Hi Peter,

Honestly, I don't know if humans are too stupid and/or dangerous to be given the means to use FTL technology. The older I get, the more I feel like being human is a competition of who is more powerful (smarter, faster, has more endurance, better adaptation skills). I yearn for those days in my early 20's when I believed there were advanced alien civilizations out there who wanted to help humanity grow spiritually. They may yet be there, watching us; but I just don't feel as spiritual as I used to. It's not that I want to shoot down a UFO nor do I feel that it is morally justified. It would be an act of war if we did shoot an alien spacecraft down. Only then would the skeptics be convinced that we are not alone. I hate that unavoidable fact; I wish we could go back to the time when we could believe in grey aliens, etc., because it was inspiring to do so.

As for FTL technology, I don't think it's a failure of intelligence on our part (even though it would be complicated). I think it's an access problem. We just don't have access to the kind of physics and technology that allows us to alter physics constants or pull energy out of thin air using the energy+gravity=0 loophole to conservation of energy. At this point in our cultural/technological evolution, we may as well just pretend there are magic crystals that can do things, as a place-holder. It is probably better to have our little Star Trek fantasies, then to become so hyperfocused on reality that our species becomes... boring.

Now we can see why quantum outcomes are probabilistic rather than completely predictable. Lion ( behaviour ->location ) outcomes too are probabilistic. Having done the field work we can divide up the map of the territory into areas and mark it with probabilities for finding the lion in each, that can then be used in future for locating the lion.

The probability distribution that will be found can be represented by all of the factors that play their part in giving outcomes in the different areas. In the case of the sub atomic particle its the non relativistic time dependent Schrodinger equation. For a lion the factors affecting its position would be things like hunger, whether feeding or not, thirst, external body temperature, whether or not the lionesses are sexually receptive or if there are cubs to protect and whether there are rival males in the neighborhood.

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.

Does the behaviour->location probability distribution, wave function, for the electron exist as a real thing in space? I'm going to say no because at any instant in time the electron has only one location. For a macroscopic object such as a lion can we say the same? There is a big difference. We do not detect the lion by direct interaction but via electromagnetic signals or as I've been calling it potential sensory data (s.d.). The lion (Object, an actualisation),aka a-Lion has only one position at any one instant. However the potential sensory data from which a lion Image reality can be produced, IE the experience of where the lion is, is spread over space as electromagnetic waves. So s.d.lion encodes many potential positions in space simultaneously.

The observed lion position will depend upon where and when the observer takes the sample and what data is at that position then, giving singular lion position m-lion (manifestation) output.That sequence of events does not happen with the sub atomic particle because it is detected by direct interaction.

Now I must reiterate that an aspect of what we call lion can be represented as a probability distribution of its locations resulting from its behaviour which is a phenomenon over time not an attribute of the lion object at any instant. However its behaviour and consequent locations are also spread out within space as electromagnetic data only becoming a singular manifestation upon receipt of that sensory data and processing into experienced output.

Does the electromagnetic data in the environment collapse, no a sample is taken from it and the rest continues on its way. Upon collection of the data there is a switching from considering many possibilities (the probabilistic view ) to observation of one fabricated manifestation. That is from an imaginary view spanning many iterations of the Object universe to one Image reality manifestation.

Can the lion be both alive and dead simultaneously. Yes if you are referring to s.d.lion rather than a-lion or m-lion. Have a near and a far observer, shoot the lion. Near observer sees lion dead before far observer because they are receiving different sensory data from the environment in which there is data encoding both dead and alive manifestations.

That makes me think a singular wave function for a macroscopic object is inadequate as a description as it does not take into account the trinity of things. That are all called by the same name but are fundamentally different, in The actualisation, aka a-x, the potential sensory data, aka s.d.-x and the manifestation aka m-x.

Having said all that, the sensory data spread out in the environment is why I really like what Julian Barbour has been doing with his Shape space. Not because of where he is taking it,which is interesting in its own right, but because there has to be in the environment, not just imaginary shape space, data to give all of the possible spatial transformations and changes of scale that could become manifestations if just that sample of em data is received and processed. The maximum size being the same as the actualised object unless a magnifying glass or microscope is being used. His process of finding closest matching transformation could be a way of finding how the manifestation would alter as the observer is placed in a different position with different viewpoint.

Has anyone here studied the Fine Tuning data? I'm looking at this website: http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/designun.html

They seem to be saying that if the physics constants were not exactly what they are, then either chemistry wouldn't work, or there wouldn't be materials available for complex organic life forms. Or biology wouldn't have enough time to evolve, stuff like that. Does anyone here know just how much error is allowed in the physics constants before biology is no longer possible?

    Now for the macroscopic object I have one wave function giving probabilities of a-objects locations. The observer under normal observation doesn't interact directly with the a-object so there is no collapse of that wave function upon the act of observation.

    Not knowing exactly what is going on i.e.where the object is the representation giving probabilities of location could stand in as proxy. Now one might say that first wave function (proxy for a-object,) sets up the sensory data waves which also do not collapse upon observation but are sampled. The second wave is actualised from continued interaction of the a-object (or one might say the proxy wave function) with the environment, the environment is changed.

    Could this have any bearing on the double slit experiment? (Rhetorical). The particle is vibrating or oscillating (or one might choose to consider the wave function proxy) and causing vibration of the environment. That sets up waves which can interfere but also guide the particle (like pilot waves), making some output locations more likely than others.The bottom of troughs rather than climbing out of them as it takes less energy. Where the particle ends up on a screen will depend upon its starting position and the interaction with the waves it produces.

    The waves are like the potential sensory data, a disturbance/change of the external environment caused by a macroscopic a-object. The s.d.-object can be regarded as the wave nature of an object and the a-object as the particle nature, even though a-object characteristics/behavior giving probabilities of locations can be expressed as a wave function. Likewise the disturbance of the environment caused by a particle can be regarded as its wave nature and not in contradiction to its particle nature even though its characteristics/behaviour can be used to describe the particle as a wave function, which is able to give probability of different locations.

    It can be seen that QM is dealing with amalgamated behaviour over time of a-objects and with m-objects aka Manifestations, the various kinds of detection output.Classical mechanics seems to me to be about a-objects themselves over time. Whereas Einstein's SR is about s.d.objects, the Potential Sensory data in the environment i.e. wave nature of objects, and with m-objects, observed Manifestations.

    Rather than contradicting each other each is considering different viewpoints of reality, by looking at different aspects of objects. a-x Actualisations, s.d-x Potential Sensory data, and m-x Manifestations.

    I should also say something about uncertainty. Just as taking a quantum measurement can disturb a system and so there is some uncertainty about the outcome. IE whether measurement itself has affected it. The same applies to the macroscopic example I gave. The act of locating the lion in order to photograph it could cause it to move, if it is disturbed or frightened by the intrusion. So one can never know, when the photograph has been taken, if that would have been the lions location had the sanple not been taken.

    Peter,

    Just before you log out finally on the discussion. Where in your hierarchy ladder of motion would you place Quantum vacuum? That is, is it moving around anything?

    Akinbo

    Maybe evenly interesting:

    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.2867.pdf

    Feynman describes double slit experiment results. He mentions light destroying the interference, and that any other means of observing which slit the electron goes through would too. Which makes sense as the photons or other particles that might be used for detection will be producing waves as well and so the wave pattern of the electron will be disrupted.The wave pattern must be very delicate.

    The lion represents an object whose location is knowable, but only within the uncertainty principle. The electron as a matter wave has a location that is knowable, but only within the uncertainty principle.

    The lion's probability function is made up of knowable measurements, the electron's probability function is due to the Schrodinger equation.

    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.

    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

    ">here.](https://www.academia.edu/6525547/Classical_reproduction_of_quantum_correlations_popular_summary_B_

    )

    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.