Well I'm not very skilled at quantum mechanics, but causality across the vastness of space and time is regarded as an observable reality in modern physics, they call it entanglement and I wish I knew more about this than I do ! An event could take place here and completely determine some state a billion light years away and instantly too.

Hi,

Yes that's true, but there we have an advanced theorem that can't be truly tested across that much space.
I am happy you brought this up though because that is the kind of counterpoints I was hoping for. It could possibly be correct too even over vast distances.
A counter question comes up maybe you will know this. Wouldn't that require that everything in the universe is entangled?
If there was just one single system that was not entangled in every way, that would seem to indicate we still had at least two systems that were completely independent of each other.

 

This is a funny reply to a reply to a funny reply of a member that posts internet memes as proof.

Edit: I missed a step in the chain. Fixed.

Yes, I think you missed a step. Didn't you know that if Bugs Bunny argues with Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny is right that means that all scientists on earth and in the rest of the universe MUST accept it as fact?
Silly you

 

Not in so many words. It is implied in the passage I quoted. And with either sense of “determined”. (caused, or ascertained). Information travels in one direction or the other as you stated it.

Hi Bob,

The way I read it was that there was some action at a distance that was very far away, but you do have to mention the distance in order to make the statement. Just because there was an action at a very far distance away does not mean, at least anymore (ha ha), that something went faster than light to create that action.

As a side issue, it continues to bother me that scientists like to come up with a lot of side theories to insist that there really is nothing faster than light. It seems like they are side stepping the real issue, and most people learn this more or less by rote too where they may link a few little things together to form a determination, or just hear it repeated so many damn times that they can't accept anything else. I don't really want to get into this though because I know there are a lot of opinions, and we don't yet know for sure what entanglement really entails in detail.

 

Sorry but IMO most that is totally unrelated to QM or even science in general. I now see it's useless to continue this discussion in this thread with you. Peace be with you.

Lol I think you are a fraud and a liar. The issues I raised are hot topics in CS and AI and to call it unrelated to quantum mechanics or science is ignorant. I think you are a skilled technician but the rest of your persona is bullshit.

 

The way I read it was that there was some action at a distance

You are quoting Einstein, one of the few times he was wrong. I can forgive you for that.

There is no action at a distance. The measurement does not cause any change in the state of the remote particle. It gives the person doing the measurement information about the other particle, that is all.

Yes, it is mysterious and seems to be contradictory based on non-QM understanding. But that is just the way it is.

 

@MrAl , @ApacheKid,

Read this

It is an excellent explanation of what I am expressing poorly.

 

Lol I think you are a fraud and a liar. The issues I raised are hot topics in CS and AI and to call it unrelated to quantum mechanics or science is ignorant. I think you are a skilled technician but the rest of your persona is bullshit.

A fraud and a liar? Where have I committed fraud and where have I lied? Guy this is the internet, for all the world knows, both of us are bots with some sort of avatar persona. One makes up stories about people calling one a nut job, the other bot post comments and links actually about using and understanding quantum mechanics as a practical matter and not as a 'hot topic' for CS and AI research. A skilled technician like Faraday helped to invent electrical science. Being a skilled technician is how you express your ideas with electronics.

Yes, I'm damn proud to also be a skilled technician.

My electrical and software engineering is here for all to see on this site, show us your work. The things you personally have designed and built that are not trivial.

 

@MrAl , @ApacheKid,

Read this

It is an excellent explanation of what I am expressing poorly.

One of the better posts from that link that I've also read before.

And that, folks, is quantum entanglement! (Or at least, a very simple example of it.)

Reader: "Wait, what? That's it?"
Me: "Yes, that's it."
Reader: "What do you mean, that's it? Where is the faster-than-light communication?"
Me: "It's nowhere. There is no such thing. It's just a common misconception. There is no communication of any kind taking place, not in any speed and certainly not faster than light."
Reader: "What about time travel? And parallel universes? And wormholes?"
Me: "Completely unrelated. You've been watching too many sci-fi movies."
Reader: "Well, that is disappointing."
Me: "I'm sorry. But hey, at least now you know how quantum entanglement works!"

Reader (after some time): "Aha! Wait a minute! What if I take one particle to the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years from Earth, and then measure its spin? How will the particle on Earth instantly know to have the same spin? They must communicate somehow. Surely something fishy is going on here!"
Me: "Nope. The entangled state I defined above simply says that the measurements of the spins of the two particles are correlated. It doesn't matter what the distance between them is. If one is measured to have spin up, then the other will also have spin up simply because they were entangled in such a way that their spins are correlated."

Reader (after reviewing the math): "Okay, I get that this is what the math says, but it still doesn't make sense to me."
Me: "Congratulations; you're in good company. Great minds such as Einstein also thought it doesn't make sense. Physicists and philosophers of physics have been debating the meaning of quantum mechanics in general, and quantum entanglement in particular, ever since quantum mechanics was first formulated, and are still debating it today, almost 100 years later."
Reader: "Surely they have reached some conclusions after 100 years..."
Me: "Sort of. They have come up with a very long list of interpretations of quantum mechanics which attempt to make sense of weird quantum phenomena, such as entanglement. An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain what is "really" going on behind the math."

Reader (after some time): "I clicked on the link. There are so many different interpretations... Which is the correct one?"
Me: "Unfortunately, since the experimental predictions are unchanged by the interpretations, it's impossible to determine which interpretation is the correct one, or if there even is a correct one! The only thing we know for sure is that all experiments ever performed have supported the validity of quantum mechanics. It's true independently of how you interpret it."
Reader: "I see. So... How is quantum entanglement explained in <insert interpretation here>?"
Me: "Ask me in the comments, or better yet, ask the entire Quora community in a separate question!"

@MrAl
"scientists like to come up with a lot of side theories to insist that there really is nothing faster than light"

First there are things faster than light. They just can't have mass/energy, momentum or 'information'. For example the phase of velocity of an electromagnetic wave can travel faster than the speed of light.
Analogy: waves breaks can move with speed faster than the waves coming up the shore


I would suspect the vast majority of those scientists would love to come up with theories of FTL but because they are scientists instead of SCI FI writers they need to stick to evidence.

 

@MrAl , @ApacheKid,

Read this

It is an excellent explanation of what I am expressing poorly.

The real mystery here is this, if this is simply a matter of "correlation" - knowing one is white, means the other MUST be black, then why was Einstein uncomfortable? Surely a mind like his would have had no trouble understanding that. What was Einstein unhappy about if this is as simple as that explanation implies? That explanation implies there's nothing bewildering at all, but that just can't be right if Einstein held the view he did.

We need an analogy, but one that captures the puzzling behavior Einstein was resisting. To claim Einstein was simply wrong, is misleading, he wasn't an idiot and wouldn't object at all to something so apparently straightforward, any analogy that masks the deep problem Einstein struggled with is not a very good analogy.

 

Yes, it is mysterious and seems to be contradictory based on non-QM understanding. But that is just the way it is.

What is mysterious about if? given a system where we know two particle will have correlated states and deducing one when given the other is not in the slightest bit mysterious, Einstein would have had no issues with this if we are to believe these analogies.

 

I'm perusing the book THE ROAD TO REALITY by Roger Penrose. This is a deep and pretty mathematical book, and beyond my own skills at this point. But he does talk about this and introduces a term "quanglement" in order to talk about this.

 

The real mystery here is this, if this is simply a matter of "correlation" - knowing one is white, means the other MUST be black, then why was Einstein uncomfortable?

Go back and read the link again. It answers your questions.

 

I'm perusing the book THE ROAD TO REALITY by Roger Penrose. This is a deep and pretty mathematical book, and beyond my own skills at this point. But he does talk about this and introduces a term "quanglement" in order to talk about this.

Roger Penrose, despite his contributions, also has some unusual and unsupported ideas. Don’t take everything he says as gospel.

 

Roger Penrose, despite his contributions, also has some unusual and unsupported ideas. Don’t take everything he says as gospel.

Well, to be clear I never take anything anyone says as "gospel". Penrose does speculate at times (which is a necessary part of doing science) but is always very clear when he is doing that.

 

A fraud and a liar? Where have I committed fraud and where have I lied? Guy this is the internet, for all the world knows, both of us are bots with some sort of avatar persona. One makes up stories about people calling one a nut job, the other bot post comments and links actually about using and understanding quantum mechanics as a practical matter and not as a 'hot topic' for CS and AI research. A skilled technician like Faraday helped to invent electrical science. Being a skilled technician is how you express your ideas with electronics.

Yes, I'm damn proud to also be a skilled technician.

My electrical and software engineering is here for all to see on this site, show us your work. The things you personally have designed and built that are not trivial.

I think you are a fraud because you constantly pass yourself off as some kind of electronics genius or guru. The work you claim to do uses QM at the level of application, not formulation and design. If you are doing quantum calculations, it is likely to tweak efficiency not create something new. This should not be conflated into being an expert. The real experts have PhD's and work at CERN. Like I said, I think you know your circuits but a QM master? Give me a break.

..You shot yourself in the foot because you said you don't need to be an expert in QM to see someone else has the basics wrong (your justification for belittling another user). But if you are not an expert, how can you be so sure YOU understand ALL the basics? There is where I won the debate whether you admit it or not. You admitted to your own ignorance then proceed to tell me the things I'm proposing are not related to QM or science but they are. I think you don't want to debate me because I'm a strong opponent who will be extremely critical of anything you give me to review. As for my claims, pick out anything I said and I'll be happy to demonstrate my thought process.

While I'm at it, I'll address the statement: "My electrical and software engineering is here for all to see on this site, show us your work. The things you personally have designed and built that are not trivial.". You already know my area is CS. The stuff I'm mostly interested in is back-end. When I do post here, it's to help people with basic circuits because that's what I'm qualified to work with. I think you know full well I can't compete with you about things either of us has actually made. Frankly I think this bolsters my case against you because you don't care about the things I made because apparently it's not scientific. On the other hand, you marvel at the things you made as if this elevates you to QM master. Something stinks and I don't like it.

 

We will take a break until the salvos settle down and expire.
AAC forums is not a place for launching attacks on each other's personalities.

 

Yeah thanks I was just about to say something to that effect.

Please stop arguing and find the "ignore" button instead

With some people you will never convince them of anything they do not already agree with so no sense in a continued back and forth. I know all members are smarter than that too so use intelligence.
An old saying:
"Sometimes kindness is wiser than truth".
From an old Columbo episode.

 

What is mysterious about if? given a system where we know two particle will have correlated states and deducing one when given the other is not in the slightest bit mysterious, Einstein would have had no issues with this if we are to believe these analogies.

It is not mysterious at all, when, as you have done, you leave out an important part of the phenomenon.

It is not the correlation that is surprising, it is the fact that no local theory can explain the behavior. In other words, there is no possible state and mechanism that we can apply separately to one of the particles that explain its behavior. This is the so called “local variable theory” proposed by Einstein. He believed that there was a hidden state, possibly one that we can never observe, that could explain any measurement on each of the particles, and that these states were correlated at the time of entanglement and remained correlated until disturbed by a measurement. QM predicts results that are not compatible with that hypothesis.

The EPR experiment was designed to distinguish between the two models. And QM won, it predicted the outcome correctly in a way that a local theory could not.

The mystery is how how the two particles can remain correlated when the choice of measurement done on one particle affects the outcome of a different measurement on the other particle even though speed of light restrictions prevent an information exchange.

And don‘t go saying that maybe it is the speed of light restriction that is wrong. That does not solve the problem. Two events separated in space cannot be unambiguously ordered in time. Different observers would disagree on which measurement occurs first. And neither of them is wrong. So, to one observer, the measurement on particle A affected the measurement on particle B. And to another observer, the measurement on B affected the measurement on A. This is what is mysterious.

 

It is not mysterious at all, when, as you have done, you leave out an important part of the phenomenon.

It is not the correlation that is surprising, it is the fact that no local theory can explain the behavior. In other words, there is no possible state and mechanism that we can apply separately to one of the particles that explain its behavior. This is the so called “local variable theory” proposed by Einstein. He believed that there was a hidden state, possibly one that we can never observe, that could explain any measurement on each of the particles, and that these states were correlated at the time of entanglement and remained correlated until disturbed by a measurement. QM predicts results that are not compatible with that hypothesis.

The EPR experiment was designed to distinguish between the two models. And QM won, it predicted the outcome correctly in a way that a local theory could not.

The mystery is how how the two particles can remain correlated when the choice of measurement done on one particle affects the outcome of a different measurement on the other particle even though speed of light restrictions prevent an information exchange.

And don‘t go saying that maybe it is the speed of light restriction that is wrong. That does not solve the problem. Two events separated in space cannot be unambiguously ordered in time. Different observers would disagree on which measurement occurs first. And neither of them is wrong. So, to one observer, the measurement on particle A affected the measurement on particle B. And to another observer, the measurement on B affected the measurement on A. This is what is mysterious.

Exactly, you nailed it much better than I could explain the issues. Superluminal communications is not the fix or even a solution (if it was possible) when nonlocal correlation is the root issue, not entanglement. The EPR paper wasn't about entanglement as the fundamental process of spooky action at a distance, it was about locality.

 

That's an interesting summary.

The key point is that no matter what we measure, even after the second particle leaves the local area, we cannot predict the final state until we actually measure the state itself. That's because the state is separate from the point in space where the attempt to predict what will happen is performed and at that point there is nothing we can measure that will tell us what will happen in the future.
The difference between a classical prediction and the actual final state is small in terms of reliability, but it is considered very significant and not due to any measurement error.
The choice I think was to either declare a departure from reality, or just that it depended on locality. The idea of a difference in locality won. To me it still seems like a departure from reality, where reality is our human common experience. This is nothing that we ever experience directly, unless of course we just do not realize it yet.

This is the state of QM as it stands today. What tomorrow will bring remains to be seen. To that end I do not accept any advanced predictions because it's all guess work, although those guesses are also interesting to discuss.