Proof Of NO LOCAL Hidden Variables From Magnets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that’s not the case. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme
***

[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.

WHAT EINSTEIN DIDN’T UNDERSTAND: W Is Different From (W,E)!

Referring to Quanta, foundations of physics expert Dr. Ian Miller said in a comment on this site: “What the particle does it will do irrespective of whether you wish to try and calculate it.” 

This is, rephrased, an affirmation of LOCALITY found in Einstein’s famous EPR paper of 1935 [1]. Let’s try to dispose of it.

The “particle” “is”/or is “guided by”… a wave W… Of this all those who passed a course in Quantum Mechanics agree. Basic QM consists in computing amplitudes of complex probability waves W.

That W is the Quantum Wave appearing all over Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory. Right, the nature of the wave W will change according to what Quanta we consider… Let’s neglect this for a moment.

[[In SQPR, the quanta is a nonlinear wave with a linear tail, expanding and contracting at a quasi-infinite speed (that allows SQPR to quasi-duplicate Bohm’s quantum potential)… But this is irrelevant here for the most general argument. We only need the concept of a wave.]]

Now if one sets up an experiment E, wave W, being a wave, will interact specially with E. The point is that (W,E) is different from (W, E’), if E is different from E’. Niels Bohr made, basically, that argument to Einstein, who couldn’t understand it… (Nor could I, for the longest time!)

But SQPR makes clear why that’s true… And, even simpler, so does the simplest wave mechanics, as long as the wave interferes with the environment. But that matter wave interferes with the environment, we know, and have known for a million years, because light coming out of a hole diffracts, or makes rainbows coming out of eyelashes…. Diffraction patterns are everywhere.

More sophisticated, and for spin: Stern-Gerlach magnets…. Which shows that spin measurments don’t commute, and “which path” information is crucial… The “which path” data is itself nonlocal…

We know of “the particle” W because we put some experiment E in its way. W is different from the entangled pair (W,E). This is the core of what Einstein didn’t get. The biggest notions in physics are the simplest [2].

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TRYING TO BE MORE SOPHISTICATED REINFORCES THE ARGUMENT:

So the argument was disposed of, and Einstein instructed…I agreed with Einstein for years before realizing my mistake, and that Bohr was right.

However, classically inclined skeptics will moan, what is this W? 

Well W, the Quantum Wave, is all we have to compute with. W “IS” the Quantum.

W could be the Dirac wave representing the relativistic electron, W could be the wave of the W boson, whatever, they are in different spaces. And they all need to be “renormalized”, right… because the fields self-interfere (“fields” and “waves” are the same things)

But that greater complexity doesn’t change the simplicity of the argument above. It actually makes it even more powerful. Indeed W is truly a wave in the appropriate Hilbert space, itself revealed by the nature of the experiment E one intends to reveal W with…

If I remember well, Niels Bohr made that argument to Einstein, but in a more obscure way, and he aggravated his case with some philosophical mumbo-jumbo…

The point remains: what we want to measure, the Experiment E that we have in mind, determines the grossest mathematical nature of the wave W.  W does not just interfere with E, E creates the grossest nature of the W to start with (for example Dirac wanted a first order PDE conserved by relativity to depict the electron; out of that requirement popped out spin and antimatter… Among other things…)

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: Some want to grab the wave W, and complain they can’t, because W lives in “phase space” (aka the Hilbert Space which is the experiment E. But that’s misunderstanding about how thinking works: One can’t decide the universe, and all its objects are three dimensional, when we have plenty of forces, and, as Riemann more or less pointed out, each of them brings us one or more dimensions, each of them potentially (joke intended) in a fancy space (for example so-called Clabi-Yau manifolds…) 

 

Diffraction Pattern. This shows that a light wave interfere with its environment, E (in this case a hole). In QFT, one has an evolution equation on one side, and a space dependent energy term on the other, plus a potential A. The A represents the environment E. In the grossest analysis, the situation is the same as above.

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[1] Einstein used that point, that the particle was always there, untouched, to affirm that, thus, there were HIDDEN (from Quantum Mechanics) variables. It’s not really an argument, because it’s the reaffirmation of the same point. Alain Aspect’s experiment for which he got the Wolf and Nobel prizes in physics, disposed of that the “particle” was TOUCHED… demonstrating that god refused to listen to Einstein.

[In SQPR, there are hidden variables, however they are, de facto nonlocal, as they change at speed in excess of 10^23c. Thus SQPR doen’t contradict the prohibtion against “LOCAL” hidden variables. Anything above c is “nonlocal”. As in “NONLOCAL hidden variables”. We know from experiments (Aspect, Zeilinger, labs in China, etc.) that the QUANTUM NONLOCALITY proceeds at speeds orders of magnitude greater than the speed of light…]

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[2] E itself is typically NONLOCAL (for example two arms of an interferometer…

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.

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Anyway, here it is: Nonlocality has become official!

Patrice Ayme 

RELATIVITY DOESN’T EXCLUDE FASTER THAN LIGHT COMMUNICATIONS; Einstein Illogical There

“Relativity”, first named and defined by Henri Poincaré (1904) is a local theory of LOCAL TIME. Einstein was aware of this and thus contributed later to what he called “GENERAL Relativity”, by incorporating accelerations of the gravitational type (Relativity as defined by Poincaré is all about uniform motions, as in Galilean Relativity). The main contribution of Einstein in his Relativity paper of 1905 was to derive the (already derived) equations of Relativity without referring to a state of rest (Einstein’s work is mostly a slick mathematical trick with the axiomatic system, because the state of rest is there nevertheless… as Einstein himself admitted much later).

Einstein has awed generations of physicists. Einstein had a world picture in his head, partly from his mastery of differential calculus at young age (from a helping uncle), friendly to fields and slick math. A famous conclusion from Einstein’s exposition of Relativity is that communications Faster Than Light (FTL) are impossible, because they violate CAUSALITY. Most theoretical physicists have to repeat this lest they lose their good standing. The source is Einstein. Here is Einstein’s reasoning:

The math are correct, but one of the assumptions (underlined in red by me) of the mathematical reasoning is not-previously demonstrated. Namely the addition of velocities has not been proven to be applicable when W> c!

Einstein’s logical mistake in his demonstration of the impossibility of FTL communications is that the addition of velocity formula has been demonstrated ONLY when adding speeds LESS THAN c. So Einstein should not have applied something demonstrated for W<c and ONLY FOR W<c, to W>c.

To see that relativistic speed addition applies only for speeds less than c, one has to go through the derivation of the relativistic addition of velocities step by step, as Einstein does in this Relativity-recapitulation paper of 1907, from which the impossibility of FTL com comes from, and extracted above.

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Let’s acquire some philosophical altitude: Relativity is a type of logical cooking which applies only locally. Its main ingredient is LOCAL LIGHT CLOCK THEORY. Local light clock is, admittedly a pleonasm, as it turns out that the universe, considered to be a differential manifold U with metric given by light, is curved… So non-local light clock are impossible (at any point their size would be bounded by the exponential radius). The Michelson-Morley experiment shows that the time given by a light clock doesn’t depend upon its orientation relative to its speed… Now causality is a different concept, independent of time (it is not because something happened before, or after, that it is causally related to something else).  There is a causality category CC, independent a priori from the Universe U, a differential manifold. 

The conflict between CC and U is the problem of nonlocality. Amusingly we now know that the resolution of this conflict requires some FTL mechanism, or FTL causality. Could there be no FTL mechanism, and no FTL causality? Yes, but at an even higher logical and counter-intuitive price: namely the Universe, far from being just a differential manifold equipped by light metric (which has T2, Hausdorff separability, topologically)… Would not be topologically separable…  Instead in my own SQPR, separability is maintained, time delayed causality is maintained, and Dark Matter blossoms [1]…

A lot of the hang-ups of all too many physicists about causality and Faster Than Light and Quantum Nonlocality have been caused by the erroneous feeling that it has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that Faster Than Light is impossible, no matter what, in all and any way.

A meta objection could be made, trying to supersede my logical refinements above: that all and any communication require momentum transfer and that momentum augments as 1/(1-vv/cc)… Right, but there again, an assumption is made which is unproven:  that all communications require momentum transfer. This is precisely what, ironically enough, the Pandora box Einstein-Podolski-Rosen (EPR) paper of 1935 showed not to be necessarily true. The EPR opened for all of humanity to be thereafter tormented, or delighted with, ever after… EPR should have made manifest that Einstein 1907 had slipped on a slick mathematical banana… But no… [2] 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Global time can still be maintained as a concept, but it is path dependent (and this is true in GR). In SQPR, U is embedded in a larger Euclidean space of dimension at least 2n+1 (Whitney and Nash theorems). However all this, including how many dimensions there really  are, belong to the experimental realm. 

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[2] An example of something completely obvious which was then completely lost for ever and ever: Non-Euclidean geometry. At the same time as Euclid made his geometry all the geometry which could be had. Pytheas of Marseilles, Πυθέας ὁ Μασσαλιώτης Pythéas ho Massaliōtēs; Pytheas Massiliensis; c.350 BC-c.285 BC and then Eratosthenes, used Non-Euclidean geometry to measure the Earth and universe.

It took 21 centuries for eminent mathematicians, philosophers, physicists and thinkers to rediscover all this… Notice though that János Bolyai, Gauss, and Riemann were not professional physicists (the latter two were paid as mathematicians…).

Bolyai became so obsessed with Euclid‘s parallel postulate that his father, who pursued the same quandary for many years, wrote to him in 1820: “You must not attempt this approach to parallels. I know this way to the very end. I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and joy in my life. I entreat you, leave the science of parallels alone…Learn from my example.”^[4]

János, however, persisted (perseverare diabolicum) and eventually concluded that the postulate is independent of the other axioms of geometry and that different consistent geometries can be constructed on negating and modifying it. In 1823, he wrote to his father: “I have discovered such wonderful things that I was amazed…out of nothing I have created a strange new universe.

Gauss, contacted, replied by glorifying himself and pretending that he had published nothing for fear of the “cries of the Boeotians“…. Gauss wrote: “To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work…coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years….” Never mind that Gauss said to some other friend: “I regard this young geometer Bolyai as a genius of the first order.“

Disgusted János Bolyai left mathematics, all too often, a most poisonous church full of autistic navel gazers with mountainous egos dissolvable FTL… 

 

Consciousness, Nonlocality, Free Will

DS asked in Aeon: “Patrice, in what way is consciousness “nonlocal”, and what is the evidence for this?”

DS: Science  and technique progress, and thus so do our visions of the world. Quantum computers are becoming a reality. Quantum computers work in a completely different way from the classical computers we presently have (which, fundamentally are of the same type as those the Greeks had, more than 2,000 years ago!). Present (2017) versions of Quantum computers are primitive relative to what’s coming (Artificial Consciousness computers). And you know what? Full Quantum computers depend crucially upon nonlocality.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/artificial-consciousness/

Descartes located consciousness (“the soul”) in a tiny part of the brain (the pituitary gland).  I guess because Descartes considered it was the only part of the brain with a unique character, just like the soul is unique to the mind? Now we know the pituitary is just a master neurohormonal center…) 

Philosophers And People of Culture Have to Learn New Words and Especially the Concepts Having to Do With Quantum & Nonlocality. Lest they Become the New Barbarians…

Split brain, and other surgeries have revealed that consciousness can’t be localized that way, inside a tiny organ (whereas short-term memory can be localized, to the hippocampus, fear to the amygdala, vision to 17 areas in the cortex, etc.)

So, in that gross sense, consciousness is non-local.

Next, we are now basically certain that basic biology uses the Quantum (we have a few telling examples already, not just chlorophyll). By this I mean that consciousness uses individual quanta and their nonlocal behavior (for example individual photon, or individual electrons, the latter when, and precisely because, delocalized).

Indeed, what is the most fundamental property of the Quantum? Not just that it is quantified. Nonlocality is the Quantum most important property. The Quantum is quantified because it is nonlocal (Einstein did not understand this his entire life, from 1905 to his death). Nonlocality is the crucial difficulty of Quantum Physics (it shows up as Schrödinger cats, EPR paradox, etc.)

Supposing that the most fundamental thing we know of in the universe, consciousness, can, somehow, avoid the most fundamental physics we have found in the universe, is a form of denial akin to climate denial, or parallel universes. Ignoring Quantum Physics, as a fundamental conceptual tool to understand consciousness can only be explained by prejudice.

What prejudice? Most cultured people have no understanding, let alone feeling, for the Quantum. So they desperately clinging to Classical mechanics, something best suited for artillery shells…

As the Quantum is essentially nonlocal, and fundamental to consciousness, so is consciousness.

And what of the Quantum deniers? Well they miss entirely the immensely rich new logic that Quantum logic has offered beyond Classical logic…

The preceding should not be construed as an endorsement of so-called weirdly named “extrasensory perception”. Instead, I have argued that the sensory system itself is nonlocal (pretty much a physiological evidence, too, as we see with 17 areas…)

A trivial, but telling, case could be called “Free Will and Cosmic Rays”. Cosmic rays, cosmic elementary particles, can be millions of times more energetic than the most powerful elementary particles created by man, at CERN (their origin is obscure, logically speaking). It is known that cosmic rays can change the states of present computers (so even present computers are unpredictable!) Now the scale at which present computers operate is classical (as in classical mechanics), it is hundreds of times larger than the scale at which the inner machinery of cells operate.

That means that the inner machinery of neurons will be put in different states by cosmic rays, just like smartphones. There goes the freedom of Free Will. “Free Will” may feel free, but it may well have, and sometimes surely will have been, directed from a galaxy long ago, far away… This spectacular conclusion is not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of science. And I have not even considered the question of (the extremely nonlocal) Quantum Entanglement. Quantum Entanglement is real and makes matters way worse.

Some will say, that’s fine, we don’t need to know all this stuff, we can be happy, and we can still pontificate about our classical notions of “Free Will” and “Consciousness”. Indeed, those who want to stay primitive, should. Yes. Yet, within bounds. There are limits to barbarity that civilization needs to set-up, as a matter of survival.

Those who want to cling to a more barbarian, less scientific past certainly cannot claim to have the will to moral superiority. They are like those who believe Muhammad rode to Jerusalem on a winged mule. One cannot accept the principle that one can believe in anything, accept that anybody can believe in anything, and civilization will go on. Verily, superior morality, superior smarts.

If anything, Quantum Physics show that much more things are connected in mysterious ways than ever thought possible. Even space and time get entangled in “Quantum Procrastination“, and cease to have any conventional meaning.

To believe that this completely new, immensely more subtle than was ever suspected (Quantum) universe, has nothing to do with the way we perceive it, and conceive of it, would be an astoundingly naive, revoltingly obsolete, lack of introspection, a short step away from those winged mules.

Patrice Ayme’

TO BE AND NOT TO BE? Is Entangled Physics Thinking, Or Sinking?

Frank Wilczek, a physics Nobel laureate, wrote a first soporific, and then baffling article in Quanta magazine: “Entanglement Made Simple”. Yes, all too simple: it sweeps the difficulties under the rug. After a thorough description of classical entanglement, we are swiftly told at the end, that classical entanglement supports the many World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. However, classical entanglement (from various conservation laws) has been known since the seventeenth century.

Skeptical founders of Quantum physics (such as Einstein, De Broglie, Schrodinger, Bohm, Bell) knew classical entanglement very well. David Bohm found the Bohm-Aharanov effect, which demonstrated the importance of (nonlocal) potential, John Bell found his inequality which demonstrated, with the help of experiments (Alain Aspect, etc.) that Quantum physics is nonlocal.

Differently From Classical Entanglement, Which Acts As One, Quantum Entanglement Acts At A Distance: It Interferes With Measurement, At A Distance

The point about the cats is that everybody, even maniacs, ought to know that cats are either dead, or alive. Quantum mechanics make the point they can compute things about cats, from their point of view. OK.

Quantum mechanics, in their busy shops, compute with dead and live cats as possible outcomes. No problem. But then does that mean there is a universe, a “world“, with a dead cat, happening, and then one with a live cat, also happening simultaneously?

Any serious philosopher, somebody endowed with common sense, the nemesis of a Quantum mechanic, will say no: in a philosopher’s opinion, a cat is either dead, or alive. To be, or not to be. Not to be, and thus not not to be.

A Quantum mechanic can compute with dead and live cats, but that does not mean she creates worlds, by simply rearranging her computation, this way, or that. Her various dead and live cats arrangements just mean she has partial knowledge of what she computes with, and that Quantum measurements, even from an excellent mechanic, are just partial, mechanic-dependent measurements.

For example, if one measures spin, one needs to orient a machine (a Stern Gerlach device). That’s just a magnetic field going one way, like a big arrow, a big direction. Thus one measures spin in one direction, not another.

What’s more surprising is that, later on, thanks to a nonlocal entanglement, one may be able to determine that, at this point in time, the particle had a spin that could be measured, from far away, in another direction. So far, so good: this is like classical mechanics.

However, whether or not that measurement at a distance has occurred, roughly simultaneously, and way out of the causality light cone, EFFECTS the first measurement.

This is what the famous Bell Inequality means.

And this is what the problem with Quantum Entanglement is. Quantum Entanglement implies that wilful action somewhere disturbs a measurement beyond the reach of the five known forces. It brings all sorts of questions of a philosophical nature, and make them into burning physical subjects. For example, does the experimenter at a distance have real free will?

Calling the world otherworldly, or many worldly, does not really help to understand what is going on. Einstein’s “Spooky Interaction At A Distance” seems a more faithful, honest rendition of reality than supposing that each and any Quantum mechanic in her shop, creates worlds, willy-nilly, each time it strikes her fancy to press a button.

What Mr. Wilczek did is what manyworldists and multiversists always do: they jump into their derangement (cats alive AND dead) after saying there is no problem. Details are never revealed.

Here is, in extenso, the fully confusing and unsupported conclusion of Mr. Wilczek:

“Everyday language is ill suited to describe quantum complementarity, in part because everyday experience does not encounter it. Practical cats interact with surrounding air molecules, among other things, in very different ways depending on whether they are alive or dead, so in practice the measurement gets made automatically, and the cat gets on with its life (or death). But entangled histories describe q-ons that are, in a real sense, Schrödinger kittens. Their full description requires, at intermediate times, that we take both of two contradictory property-trajectories into account.

The controlled experimental realization of entangled histories is delicate because it requires we gather partial information about our q-on. Conventional quantum measurements generally gather complete information at one time — for example, they determine a definite shape, or a definite color — rather than partial information spanning several times. But it can be done — indeed, without great technical difficulty. In this way we can give definite mathematical and experimental meaning to the proliferation of “many worlds” in quantum theory, and demonstrate its substantiality.”

Sounds impressive, but the reasons are either well-known or then those reasons use a sleight of hand.

Explicitly: “take both of two contradictory property-trajectories into account”: just read Feynman QED, first chapter. Feynman invented the ‘sum over histories’, and Wilczek is his parrot; but Feynman did not become crazy from his ‘sum over history’: Richard smirked when his picturesque evocation was taken literally, decades later…

And now the sleight of hand: …”rather than  [gather] partial information spanning several times. But it can be done — indeed, without great technical difficulty.” This nothing new: it is the essence of the double slit discovered by that Medical Doctor and polymath, Young, around 1800 CE: when one runs lots of ‘particles’ through it, one sees the (wave) patterns. This is what Wilczek means by “partial information“. Guess what? We knew that already.

Believing that one can be, while not to be, putting that at the foundation of physics, is a new low in thinking. And it impacts the general mood, making it more favorable towards unreason.

If anything can be, without being, if anything not happening here, is happening somewhere else, then is not anything permitted? Dostoyevsky had a Russian aristocrat suggests that, if god did not exist anything was permitted. And, come to think of it, the argument was at the core of Christianism. Or more, exactly, of the Christian reign of terror which started in the period 363 CE-381 CE, from the reigns of emperor Jovian to the reign of emperor Theodosius. To prevent anything to be permitted, a god had to enforce the law.

What we have now is way worse: the new nihilists (Wilczek and his fellow manyworldists) do not just say that everything is permitted. They say: it does not matter if everything is permitted, or not. It is happening, anyway. Somewhere.

Thus Many-Worlds physics endangers, not just the foundations of reason, but the very justification for morality. That is that what is undesirable should be avoided. Even the Nazis agreed with that principle. Many-Worlds physics says it does not matter, because it is happening, anyway. Somewhere, out there.

So what is going on, here, at the level of moods? Well, professor Wilczek teaches at Harvard. Harvard professors advised president Yeltsin of Russia, to set up a plutocracy. It ruined Russia. Same professors made a fortune from it, while others were advising president Clinton to do the same, and meanwhile Prime Minister Balladur in France was mightily impressed, and followed this new enlightenment by the Dark Side, as did British leaders, and many others. All these societies were ruined in turn. Harvard was the principal spirit, the Geist, behind the rise of plutocracy, and the engine propelling that rise, was the principle that morality did not matter. because, because, well, Many-Worlds!

How does one go from the foundations of physics, to the foundations of plutocracy? Faculty members in the richest, most powerful universities meet in mutual admiration societies known as “faculty clubs” (I was there!) and lots of other I scratch-your-back, you scratch-my-back social occasions they spend much of their time indulging in. So they influence each other, at the very least in the atmospheres of moods they create, and then breathe together.

Remember? It is not that everything is permitted, they chuckle: it’s happening anyway, so we may as well profit from it too. Many-Worlds physics feeds a mood favorable to ever more plutocracy, by fostering confused thinking, and that’s all there is to it. (But that, of course, is a lot, all too much.)

Patrice Ayme’

The Quantum Puzzle

CAN PHYSICS COMPUTE?

Is Quantum Computing Beyond Physics?

More exactly, do we know, can we know, enough physics for (full) quantum computing?

I have long suggested that the answer to this question was negative, and smirked at physicists sitting billions of universes on a pinhead, as if they had nothing better to do, the children they are. (Just as their Christian predecessors in the Middle Ages, their motives are not pure.)

Now an article in the American Mathematical Society Journal of May 2016 repeats (some) of the arguments I had in mind: The Quantum Computer Puzzle. Here are some of the arguments. One often hears that Quantum Computers are a done deal. Here is the explanation from Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister, which reflects perfectly the official scientific conventional wisdom on the subject:  https://youtu.be/rRmv4uD2RQ4

(One wishes all our great leaders would be as knowledgeable… And I am not joking as I write this! Trudeau did engineering and ecological studies.)

… Supposing, Of Course, That One Can Isolate And Manipulate Qubits As One Does Normal Bits…

Before some object that physicists are better qualified than mathematicians to talk about the Quantum, let me point towards someone who is perhaps the most qualified experimentalist in the world on the foundations of Quantum Physics. Serge Haroche is a French physicist who got the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to count photons without seeing them. It’s the most delicate Quantum Non-Demolition (QND) method I have heard of. It involved making the world’s most perfect mirrors. The punch line? Serge Haroche does not believe Quantum Computers are feasible. However Haroche does not suggest how he got there. The article in the AMS does make plenty of suggestions to that effect.

Let me hasten to add some form of Quantum Computing (or Quantum Simulation) called “annealing” is obviously feasible. D Wave, a Canadian company is selling such devices. In my view, Quantum Annealing is just the two slit experiment written large. Thus the counter-argument can be made that conventional computers can simulate annealing (and that has been the argument against D Wave’s machines).

Full Quantum Computing (also called  “Quantum Supremacy”) would be something completely different. Gil Kalai, a famous mathematician, and a specialist of Quantum Computing, is skeptical:

“Quantum computers are hypothetical devices, based on quantum physics, which would enable us to perform certain computations hundreds of orders of magnitude faster than digital computers. This feature is coined “quantum supremacy”, and one aspect or another of such quantum computational supremacy might be seen by experiments in the near future: by implementing quantum error-correction or by systems of noninteracting bosons or by exotic new phases of matter called anyons or by quantum annealing, or in various other ways…

A main reason for concern regarding the feasibility of quantum computers is that quantum systems are inherently noisy. We will describe an optimistic hypothesis regarding quantum noise that will allow quantum computing and a pessimistic hypothesis that won’t.”

Gil Katai rolls out a couple of theorems which suggest that Quantum Computing is very sensitive to noise (those are similar to finding out which slit a photon went through). Moreover, he uses a philosophical argument against Quantum Computing:

“It is often claimed that quantum computers can perform certain computations that even a classical computer of the size of the entire universe cannot perform! Indeed it is useful to examine not only things that were previously impossible and that are now made possible by a new technology but also the improvement in terms of orders of magnitude for tasks that could have been achieved by the old technology.

Quantum computers represent enormous, unprecedented order-of-magnitude improvement of controlled physical phenomena as well as of algorithms. Nuclear weapons represent an improvement of 6–7 orders of magnitude over conventional ordnance: the first atomic bomb was a million times stronger than the most powerful (single) conventional bomb at the time. The telegraph could deliver a transatlantic message in a few seconds compared to the previous three-month period. This represents an (immense) improvement of 4–5 orders of magnitude. Memory and speed of computers were improved by 10–12 orders of magnitude over several decades. Breakthrough algorithms at the time of their discovery also represented practical improvements of no more than a few orders of magnitude. Yet implementing Boson Sampling with a hundred bosons represents more than a hundred orders of magnitude improvement compared to digital computers.”

In other words, it unrealistic to expect such a, well, quantum jump…

“Boson Sampling” is a hypothetical, and simplest way, proposed to implement a Quantum Computer. (It is neither known if it could be made nor if it would be good enough for Quantum Computing[ yet it’s intensely studied nevertheless.)

***

Quantum Physics Is The Non-Local Engine Of Space, and Time Itself:

Here is Gil Kalai again:

“Locality, Space and Time

The decision between the optimistic and pessimistic hypotheses is, to a large extent, a question about modeling locality in quantum physics. Modeling natural quantum evolutions by quantum computers represents the important physical principle of “locality”: quantum interactions are limited to a few particles. The quantum circuit model enforces local rules on quantum evolutions and still allows the creation of very nonlocal quantum states.

This remains true for noisy quantum circuits under the optimistic hypothesis. The pessimistic hypothesis suggests that quantum supremacy is an artifact of incorrect modeling of locality. We expect modeling based on the pessimistic hypothesis, which relates the laws of the “noise” to the laws of the “signal”, to imply a strong form of locality for both. We can even propose that spacetime itself emerges from the absence of quantum fault tolerance. It is a familiar idea that since (noiseless) quantum systems are time reversible, time emerges from quantum noise (decoherence). However, also in the presence of noise, with quantum fault tolerance, every quantum evolution that can experimentally be created can be time-reversed, and, in fact, we can time-permute the sequence of unitary operators describing the evolution in an arbitrary way. It is therefore both quantum noise and the absence of quantum fault tolerance that enable an arrow of time.”

Just for future reference, let’s “note that with quantum computers one can emulate a quantum evolution on an arbitrary geometry. For example, a complicated quantum evolution representing the dynamics of a four-dimensional lattice model could be emulated on a one-dimensional chain of qubits.

This would be vastly different from today’s experimental quantum physics, and it is also in tension with insights from physics, where witnessing different geometries supporting the same physics is rare and important. Since a universal quantum computer allows the breaking of the connection between physics and geometry, it is noise and the absence of quantum fault tolerance that distinguish physical processes based on different geometries and enable geometry to emerge from the physics.”

***

I have proposed a theory which explains the preceding features, including the emergence of space. Let’s call it Sub Quantum Physics (SQP). The theory breaks a lot of sacred cows. Besides, it brings an obvious explanation for Dark Matter. If I am correct the Dark matter Puzzle is directly tied in with the Quantum Puzzle.

In any case, it is a delight to see in print part of what I have been severely criticized for saying for all too many decades… The gist of it all is that present day physics would be completely incomplete.

Patrice Ayme’