Isn't anyone willing to argue against the Fine Tuning of the physical universe? The stronger the Fine Tuning argument is, the more likely it is that Intelligent Design is closer to reality. That would disprove the Richard Dawkins idea that life is purposeless. It would mean that some Intelligent Power wanted life to exist in the universe.
Why Quantum?
Stefan,
'Weak measurement' mass data and statistics can't compare actual pairs, so has to make assumptions. They assume paired findings up/up are impossible so the whole paper is thus built on foundations of mud.
Caroline Thompson brilliantly exposed and analyses this, including here but tragically died.
More solid foundations are identified and a coherent classical solution is summarised
If you can't understand any parts please identify them for me.
Many thanks
Peter
Akinbo,
The quantum vacuum doesn't have a 'place' in the hierarchy. It is as the water of the ocean. It is ALL QV! yet the infinitely many flows and bodies of water are in constant relative motion within, beside and around each other. Wherever you dive in you'll find it locally 'at rest' so YOU FIND LIGHT TRAVELLING AT LOCAL C/N!
Where that speed change happens to each new local c/n is at the domain 'shear plane' boundaries where the two flows meet (and where we find MHD turbulent shocks in space).
It seems kinetic visualisation isn't your strength. We all have strengths and weaknesses, as we should. Chiral (2 state) spin isn't 'brain twisting' it's a simple fact, but is indeed poorly understood. The proof is simple;
Find any small ball, or just screw up and tape up a sheet of paper. Hold it between your left thumb and forefinger so it'll rotate. Now draw an arrow in either spin direction, half way between the 'poles' (your thumb and finger).
Now rotate in the direction of the arrow. Looking from you thumb it will be either clockwise (S pole) or anti-clockwise (N). OK? Now flip your wrist over and look from the FINGER side (pole). When rotating the same way (as the arrow) you will find the OPPOSITE spin (pole).
What's been 'missed', which I point out in the essay is that there is NO DIFFERENCE whether you draw the arrow one way or the other. ALL spinning bodies have both poles so both spins, and the ONLY difference is which side the observer HAPPENS to be on. i.e. the spin observed is observer dependent and entirely random. (half the planets we find are north 'up' half south 'up') WHICHEVER direction we arbitrarily choose to call 'UP'! (as there is no 'UP' in space!.)
Now look back to your ball. Note how you could spin it (on the 'x' axis) but still rotate it 180 degrees on the y or z axis while CONSERVING that spin! That's what a detector magnetic 'field direction flip' does (as Goudsmidt first found long ago). In which case an 'UP' spin can be independently changed to a 'DOWN' spin (and vice versa) at each 'detector'.
If the spin 'axis' of the particle pair was the same, then the mechanism above alone reproduces the exact effects of so called 'non-locality' so removing quantum 'weirdness' and reducing the domain of 'uncertainty'. The link I just posted to Stefan shows the details. Is it really too difficult to visualise?
Best wishes
Peter
[deleted]
Georgina,
Your Lion is fine, as the information theory interpretation of QM. However it doesn't address the problem which gave rise to QM's interpretation which is 'non-locality'. To explain.
There are TWO lions. When observed one is pale and one dark. They head off opposite ways, but we don't know which went which way. Alice and Bob, many miles apart, find each through quantum magnetic binoculars at the same instant, so we assume that if Alice finds 'pale' Bob must find 'dark'. easy yes? ...No.
The quantum binoculars have a range of magnetic settings. Only on HALF the settings does Alice finds 'pale'. On the other half she finds 'dark' (in which case Bob must find 'pale'). But that means that by changing her OWN setting Alice can instantly control whether Bob's lion is the 'pale' or 'dark' one!!! (cue the spooky music).
THAT's the 'spooky action at a distance' which Einstein (EPR) objected to, saying QM is 'incomplete'. Yet it's predictions have always proved precisely accurate! They're also backed up by Bell's solid mathematical logic that no random other lions could cause the same findings.
What I show, shockingly for all! is that the binoculars themselves cause the difference, circumventing Bells maths (which he anticipated would be done one day). At the initial observation with 2 random binocular settings one HAD to look darker than the other (both can also be different each side!)
Bob does NOT have to find the opposite to Alice. In 'weak measurement' (bulk photon beam statistics) it's just 'assumed' that they must as they can't discern individual pair data, so they use the wrong assumption.
But all are 'locked in' to 'QM weirdness'. Bell said they're "sleepwalking" and; "professional physicists ought to be able to do better" but they just dismiss 'classical' solution a priori.
The few 'timed pair' experiments had problems (clearly!), which I identified as the DFM predicted it. Caroline Thompson also found them(see my link above to Steve). I also derived the cos^2 distribution geometrically to complete the job as Einstein suspected (but he did NOT demand absolute determinism, and doesn't get it). So no problem with your lions, but we still need to rev them up, get them hungry and set them on the sleepwalkers!
Did that now make sense of the nonsense? (Simply add that all Lions roars propagate at a fixed speed c wrt the local wind and QM and SR can be unified!)
Peter
A few years ago, the lovely Eva Longoria made a forgettable movie in which she played a ghost who died on her wedding day and came back to haunt her husband.
One scene had her hovering face to face with her husband, over his bed.
I thought about that scene after reading Anil Ananthaswamy's 23 July New Scientist article about quantum particles losing their identity (the "Cheshire Cat" phenomenon), which concludes with the question: "What does it mean for an atom to be separated from its properties?"
While the article allows that "No one quite knows" the answer, we might be closer to understanding what the question means when experimenters "succeed in measuring the electric dipole moment of a neutron by separating it from its magnetic moment."
Not surprisingly, experimentalists interpret their data on the conventional quantum assumptions of superposition and entanglement. That's where the ghost of Eva Longoria's character comes to my mind:
I don't remember how the hovering-over-the-bed scene actually appeared in the movie, but let's imagine that Eva's ghost is dressed in a flowing nightgown for maximum ghostly effect. Were she standing upright, we would see that gravity confines the hem of her gown more or less uniformly around her calves. Were she not a ghost, we know that were she lifted from the floor and placed horizontal over the bed, her gown would droop toward the bed; that's the way that gravity works. Assuming that a ghost is an object already independent of its (former) physical properties, then the orientation of the gown should not change when the ghost rotates from vertical to horizontal -- why?
Nothing physical is happening. Importantly, though, the way that we know nothing physical is happening, is that the property of orientation drives our measurement schema; i.e., whether it's an experimenter's orientation of measurement direction, or the orientation of a property (gravity), the effect of the choice of orientation is always independent of the object being measured.
This alone is enough to make Yakir Aharonov and Jeff Tollaksen's finding of time symmetry in the quantum domain important and foundational. Using the technique of weak measurement, "Aharonov and Tollaksen found that past and future can lead to a particle and its properties going their separate ways. The quantum Cheshire cat was born." Aharonov's mathematics had shown that a strong (classical) measurement on a particle with spin 1/2 or - 1/2 may be allowed a spin of 1.00 when measured weakly. (Ultimately, this means that fermion, or fractional spin, particles are integrated with boson particles that have integer spin values. Past and future, as in classical mechanics, are time symmetric.)
Peter Geltenbort (Institut Laue-Langevin)comments: "The only thing that cannot be separated from a particle is its mass. What defines where the particle lives is its mass; everything else is like the smile of the cat. You can separate it from the cat."
As one can also separate the behavior of the ghost's garment from the ghost, because it's the behavior of objects -- classical or quantum -- that we measure, and not "where the particle lives." After all, mass lives in all conditions of spacetime with its properties differing in proportion to the measured behaviors.
So assuming that ghosts are not physical, we can't actually detect them even when we might think that they hover right over us -- suppose, though, that weak measurement lets us detect the "drooping hem" independent of the hypothetical nonphysical ghost. That surely qualifies as a physical effect, and leaves us no choice but to conclude that the ghost is metaphysically real, i.e., a rationally objective phenomenon. So it is that Johannes Kofler (Max Planck Institute of Quantum optics) nails the foundational question with compact precision:
"The interpretation of these measurements is non-trivial, even tricky. The Cheshire cat paradox arises only when you give a physical meaning to the observed weak values -- which is challenged and debated in the community."
And Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto) argues: "I think it's easy to overinterpret that language. "I'm not going to claim that when I dig up a dinosaur bone today, it causes that dinosaur to have gotten killed 65 million years ago. I wouldn't say that the future is influencing the past. I'd say that information about the future gives us information about the present or the past."
The demarcation that Prof. Steinberg draws, however, is not necessary if the measurement (examining the bone) is accompanied by a metaphysical reality. That is, just as the ghost is not physical but metaphysically real, the measurement is physical, not metaphysical. That describes time symmetry at every scale -- the moon is really there when no one is looking, and so are an infinity of unphysical moons. Not in linear superposition as time asymmetry would have it, because the unphysical manifest only in a measure of physical properties that are bosonic, i.e., in which any number of particles may occupy the same point in space. (No two fermions can occupy the same space.)
It continues to amaze me that Joy Christian is the only physicist I know who takes metaphysical realism seriously -- by seriously, I mean with a precise mathematical measurement framework -- by using the key principle of orientability that is native to topology. If the only thing that cannot be separated from a particle is its mass, it follows that its measured orientation is the only thing that cannot be separated from a metaphysically real topology. And what we find with the n-sphere topology n > 3, is the number line R^3 of dimension 3, is compactified by a single point at infinity. Eva's ghost can rotate on her horizontal axis to any degree, and yet the "hem" of her gown will maintain the same vertical orientation (and forget that she is "entangled" in the gown; since she isn't physical, she can't be entangled with anything). The physical measurement tells us that Eva's ghost lives in many worlds, while we live only in this one, possibly without ever recognizing what a lonely existence it is.
Tom
Peter,
i don't think that the paper is built on foundations of mud. But anyway. I have a question concerning the link you gave me to your summary of your Classical Reproduction paper.
You wrote
"Bohm's Gedanken experiment ... If magnet A is rotated; the particle deflects down. The particle at B then MUST go up."
Why MUST the particle then go up?? Either i have a dropout at the moment or you haven't understood what happens with the Stern-Gerlach-setup. For me, after magnet A has been reversed, the particle at magnet B MUST go down.
I read the Caroline Thompson paper, but i couldn't find that she writes about up/down-directions, nor does she write about weak measurements. She points to some potential loopholes in the experiments of Aspect and Tittel.
Best wishes,
Stefan
Yes Steve as I said ...
For lion:If all the factors affecting behaviour are amalgamated it should be possible to match probabilistic expectations of location to probability distribution of actual positions found by sampling. Then there is an accurate formulaic description not of a lion but of lion behaviour over time giving accurate prediction of probabilities of locations.
For particle: Quotes:"A wave function or wavefunction (also named a state function) in quantum mechanics describes the quantum state of a system of one or more particles, and contains all the information about the system considered in isolation."... "The Schrödinger equation determines how the wave function evolves over time, that is, the wavefunction is the solution of the Schrödinger equation. Wikipedia, My emphasis
Now there may well be periodic fluctuation in lion behaviour. Lets imagine that at sunrise and sun set it patrols the boundary of its territory. Each morning and each evening it goes to the water hole when the sun is not too hot. Each day it varies the shade tree under which it sits according to height of the sun. That peridic behaviour could be plotted as compound amplitudes over time.The regularly frequented places being peaks and the places inbetween shade trees and water hole and boundary are troughs. So lion behaviour could be plotted as a "wave function" Bear in mind the lion is just an analogy and I am not basing this on actual knowkledge of lion behaviour. Now just because the behaviour has been expressed as a wave function it does not in any way imply that the a-lion is a wave. The behaviour is a characteristic associated with the lion but not the lion.
Here's a question :If the lion walks in a particular direction does it take its behaviour wave function with it? Where is the behaviour when it isn't spread out over space sampled over time? Cf. the electron and its wave function.
When we designate a precise location to the lion we are no longer considering behaviour over time and so the wave equation description is irrelevant not materially collapsed.The lion still has its behaviour. For a particle at detection the wave function no longer describes the behaviour of that particular particle. The wave function or behaviour description is no longer of any relevance or use. It is not as if a material wave like a water wave has collapsed but just we are no longer considering that now we have this-a singular position. In the particle example it may be that that particle has been removed from further participation in the experiment. No particle, no associated behaviour wave.
Hi Peter your analogy reminded me of a great film called "The Ghost and the Darkness; about two brother lions, one pale, one dark that have become man eaters.
Thinking ...I'd like to see if I can get the lion analogy or another to work for this problem. I'll get back to you.
Peter,
I can entangle the two lions as follows.While the lions are resting one lion is always standing on guard while the other sleeps on his back.The two lions have the following appearances. Ghost has a pale body but a dark underbelly and Darkness has a dark body and pale underbelly. The lions are next to each other and each observer is nearest to a different one. Now the two observers set off in opposite directions having synchronized their watches. Equidistant from the lions at a pre-arranged time they both look simultaneously at the nearest lion.
Observer Alice sees standing lion that has pale fur, can not know with certainty underbelly colour as it can't be seen. As Alice has seen Ghost, Bob must be looking at Darkness. And as when one lion stands the other sleeps on its back Bob is seeing a pale underbelly fur, and can't know with certainty the colour of the body fur on its back as it can't be seen.If instead Alice sees darkness Bob sees Ghost. If Alice's lion is on its back Bob's lion is standing.
Light is spreading out from the two a-lion sources in Alice's direction and in Bobs direction. Each stream of photons is associated with one of the lions and the streams of photons are independent of one another.Now Alice puts on her special polarizing sun glasses which can be set to give either a pale or dark appearance on light fur. Ghosts belly is dark only 50% of and very dark 50% of the time Darkness' belly is pale only 50% of the time and dark 50% of the time. Ghosts body is pale only 50% and dark 50% of the time. Darkness' body is dark 50% of the time and very dark 50% of the time. Now does the way Alice see the lions affect what Bob sees? If the lion is lying on its back Bob's lion is standing and vice versa.
If Alice sees a dark belly there is a 50% chance she is seeing Ghost unaltered belly fur image and 50% chance she is seeing Darkness' belly fur image darkened by the glasses, so there is a 50% rather than 100% chance of correctly guessing which standing lion Bob is seeing and so what fur color he sees. Bob has to have the opposite lion in the opposite stance whatever lion Alice imagines she sees. So have seemingly contradictory findings such as dark belly fur and dark body fur pairs and pale body pale underbelly pairs of results. Though I suppose if lots of results were collected the pairs might be mentally chopped and swapped so there are imagined to be only complementary pairs of results in the collection.
I haven't yet had time to look at all possible outcomes and possible interpretations.Must go now. Does the analogy work or has it been taken too far and fallen apart?
There are two different 'independent' cascades of photons s.d.Ghost and s.d. Darkness,cascading from the surface of the two different lions, apparently entangled and spread out over space and spreading further out over time" [l]So long as the relationship of the two lions holds IE one up one down and their complementary colouration if both equidistant observers observe simultaneously they will be selecting from parts of the sensory data corresponding to the same temporal origin which should always be complementary stance and matching colour. If they are not equidistant they may sample data from different temporal origins and so the up down relationship may not hold and entanglement is lost. Likewise if samples are not taken simultaneously.
When Alice puts on her special sunglasses it alters a proportion of the outcomes of observation for just her sensory data that correlate according to expectation with Bob's. Importantly simultaneously that alters what can be known,the probability of correct prediction re. Bob's lion manifestation. There will be expected correlation only some rather than all of the time.
Joy. Not only is 'probability' poorly understood, it is used with a certain blindness. In my paper Res. in Phys. 4, 81-82 (2014) one can read that it is wrong to use the phrase "impossible" as e.g. in: "it is impossible for LHV to violate CHSH" using probabilistic argumentation. Many important exceptions are overruled when statisticians act as though they can be certain about probabilistic claims.
You had exchanges with statisticians about your ideas. CHSH was used many times against your views. I hope that people now see that CHSH is not waterproof.
Btw did Gill or Gregor already appologize for some of their misconduct towards you? E.g. calling your papers ejaculations and more of that childish behavior?
Georgina,
A very good attempt, but two flaw and departures from a model of nature (as maths does!). One flaw is that the basic essential of "non-locality" is that the lions must be a massive distance apart, so no communication is possible. The other is that they must be 'identical' but both 'non-mirror symmetric' (see below).
The (simpler) physical mechanism should help; ALL spinning bodies have both North and South poles. If we spit on at the Equator, then BOTH have both north and south poles! If each half is re-shaped as a sphere or torus they are IDENTICAL, and the poles can be rotated (switched) without affecting the spin. That is poorly understood (as Akinbo showed) and applied.
So two spheres head off on the SAME SPIN AXIS [2 identical lions, front half pale rear dark go in opposite direction but with one walking backwards!]
Now the shutter settings on the camera 'click', making the lions turn round by some angle subject to setting, up to 360^o. (the spin 'axis' itself rotates, but this may be in BOTH the y and z planes. i.e. the lions may also roll over but we need curves for the 'intermediate cosine^2 distribution'.) The 'flip' from pale to dark (N to S) IS important as it defrocks 'non-locality.
Now the statistician analysing the 1,000's of A and B's photo's sorts them into piles. But he does NOT KNOW that both A and B can find the same colour from the same pair of lions! He assumes there's one pale one dark lion. So when he's told that Alice can 'flip' her colour by changing her lens setting, he assumes that means she much change Bob's lion as well! THAT'S SPOOKY!
Of course WE know it's not spooky at all, as did Einstein and Bell (despite his theorem), those two just didn't know what we know now. The rest are now just 'believers' who haven't applied it (and dismiss the DFM); the "Sleepwalkers" Bell referred to in "Speakable...". That doesn't 'disprove' QM, or 'uncertainty' of course, It just dramatically reduces the latter and removes the need for 'weirdness'.
The lion analogy does have the problem that we can tell a lions face from it's tail! Unfortunately the solution is rather incompatible with mainstream as it lacks all the anomalies and paradoxes. I'm struggling to solve that problem to make it publishable. Any ideas?
Peter
Stefan,
You are in the great majority. But 'weak measurement' statistical analysis can't compare single pairs, so has to make assumptions. Caroline identifies, as I did, that they make the wrong assumption. THAT is the 'mud', as the data from the few 'time resolved' experiments showed (despite the fact that what was reported was 'consistent with the theoretical expectation'!) See my post a few mins ago to Georgina below.
Thanks for identifying the 'incompleteness' of the summary description. I agree it could be misread. However I suggest the point is correct; That 'Non-Locality' arises from the apparent logical necessity for B's finding to be somehow DEPENDENT instantaneously on a decision of A, due to some unidentified form of 'entanglement'. (If you disagree with that do please explain your own beliefs).
I also identified the same flaws in the Weighs experimental analysis that Caroline also identified in the others. Weigh's also identified the 'rotation' from his (electro-optic) 'analyser' (with voltage change in that case) but was focussed in the 'instantaneous A/B choice' timing issue so just excluded it from theoretical analysis as it would have made nonsense of accepted theory.
I assume then you have no argument with the rest of my summary and derivation of the Cos^2 distribution (which being geometrical is clearly sound) and employs the NLS equation and current quantum optics. That then satisfies Bell's expressed expectations, including;
"The quantum phenomena do not exclude a uniform description of micro and macro world...systems and apparatus." p.171.
"a real synthesis of quantum and relativity theories requires not just technical developments but radical conceptual renewal." p172.
"Professional theoretical physicists ought to be able to do better." p.173.
Of current QM; "We differ only in the degree of concern or complacency with which we view...the intrinsic ambiguity in principle of the theory."
also; "..the 'Problem of Interpretation of QM' has been encircled. And the solution, invisible from the front, may be seen from the back. ..The nonlinear Schrodinger equation seems to me to be the best hope for a precisely formulated theory..." p.194.
Shocking I know, but the 'discrete field' based model I outline is then in line with both Bell and Einstein's views, and employs coherent logic. Interestingly it also supports Bohr's Copenhagen view and von Neuman's 'meter' (the detector's role) and retains a reduced gauge element of Heisenburg uncertainty. My previous (2nd scored) essay showed how the Born rule was met.
But please do keep throwing any apparent falsifications you can find at it!
Peter
Peter,
thanks for your reply.
I agree with you that
"That 'Non-Locality' arises from the apparent logical necessity for B's finding to be somehow DEPENDENT instantaneously on a decision of A, due to some unidentified form of 'entanglement'"
Please upload this paper at fqxi, because i won't sign up to academia.edu. So i can read it entirely here and see what it does. Thank you.
You cited 'weak measurements' in apostrophs. What accurately is ment by you with 'weak measurements'?
I did not understand properly your statement from your other reply, that
"They assume paired findings up/up are impossible".
Please mention the corresponding experimental setup and the specific measurement scenario for which your statement is true.
And please give me the link to the Weihs paper, so i can take a look at it.
At first glance, it seems to me that you don't accept any data of any experiment made with entanglement. Am i right here or in error?
Thanks for replying
Stefan
Han, thanks for drawing attention to your paper that nicely shows the failing of statistically "impossible" results.
Statisticians often invoke the law of large numbers to substitute for quantum uncertainty, as if perfect information is magically conferred on particle ensembles the larger the group, or the greater the number of measurements.
Things are due to change course.
In response to my question on on Aug. 7, 2014 @ 08:26 GMT, "Where in your hierarchy ladder of motion would you place Quantum vacuum? That is, is it moving around anything?"
I analyse the response thus in capital letters:
"The quantum vacuum doesn't have a 'place' in the hierarchy" (BUT IT EXISTS)
"It is as the water of the ocean" (SO IT IS A MEDIUM).
"Wherever you dive in you'll find it locally 'at rest'" (SO IT IS IMMOBILE)
I think all three are agreeable to Newton with little difference based on semantics. According him 'Absolute space' is also immovable without relation to anything external.
Akinbo
(I wont be worrying this weekend about the brain twisting clockwise-anticlockwise issues but I can discuss other things. As we say here TGIF - thank God it's friday)
I like what you wrote. I think that thought experiments that replace quantum fields with "ghostliness" will be fruitful in probing the deeper mysteries of physics.
Since nobody is refuting the "Fine-Tuned Universe", then I think it's safe to conclude that our universe really is Fine Tuned. If so, then there are two possible reasons why. Either our universe is 1 of only a few in 10^(10^137) that permits biology and chemistry, or there really is an Intelligent Designer. Since scientists cannot detect another universe, then the logical conclusion is that an Intelligent Designer exists. Anyone interested in discussing this?
Jason.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Your conclusion is not logical. The anthropic principle allows infinitely many life forms. Spatially as well as temporally ('eternally). I would expect and hope the vast majority to be significantly more intelligent that us!
I agree we may well be here for some purpose, but as only God could ever really know what that is then unless we ourselves are God, Marvyn the paranoid android and Richard Dawkins have a perfectly valid point, life, to us, can be seen as completely pointless.
i.e. Is there really any purpose to anybody discovering a better understanding of how nature works?
Peter
Hi Peter,
Thank you for at least talking to me. I'm not sure the anthropic principle really means anything other than as atheist propaganda. Dawkin-ism affirms an ultimate meaninglessness with is depressing; for that reason alone, it should be discarded like rotten fruit. Why would anyone want to believe in something that is depressing and soul crushing?