Posts Tagged ‘Quantum Foundations’

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT: Nature’s Faster Than Light Architecture

November 22, 2014

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)

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.

QUANTUM WAVE

April 5, 2014

REAL WAVE, NOT BORN KNOWLEDGE WAVE.

Abstract: Quantum Waves are real. Because the alternatives are unreal. On the way I make a drastic epistemological critique of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (“CI”), and its modern aspect, QBism. (For a general introduction, one can consult Nature’s March 26 2014 lead editorial: ”Be here now.” http://www.nature.com/news/be-here-now-1.14922.)

***

Quantum Physics, as usually formulated, uses “observers” and “measurements”. That approach was the invention of Bohr and his flock. It was celebrated by giving the Nobel to Born (a friend of Einstein) for making Quantum Waves into “Probabilistic Waves”.

Quantum Interference Gives Birth To The Universe

Quantum Interference Gives Birth To The Universe

As Nature’s “Be here now” puts it: “Bohr and Einstein argued about whether quantum mechanics allowed any room for the idea of realism — of an objective world that exists independently from our efforts to observe and measure it. Bohr insisted that physics was concerned with what we can know, and was silent on the matter of ‘how things really are’. He, Born and Heisenberg made claims about quantum theory’s challenge to causality and determinism that today look like a bit of an intellectual stretch.”

QBism (for Quantum Bayesian), Nature magazine sings the praises of, brings nothing new to CI. Bayesian probabilities (developed mostly by Laplace!) modify the ingredients of a probability computation to get a better fit to what’s observed.

Far from being sophisticated, I would argue that the probabilistic approach to Quantum Physics, although effective, is primitive. It is what I will call, a typical first order theory of reality.

Indeed thinking from “measurements” and “observers” is exactly the way a scary smart prehistoric man who knew nothing about a subject would proceed. As he would try to be as objective as possible. And make no mistake: today’s civilization rests on countless scary smart prehistoric men, some living hundreds of thousands years ago, and maybe more.

Confronted to the unknown phenomenon, the first thing prehistoric man will notice is that situation depends upon observer and measurement, causality and determinism are not in evidence. In other words, scary smart prehistoric man would be baffled, just the way Niels Bohr and his followers (Heisenberg, Born, etc.) were baffled.

However scary smart prehistoric man did not just stay baffled, as most physicists have resigned themselves to be. Instead scary smart prehistoric men built up meta-theories, that is all encompassing brain networks that made a given phenomenon into one. (It could be a theory of Tarpan Horse hunting, or of spring floods, bad weather incoming, or the local volcano.)

The probabilistic approach, “just shut up and calculate”, CI, is only a first approach. Real science substitute concepts with a life of their own to raw data. (That life is the appropriate brain machinery set-up to organize the data; that’s what causality is.)

Even human beings (“savants”) who are natural born computers, those who can tell you instantaneously what day of the week was February 17, 1924, adorn numbers with smells, texture, colors and personalities. Numbers become personalities in a landscape.

General philosophical metaprinciple out of that? Acquiring dimensionality is acquiring reality.

(This advanced remark is an allusion to the fact full Quantum wavefunctions can be arbitrarily high dimensional, and that has nothing to do with String Theory’s pitiful 11 dimensions. Ironically, that has been the main objection against the Pilot Wave Theories.)

For example, take the Moon. Try to be objective, while playing prehistoric man. What do you observe about the Moon as Homo Erectus? (Or equivalently, Arab in the desert, 20 centuries ago.)

The Moon? A white disk, sometimes a crescent, when most of the disk is obscured. If one wants to be objective, as a Prehistoric Man, nothing more. No proof, whatsoever, for a Prehistoric Man, that the Moon is a physical object. You can’t go there, you don’t have a rocket, and you cannot see mountains on the Moon, and their shadows, you don’t have the eyes of an eagle.

So, all right, for prehistoric man, the Moon is this whitish crescent-disk, and all you can do is measurements with what you have, the appearance of the thing.

One can measure the monthly appearances of the Moon by comparing it to the Solar Year, seasons, what not. Notice things come back in cycles, but not quite.

Maybe the Moon is the language of the gods, trying to talk to us? That was the interpretation made in Antique Mecca (with its 360 gods, but with the Moon dominating). So then, obviously the Moon was a message from God, observed the Muslims, and they believe in that to this day.

This is what Bohr’s CI and his modern imitators, the QBists, achieved. They have numbers, don’t understand where they come from, and made a cult around them.

When they claimed that one could not go any further (as Von Neumann stupidly claimed to have proven), deeper thinkers smirk.

The correct scientific approach is to go beyond numbers (this, by the way, is what inflationistas have done, with their Cosmic Inflation theory; and now everybody is excited about them). Sit down, and ponder: what could the Moon be? Could it be a real object?

What’s a real object? Answer: something endowed with more than the first set of numbers we got to know about it.

Of course, the first time scary smart prehistoric man comes across a situation he did not understand, but a situation that seems to reproduce itself, again and again, he set-up an experiment, hopefully a simplified version of what he observed. OK, so a horse fell from the cliff. Excellent meat for all for a full moon. Horse flees from man, so maybe man can make many horses fall off cliff, as needed.

Arrogant twerps who believe that modern man, preferably talking the Anglo-Normand dialect, invented the experimental method, know nothing of man.

Ever since man is man, man has found out about reality with experiments to observe how nature works. Quantum Physics is not any different.

Yes, the experiments depend upon the observer. So what? It dos not mean that all that could be observed has to be experienced. Quantum Interference is everywhere, it’s the essence of creation, and men observe it on a countable set, of measure zero.

Primitive Men Believe The Universe IS All About Themselves

Primitive Men Believe The Universe IS All About Themselves

Quantum Interference Does Not Depend Upon Man

Quantum Interference Does Not Depend Upon Man

The reality the experiments are after do not depend upon the observer. That Bohr and company could not figure it out, and, instead, started to dissect and not dissect the same cat, is a monument to the frailty of human intelligence.

John Bell (inventor of the Bell Inequalities to help check that Quantum Physics is non local) was ironical about this subject. He said:“What exactly qualifies some observer to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer for some better qualified system… with a PhD?”

Or, even better, a Nobel prize?

Of course not. (Unfortunately, Bell, the head theorist at CERN, was felled by a heart attack at the age of 62, before he could debunk more of the orthodoxy.) As I said above, believing that what we observe depends upon the observer is the most primitive objective approach. In first approach to knowledge, it’s objective to admit one’s subjectivity.

Can the “wave function” in Quantum Physics be a real object? Of course yes. Go back to the Two Slit Experiment. (Feynman correctly pointed out that the entire mystery of Quantum Physics was within the 2-slit.)

All the appearance of what we observe, when conducting a 2-slit experiment, for example between our eyelashes, observing the pretty color patterns, is that wave interference is causing the apparition of photon(s) of light in some places (where the waves interfere positively) and not in others (where waves interfere destructively).

Those waves, between our eyelashes are as real as waves in a port, no matter what a thousand Nobel laureates in physics may want to bleat about. (Lay on your back in the sun, and look through your eyelashes as you close them: this is my portable version of the 2-slit experiment.)

So what are these waves?

Above I shot down the subjective-knowledge theory of Bohr-Born-QBism. They reason from the first appearance, and forgot that experiments require, they always did, a carefully contrived measurement process, and an observer. They went prehistoric, and don’t know about it.

What’s left to understand Quantum Physics? Only two classes of theories are left.

One of them is the maniacal “Multiverse” “theory”. That insanity claims that any fundamental process generates as many universes as there are possibilities for it to evolve into. It’s an attempt to “save determinism”.

Unfortunately, the madness is infecting physics; just when we thought physics was ruled with not too smart a theory, an insane one comes to dominate. (The Multiverse was invented partly because of confusion about Schrodinger cats, as I hinted above: lack of philosophical sophistication killed the cats.)

What are we left with? De Broglie’s Pilot Wave theories. (In Anglo-Saxonia, this is known as “De Broglie-Bohm” theory, because that makes the Anglo-Saxon equal to the French, but, truly, De Broglie invented it all by himself.)

My own theory is a sci-fi version of the Pilot-Double Solution theory. It predicts Dark Matter readily (as very low mass, very weakly interacting particles, so it definitively makes falsifiable predictions).

Some will say that I am absurd, and, instead, should learn the “Standard Model” (SM) of particle physics. SM and Quantum Theory are the most successful physical theories ever, with incomparable precision.

Yet, that precision is an illusion. Theories explaining everything with 100% precision have existed in the last 25 centuries, at least (say the geocentric theory, viewed as correct, and unique, from Archimedes to Buridan, that is for 16 centuries). OK, some of those champions of the past turned out to be wrong (outside of the realm in which they had been initially checked). What’s the difference this time?

The difference, this time, is that we know that the Standard Model is wrong (Whereas the Greeks, 18 centuries ago thought the geocentric system was 100% right). Why? It explains at most 4% of the matter-energy out there (and even then with three dozens fundamental parameters!). At least my inchoate theory explains readily 30% of what’s out there in the Cosmos.

Anyway, there is no much choice for the foundations of Quantum Physics. It’s either the Schrodinger cats, simultaneously skinned and not skinned, or its deranged contradictor, the Multiverse shall rule over the mental asylum… Or the Pilot Wave theories will finally emerge.

This ship needs a pilot, to steer among the waves. As we will see in the future, this has tremendous consequences, be it only for the theory of “The Now”, as Einstein called it (and for which he had nothing to propose, although he was very worried by it, as Nature points out in “Be here now“).

Let’s conclude with a piece of ancient hanse wisdom, as it used to be written:

FLVCTVAT NEC MERGITVR (It Fluctuates, Never Sinks; Paris’ 2,000 years old motto.)

Patrice Aymé


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NotPoliticallyCorrect

Human Biodiversity, IQ, Evolutionary Psychology, Epigenetics and Evolution

Political Reactionary

Dark Enlightenment and Neoreaction

Of Particular Significance

Conversations About Science with Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler

Rise, Republic, Plutocracy, Degeneracy, Fall And Transmutation Of Rome

Power Exponentiation By A Few Destroyed Greco-Roman Civilization. Are We Next?

SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ

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Artificial Turf At French Bilingual School Berkeley

Artificial Turf At French Bilingual School Berkeley

Patterns of Meaning

Exploring the patterns of meaning that shape our world

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in truth, only atoms and the void

West Hunter

Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat

GrrrGraphics on WordPress

www.grrrgraphics.com

Skulls in the Stars

The intersection of physics, optics, history and pulp fiction

Footnotes to Plato

because all (Western) philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

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

Learning from Dogs

Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.

ianmillerblog

Smile! You’re at the best WordPress.com site ever

NotPoliticallyCorrect

Human Biodiversity, IQ, Evolutionary Psychology, Epigenetics and Evolution

Political Reactionary

Dark Enlightenment and Neoreaction

Of Particular Significance

Conversations About Science with Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler

Rise, Republic, Plutocracy, Degeneracy, Fall And Transmutation Of Rome

Power Exponentiation By A Few Destroyed Greco-Roman Civilization. Are We Next?

SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ

Where The Eagles Fly . . . . Art Science Poetry Music & Ideas

Artificial Turf At French Bilingual School Berkeley

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Patterns of Meaning

Exploring the patterns of meaning that shape our world

Sean Carroll

in truth, only atoms and the void

West Hunter

Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat

GrrrGraphics on WordPress

www.grrrgraphics.com

Skulls in the Stars

The intersection of physics, optics, history and pulp fiction

Footnotes to Plato

because all (Western) philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

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

Learning from Dogs

Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.

ianmillerblog

Smile! You’re at the best WordPress.com site ever