More on the photon, and disproof of the Copenhahgen interpretation.

"Jan Panteltje" schreef in bericht news:issk5n$acn$ snipped-for-privacy@news.albasani.net...

It once more shows that scientific proof is not as rock solid as some scientists and many non-scientists belief.

petrus bitbyter

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:13:00 +0200) it happened "petrus bitbyter" wrote in :

's_cat Well, I think Schroedinger was on drugs, some time before this became public I wrote this, scroll all the way down, but here it is:

I quote myself, from April 15 2011 in sci.physics > There is no Schroedinger's cat in my PC. Wormley:

Me: They are the basic flaw. Yesterday I realized after stat>play role protocols quantum information processing transport information

securely instantaneously combine squeezing photon subtraction entanglement homodyne detection teleporter nonclassical wave packets light control manipulation states prove generating complex quantum information science.

Me: It is alright Ma, I am only sighing. (Dylan)

Been a long time, argued with many people. Right again :-)

's_cat

21 century pseudo science, so glad I at least see this folly come to an end.

It hardly changes things at all. The result is nice but not unexpected.

It shows nothing of the sort.

It shows that people design scientific experiments to test out the limits of established theories. The Copenhagen interpretation was one overly black and white approach that was of its time. Most physicists have thought for a long time that with the right experiment you could obtain measurements that obey the HUP but provide some knowledge of both conjugate variables. The ultimate test of this is by experiment.

Modern quantum optics has been pushing back the boundaries for a while with weak measurements and this experiment cements that work.

Regards, Martin Brown

If I gather this correctly, this gets entirely back to your comments about conjugates. I can visualize that positions and momenta are not unlike arbitrarily chosen, but orthogonal x and y axes. I can choose to imagine that there is position and momenta and set up experiments that can only show one or the other. Or that there will be interference effects, or not. But I can also choose to 'rotate' those particular orthogonal axes to some other, semi-position, semi-momenta x' and y' axes, and make measurements of either one or the other of those, as well. In such cases, there will be partially interference, partially not results. Or, there are no "preferred" axes; one can choose to view things through x and y as the conjugate pair but one could just as well choose to view things through x' and y', neither of which are x or y. It's just that we've traditionally arranged experiments that tried for either position or momentum, which is a choice we don't have to make, it seems. They just happen to be an easily understood conjugate pairing to us, as humans. But we don't have to set up experiments that choose that pairing... we could rotate our orthogonal perspectives and get neither, in particular, and something interesting and new but again not a violation.

Is that about it?

Jon

Err... no, the Copenhagen interpretation (and the Everett many-worlds hypothesis, and the transactional interpretation) are not really testable scientific theories, they're just attempts to make a natural-language statement that encompasses some strange results in quantum theory. Wave mechanics IS testable, Heisenberg uncertainty is part of that testable framework. The work quoted here was on statistical averages, not really at odds with the wave mechanics. The implications for the Copenhagen interpretation are ... minor.

Electronics content: all the quantum mechanical uncertainty shows up in noise sources and effects like Zener breakdown, but it also drives logic margins and crops up in metastability issues. Never think there isn't a Schrodinger's cat inside your computer.

So the universe is deterministic and there is no free will.

You couldn't help saying that.... ;)

Jon

Even though it isn't true.

My take on the free will issue is that any moderately complicated animal has to have its own built-in random-number generator, so that it can make unpreditable choices when concocting a search pattern or an escape route.

There are game theory results that prove than random choices can be optimal in lots of circumstances (not that I can think of one off the top of my head) and evolution pretty much guarantees that we will thus have access to such a random number generator.

This isn't exactly free will, but it would mean that our universe wasn't deterministic.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Hi,

Another way to do that experiment is to change the geometry of the double slits, so that they polarize the light that passes through them. If each slit is made up of a "screen" of elliptical holes, then each slit will polarize the light that passes through them vertical or horizontally dependent on the angle of the elliptical holes. If the detector can detect polarization then it will know which slit the light went through. The amount of polarization is dependent on the ellipse length to width ratio, with more elliptical holes causing more polarization.

Here is a picture of elliptical holes that could make up each of the slits, vertical for one and horizontal for the other:

cheers, Jamie

It's more like your limbic system is an analog computer with memory. IMO, anyway.

It isn't. IMO, "is there free will" is a stupid question.

-- Les Cargill

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:45:46 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Wanderer wrote in :

I think I can agree with that. Most if not everything that we perceive as 'free will' is things bubbling up from the subconscious. They have done experiments where a NMR scan could predict the choice people were going to make with great accuracy , by monitoring brain areas that are part of the subconscious. From a philosophical POV it is not so strange either: Imagine this universe, in it this galaxy, in it this solar system, in it this planet, on it you and me, all that governed by the 'laws of nature'. And then one dares say 'I MAKE A CHOICE'???? There but for fortune go you an I. Que sera sera.

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:10:43 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Bill Sloman wrote in :

Something is random indeed in your thought processes :-)

man

But not random enough to let me take you any too seriously.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

er

Clearly, you need to know a bit more about the way the mind works.

If you take Freud seriously - and few do.

le

About half a second before the people involved were consciously aware of what choice they were going to make. If you want to claim that the universe is deterministic, you have to stretch that half second out to some 13 billion years.

Which happen to work out by averaging the consequences of a lot of largely unpredictable small-scale events. When the planetary orbits within the solar system turned out to be chaotic over periods longer than 100 million years, claiming that the universe is deterministic started looking pretty silly.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Those random choices could still be just as effective coming from a pseudorandom number generator.

--
Dirk

http://www.neopax.com/technomage/ - My new book - Magick and Technology

:

My poor interpretation of pilot wave theory is that there is no randomness. It replaces the probabilities of quantum theory with hidden variables. If you knew the hidden variables you could predict the outcome. I like the way pilot theory separates the particle and the wave into something like the way gravity is separated into the mass and the warping of space. The wave is the particles relationship with the rest of the universe. Fields are real. But I think there is a real probabilistic element to the universe that physics has to account for. I don't like the determinism of pilot theory.

The pilot wave has its own problems:

The MWI of QM is also ultradeterministic

--
Dirk

http://www.neopax.com/technomage/ - My new book - Magick and Technology