The Perfect First Question. by T H Ray

But Fred, Vongehr doesn't even rise to the level of using Bell/CHSH criteria (read his paper). His proposal has no experimental criteria at all, just an inductive inference that is not independent of his expectations. Even a subtle rigging would be something worthwhile. The whole thing is just the biggest nonsense, and even his expected outcome is already falsified.

Tom

Yes. That is, I said that Joy's framework answers Einstein's question in the positive.

Tom

Thanks, Christian! You have probably surmised that I am pleased to reciprocate, for your insightful essay.

By the way, knowing that you were at the University of Pisa in the same period, I am reminded of delightful conversations I had in Vienna at Karl Popper 2002 with Guglielmo Tamburrini, then an associate professor in philosophy of science (now, I see, since 2005 Professor in philosophy of science at Universita' di Napoli Federico II). I'm afraid my own presentation didn't fare very well in this group of eminent scholars; I learned so much, though, and remember Guglielmo particularly with warmth and good feeling.

All best,

Tom

On the chance that readers may not fully understand the technical explanation from my essay (bottom of page 1) of why V's "quantum Randi challenge" is the veriest nonsense, I invite you to read critically the sources he links (which are of course, only his own ramblings) with the following facts in mind:

The law of large numbers and the principle of regression to the mean (both well known to mathematicians and statisticians and both well tested as fundamental rules of probability) prescribe the upper limit 0.5 independently of the wave decoherence effect between individuals playing a psychic guessing game. V's delusional prediction is that coincidental violations of the predicted value within some random time interval co-opt the Bell/CHSH expectation; i.e., in the belief that violation of the upper bound in some particular run of experimental results is significant. It isn't, for at least 2 reasons -- 1) the law of large numbers tells us that we can't predict the next result of a fair coin toss with better than 50% probability; each coin toss (Bernoulli trial) is independent of every other; 2) even averaging the coincidental violations from a large number of truncated runs won't work, because regression to the mean will overwhelm the result. This, because V's proposal cannot escape the "equally likely" assumption that attends all probabilistic results -- if he chooses to "cherry pick" experimental runs for coincidental violations of the upper bound and average them, the result is meaningless; if he chooses to truncate some run to suit his expectation, the result is meaningless. (V's most outrageous, and experimentally falsified, claim -- as I've noted elsewhere -- is that arbitrarily large computer memory is an adequate substitute for time-limited experimental results.)

Long time followers of FQXi fora and blogs might recall that Richard Gill and I had some heated exchanges a few months ago, over this issue. Gill claimed that Joy Christian's framework does not meet the standard of Bell/CHSH statistical violations in a probability measure schema. This in itself is seriously silly, because there is no probability function in Joy's framework, either expressed or implied. None. Zip, zilch, nada. The framework is completely analytical.

V takes the silliness a step further. His quantum Randi challenge doesn't need Bell/CHSH support, he says (which makes one wonder what Gill, whom V acknowledges as his "peer reviewer" thinks about V's experimental protocols) because it's for a "lay audience" who can see the correlations for themselves. To expose clearly why this is merely mind numbing gibberish, let me ask my own "lay audience" -- suppose I show you that I have tossed a fair coin 100 times and gotten 100 straight "heads." Will you bet 1 dollar to my 100 that the next toss will be heads? -- probably, because the risk is low and the potential return is high -- yet will you bet 100 dollars to my 1 that the next toss will be heads? I give my lay audience more credit for their intelligence in spotting fallacies and charlatanism.

One might wonder why I expend so much energy on something that I don't think is worthwhile in the first place(and can actually demonstrate the case). It's for the simple reason that V whipped up his impressive sounding but ultimately fatuous "quantum Randi challenge" and attached Joy Christian's name to it -- in order to flagellate serious researchers in his public forum, while inviting well known scientists (including Gill) to participate. And the social climate favored V's strategy -- Christian had already been waging a pitched battle for quite a long time, with some of these same researchers, who gullibly piled onto V's notion, without actually having any facts in hand. If they are not now red-faced, they should be.

I spent too many years in high-level marketing and advertising, to not know the power of the strategy called "positioning." It depends on using a known name to elevate an unknown name. It's how Avis overtook Hertz in the rental car competition long ago -- when Hertz practically owned the market, Avis ("we try harder") pounded their position as "number 2" when they were only a *very* distant number 2, and used Hertz's own strength against them, until the companies were running even.

Okay for marketing, where the perception is the reality. Bad for the rationalist enterprise called science.

Tom

Reproducing a post -- and including attachment -- of comments I made on George Ellis's essay site:

Hi George,

Sociological implications aside, your withering rebuke of the O.P. has much value for the scientific implications of a fully relativistic theory at multiple scales. That " ... existence of the Cooper pairs necessary for superconductivity is contingent on the nature of the ion lattice, which is at a higher level of description than that of the pairs ..." conveys the physical reality of uncollapsed potential; i.e., the information exchange between particles in the dynamic Cooper state has the particles conspiring to maintain zero angular momentum -- which IMO is fully translatable to higher levels of organization as pure unitary wave function. E.g., conceivably able to deal with questions of large scale phenomena, such as posed by Tanmay Vachaspati "What does an observer who falls into the collapsing object experience?" and Vesselin Petkov, "Can gravity be quantized?"

Point is, the distribution of causality at all levels of organization blurs the distinction between particles -- the "bottom" of the hierarchy -- and systems of particles interacting with other systems to create top down causality.

Back in May, I wrote a short piece that I never submitted or posted anywhere, "A fermionic condensate test of Bell's Inequality & local realism" that agrees with Lucien Hardy's statement, "I anticipate that quantum gravity will be a theory having indefinite causal structure whereas quantum theory has definite causal structure." I will attach it to a post on my own essay site ("The Perfect First Question"). I hope you get a chance to read it, as well as my essay.

George, your forum has become quite a clearinghouse for state of the art research in interdisciplinary science! I think it represents the best of what I perceive that FQXi is about.

All best,

TomAttachment #1: fermionic_condensate_test.pdf

Dear readers,

I have thought of yet another way to illustrate the difference between the inherently probabilistic measure of quantum correlations as described by Scott Aaronson in my essay, and the continuous measurement function of Joy Christian's model, in a head-to-head comparison.

Somewhat over a year ago, when I was reading papers by Joy's critics, I was struck by Marc Holman's honest and poignant observation that the Christian framework adds an extra degree of freedom to the measurement function. Holman rejected that solution as unphysical -- what he did not realize, however, is that topological orientability adds such a component without changing the measurement criteria, by merely allowing a left hand and right hand topological orientation (as Joy explains with technical content, in his one page paper)

I hope you agree that this information-theoretic illustration makes the case in an easy to read way.

All best,

TomAttachment #1: How_topological_orientability_adds_a_degree_of_freedom_to_the_quantum_correlation_measurement_function.pdf

This is very interesting, Peter, though I can't pretend to grasp it all. I do understand the point about deriving relativity from quantum phenomena, though I'm working in the opposite direction of deriving discrete quantum mechanics from continuous functions.

I think that Bell's theorem forbids the derivation of any classical model from quantum rules, though the converse demonstrably doesn't apply. If what you say can be rigorously proved, then I would have to eat crow, because Joy Christian would then be totally right -- Bell's theorem doesn't prove anything at all.

I have my reservations and doubts. Godspeed, though!

Best,

Tom

Hi Jens,

Thanks for reading, and for your great comments. It isn't that I am proposing a quantum mechanical framework of noncollapsing wave functions -- it's that I am trying to explain (like Joy) the appearance of quantum phenomena in a classical framework. Bell's framework is itself classical.

The symmetry of Schrodinger's wave equation is already there -- as a continuous wave function with solutions in both past and future (retarded and advanced). This is entirely unrelated to, and incompatible with, the probability function in quantum mechanics.

The only significant disagreement that Joy and I have had, is whether Bell's theorem proves anything at all. (That significance is blunted, however, by our larger agreement that the measurement domain of Joy's topological framework is complete and Bell's is not.)

I think that Bell's theorem does prove that no classical theory of continuous measurement functions can be derived from quantum rules -- which brings us to your research program. I don't have a problem with limiting the domain of quantum mechanical functions to an incomplete space of probabilistic measure, so long as one does not interpret the probability function as physical law. There are quite useful applications for quantum probability that should not -- and do not -- imply complete functions. That is, state preparation of the Schrodinger's cat experiment demands only one state, not a superposition -- the cat is always alive initially. There is no warrant to believe that observing its later state has causal efficacy, unless one were able to impose the symmetrical state of preparing a dead cat for the initial condition in expectation that the cat could be observed alive at some later time. By laws of thermodynamics and information conservation, this would require an infinite amount of time.

It follows that finite state calculations are always arbitrary and incomplete. This does not obviate correlation of quantum states in classically continuous measurement functions, as Joy Christian has shown.

Best,

Tom

Right on, Jens! If you'll look a few posts above (18 Sept 1248 GMT), I posted an attachment of a draft paper I wrote in May proposing an EPR-Bell type experiment with fermionic condensate that depends on wave correlation rather than entanglement -- instead of particle ejection, we get singlet and triplet results and instead of particle-antiparticle annihilation and gamma radiation, we get angular momentum conservation.

I would be most interested if you would read and comment on the attachment. Thanks!

Tom