum value for TAU, 10^4 c)

Then Y reacts as if it had been touched. Because, well, it has been touched: amoebae-like, it may have extended a light year, or more.

Quantum Entanglement will turn into Einstein’s worst nightmare. Informed, and all around, quasi-instantaneously. Tell me, Albert, how does it feel to have thought for a while one had figured out the universe, and then, now, clearly, not at all?

(Why not? I did not stay stuck, as Einstein did, making metaphors from moving trains, clocks, etc; a first problem with clocks is that Quantum Physics does not treat time and space equivalently. Actually the whole Quantum conceptology is an offense to hard core Relativity.)

Faster than light entanglement is a new way to look at Nature. It will have consequences all over. Indeed particles bump into each other all the time, so they get entangled. This immediately implies that topology is important to classify, and uncover hundreds of states of matter that we did not suspect existed. None of this is idle: Entanglement  is central to Quantum Computing.

Entanglement’s consequences, from philosophy to technology, are going to dwarf all prior science.

Can we make predictions, from this spectacular, faster than light, new way to look at Nature?

Yes.

Dark Matter. [2]

Patrice Ayme’

***

[1]: That the De Broglie Principle, the Wave Principle implies Planck’s work is my idea, it’s not conventional Quantum as found in textbooks.

[2]: Interaction density depends upon matter density. I propose that Dark Matter is the remnants of waves that were too spread-out to be fully brought back by Quantum Wave Collapse. In low matter density, thus, will Dark Matter be generated. As observed.