Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks? by Akbar Fahmi

Akbar

I enjoyed you clear 'Locally Real' explanation of the most confusing part of physics. I describe a novel logical and causal resolution in my essay, and have discussed the moon in other blogs. Also the Matt J and Charli C essay finds a consistent ontology incorporating the Copenhagen interpretation and SR in a conceptual solution to the measurement problem.

I've proposed the completion of QM exposes the variable which derives the effects encompassed in the SR postulates. It uses the lesson Bohr taught Heisenberg to rescue his thesis; 'understand how a lens works'. Detection itself has a quantum interaction at the lens surface with implications and effects on the detected related to Raman atomic scattering over non zero space and time, and thus kinetics. Einstein's Local Reality simply emerges.

In this case, if no lens is receiving light reflected from the moon, then there is no mechanism to convert the signals into what we interpret as 'the Moon', so we may say the moon as we know it cannot then exist. We may however still gain evidence from reflected light and shadows of it's presence.

Even my dense essay struggles to handle the most basic mechanisms, kinetics and implications conceptually, but I hope you may be able to help make better sense of it, or indeed falsify the model. There is also much not in the essay. I hope you will forgive the metaphors there to aid kinetic visualisation.

I do hope it may contribute something to your own work, but in any case I would be most honoured and greatly value your opinion and views.

Many thanks.

Peter

Answer:No

Einstein's Moon

D. Song

School of Liberal Arts, Korea University of Technology and Education, Cheonan, 330-708, Korea

E-mail: dsong@koreatech.ac.kr

An account of the subjective elements of quantum mechanics and of whether, as Einstein's famously asked, the Moon exists when

nobody is looking at it.

PACS number: 03.65.Ta DOI: 10.3367/UFNr.0182.201209h.1013

Bibliographyì4 references Received 28 May 2012

Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk 182 (9) 1013 ± 1014 (2012)

Dear Akbar Fahmi

The response to your question is "yes". The moon is there when nobody looks, for instance before the first human was born at Earth.

In his work "Does The Moon Exist Only When Someone Is Looking At It?" Raymond D. Bradley reports the history of how one of Einstein's young friends, Abraham Pais, asked him if he really believed that the moon existed only if he looked at it. Einstein himself had no doubts as to the answer. In his view the common sense belief is correct. The moon does exist in objective reality whether or not anyone is observing it.

Contrary to a common myth Einstein did not lost the famous debate with Bohr about the foundations of quantum theory. In fact, Einstein's position and his arguments are often misinterpreted. Unfortunately the myth is so deeply integrated in common physicists thinking that I agree with Einstein's advice:

"The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquillizing philosophy - or religion? - is so delicately contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow for the true believer from which he cannot very easily be aroused. So let him lie there."

I am glad to see you analysing such fundamental questions and I agree with most of that you write in your essay. I devote part of my essay to a criticism of some incorrect assumptions in quantum theory. I prepared this recent paper Positive Definite Phase Space Quantum Mechanics, where I offer details on the Liouvillian formulation of quantum mechanics, which I mentioned in my essay. You may find therein a realistic non-local theory that describes the same phenomena that quantum mechanics, thus answering the question asked in your essay.

The new formulation/interpretation is absent of typical paradoxes and puzzles that affect to ordinary quantum mechanics. You write "Entanglement is a property unique to quantum systems. Two systems are said to be quantum entangled if they are described by a joint wave function that cannot be written as a product of wave functions of each of the subsystems." However, we already have classical examples of that!

For instance, Boltzmann derived his famous kinetic equation by using the molecular chaos approximation, where the classical state for a two body system is given by a product of the states of each subsystem \sigma(1,2) = \sigma(1) \sigma(2). As everyone familiarized with advanced kinetic theory knows, the above approximation is only valid for diluted gases, for higher densities the two-body state \sigma(1,2) cannot be written as the above product due to the presence of two-body correlations g(1,2). The new theory discussed in the above paper shows that quantum entanglement is only the quantum version of this classic description when classical correlations are substituted by quantum correlations. All mystery about hypothetical superluminal signals is gone and we obtain an unified vision of both classical and quantum phenomena.

Regards.

Dear Akbar Fahmi,

I'm afraid your paper was too technical for me to properly appreciate. Though it was particularly interesting to read your concluding paragraph, outlining where you see this research leading and what it is necessary to consider. Amongst that list I saw reality, which is something to which I have given some thought. Good luck and kind regards, Georgina.

If you do not understand why your rating dropped down. As I found ratings in the contest are calculated in the next way. Suppose your rating is [math]R_1 [/math] and [math]N_1 [/math] was the quantity of people which gave you ratings. Then you have [math]S_1=R_1 N_1 [/math] of points. After it anyone give you [math]dS [/math] of points so you have [math]S_2=S_1+ dS [/math] of points and [math]N_2=N_1+1 [/math] is the common quantity of the people which gave you ratings. At the same time you will have [math]S_2=R_2 N_2 [/math] of points. From here, if you want to be R2 > R1 there must be: [math]S_2/ N_2>S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] (S_1+ dS) / (N_1+1) >S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] dS >S_1/ N_1 =R_1[/math] In other words if you want to increase rating of anyone you must give him more points [math]dS [/math] then the participant`s rating [math]R_1 [/math] was at the moment you rated him. From here it is seen that in the contest are special rules for ratings. And from here there are misunderstanding of some participants what is happened with their ratings. Moreover since community ratings are hided some participants do not sure how increase ratings of others and gives them maximum 10 points. But in the case the scale from 1 to 10 of points do not work, and some essays are overestimated and some essays are drop down. In my opinion it is a bad problem with this Contest rating process. I hope the FQXI community will change the rating process.

Sergey Fedosin

Dear Akbar,

I enjoyed your essay, and I believe I will find your analysis quite useful for some of my own work. You frame the problem magnificently with excellent referencing and historical context. Although I am not quite clear on the exact scope of what you have proven (see below), your work rates highly in my opinion. A few more thoughts.

1. Thank you for the reference [31] concerning graph states. This is helpful for some of my own (unpublished) quantum-information theory work.

2. I also appreciate the discussion of non-local boxes and related issues (pages 2-3).

3. I am trying to understand exactly how general your conclusions are in section IV. You calculate a particular example involving the TB protocol, but the discussion in the first two paragraphs of the section make it seem as though you have considered many different models and come to similar conclusions.

4. You conclude by noting that the arguments you present indicate the necessity for a deeper understanding of the notions of non-locality, reality, and entanglement. An idea that might partially contribute to this is as follows. The two possible explanations for violation of Bell's inequalities that you mention in the second paragraph of section IV involve metric and order-theoretic properties of spacetime. Nonlocality in this context is obviously a metric property, because distance is measured by the metric. Preexistence (of quantum measurement results) involves time and order. The reason I raise these points is because I believe satisfactory understanding of these issues may ultimately depend on knowledge of spacetime microstructure. For instance, if manifold structure breaks down on small scales, a different definition of locality (independent of a metric) will be necessary. One possible way to define locality would be to take two systems to be mutually local if they actually do interact. From this viewpoint, "quantum nonlocality" might be merely a natural manifestation of non-manifold structure.

I present my own favorite idea for such structure in my essay here. If you have time to read it, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks for the great read! Take care,

Ben Dribus

Dear Akbar,

I'm a fellow contestant in the FQXi essay contest. I just read your essay

and posted some remarks on your thread. Since there had not been much

activity there recently, I decided to email you as well (it's a better

method of communication anyway).

I enjoyed your essay, and I believe I will find your analysis quite useful

for some of my own work. You frame the problem magnificently with

excellent referencing and historical context. Although I am not quite

clear on the exact scope of what you have proven (see below), your work

rates highly in my opinion. A few more thoughts.

1. Thank you for the reference [31] concerning graph states. This is

helpful for some of my own (unpublished) quantum-information theory work.

2. I also appreciate the discussion of non-local boxes and related issues

(pages 2-3).

3. I am trying to understand exactly how general your conclusions are in

section IV. You calculate a particular example involving the TB protocol,

but the discussion in the first two paragraphs of the section make it seem

as though you have considered many different models and come to similar

conclusions.

4. You conclude by noting that the arguments you present indicate the

necessity for a deeper understanding of the notions of non-locality,

reality, and entanglement. An idea that might partially contribute to

this is as follows. The two possible explanations for violation of

Bell's inequalities that you mention in the second paragraph of section IV

involve metric and order-theoretic properties of spacetime. Nonlocality

in this context is obviously a metric property, because distance is

measured by the metric. Preexistence (of quantum measurement results)

involves time and order. The reason I raise these points is because I

believe satisfactory understanding of these issues may ultimately depend

on knowledge of spacetime microstructure. For instance, if manifold

structure breaks down on small scales, a different definition of locality

(independent of a metric) will be necessary. One possible way to define

locality would be to take two systems to be mutually local if they

actually do interact. From this viewpoint, "quantum nonlocality" might

be merely a natural manifestation of non-manifold structure.

I present my own favorite idea for such structure in my essay (topic

1386). If you have time to read it, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks for the great read! Take care,

Ben Dribus

Dear Ben,

Thank you a lot of for your attentions and comments. Please accept my apology for delay.

As you correctly mentioned, we reviewed all non-local hidden variable models which simulated quantum singlet state by non-local hidden variables. We derived inequalities which are based on these models and showed that they violated by quantum correlation function.

Unfortunately, my essay has typos at first paragraph of page 5 (is equal to one...), however, equation 6 and fig. 3 are correct.

As you mentioned at your essay, there are some physical models which are based on the Extra Dimensions and compactification of extra dimensions. However, please pay attention that these models take place at high energy physics (about 10^{18} Gev). I can accept your opinion if you find rationalization for it. In other words, how space-time microstructure is changed at low energy physics (about 1 kev)?

I am ready to see your work at more detail.

Thank you in advance

Sincerely yours.

Akbar