2024 Huntsville Hamfest Forum

I *do* wish that they'd stop that nonsense. More correct would be to say that the *measurement* of the state of one particle instantly changes the *description* of the state of the other. There is no spooky action at a distance.

Jeroen Belleman

If one particle measures as having polarization UP, the other measures DOWN. But if one is LEFT, the other is RIGHT.

That's spooky!

"a few Pedants, who, most of them, being conscious of their Ignorance, conceal'd it with hard Words"

Schantz's nomeclature works best for me. Here's one of his papers published by the Royal Society of London:

Danke,

Just accept the reality. Sticking to an Cartesian space with god-given coordinates and fields defined on each point, made Einstein say this. But reality is more inside out. Space should emerge as a consequence of a model not as a premise. In special relativity Einstein talks about fixed rods. We now realize that fixed rods can only exist by virtue of the Pauli exclusion principle, say quantum mechanics.

Groetjes Albert

But that is not how it works! What you'd rather find is that when you collect many measurements with aligned polarization axes, the measurements are correlated, whereas when you do it with orthogonal axes, they are not. The correlation varies with the cos^2 of the angle between the axes.

Jeroen Belleman

If you think that pointing out the difference between a mathematical model of a probabilistic process and the actual process is being pedantic, then think about this: The average value of many dice throws is 3.5, but how many individual throws will yield that value?

QM is a probabilistic theory. It gives you the mean and distribution of a large number of measurements, not the result of any single event.

Jeroen Belleman

Yes, but how do they know if you are going to measure up/down or left/right?

They don't, initially. They compare results after the fact and throw away all measurements that weren't aligned. That's what they do in quantum cryptography, at least.

That's always how the "spooky action" is detected. You compare results after the fact and keep only the subset of measurements you wanted.

Jeroen Belleman

The problem's pedantic probabilism. Pilot wave theorists such as Schantz stand by, for the time being.

"A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Danke,

Correlation can cancel the "changes" criterion:

This is why entanglement comes in: Because you need at least two particles to show that the measurement on one particle can act on the other particle. But entanglement itself is unproblematic. It's just a type of correlation, and correlations can be non-local without there being any "action" at a distance.

Danke,