"The quadrupole moment is three-dimensional, and you can choose two of three axes along which to measure it: the x-axis, the y-axis, ... you don't expect that your choice to measure along the second or third axes should affect the result you get for the measurement along x-axis."

A cube is also three dimensional, and you can choose two of three axes along which to measure it too. But you do expect your measurements to directly effect the result of an additional measurement, precisely because merely being three-dimensional is not sufficient to cause the measurements to be independent.

QM assumes the things being measured are independent, simply because they are three dimensional, in theory. However, if they are not, then it is no surprise that the results seem "weird". The real question is, Why were the measurements ever assumed to be independent in the first place? Just because there are described, in the theory, via three parameters, that may or may not be independent of one another?

Rob McEachern

    The viewpoint of Gühne, Cabello, Larsson and their colleagues that was quoted reminds me of some of the discussion on the "spookiness" page. A question needs asking ; What is "reality" in the context of physics? The word may need differentiating to specify different kinds of reality in order to unambiguously deal with objective measurement outputs that are real in their own right but were not preexisting, and the concept of a reality that exists independently of the measurement process.

      The intrinsic reality seems to be related to the fundamental "dimensions" like mass, (amount of substance), charge. Length could be included in that list but it can also be a derived reality depending on how it is measured. Velocity, orientation and measured orientation of ordinary spin are not intrinsic reality. It seems to me there must be an intrinsic spin that is the rotation relative to the whole of the Object universe not relative to a measuring device. Position is an oddity. As everything is in absolute motion nothing has a precise intrinsic position but it is always somewhere. A definite unchanging position has to be an outcome of measurement, so a derived and not intrinsic property.

      Velocity, orientation and measured orientation of ordinary spin are not intrinsic reality but relative measurements.

      Tying that in with my other writing; Object reality is intrinsic reality, Image reality (output of a reality interface subsequent to EM information receipt) is a form of derived reality.

      • [deleted]

      Abstract finite "quadrupole moment is three-dimensional," have absolutely nothing to do with the real unique infinite Universe.

      Joe Fisher, Realist

      The real unique Universe am infinite. You all keep asking what reality is and guessing what reality could be or ever was instead of understanding what reality am.

      Joe Fisher, Realist

      4 days later

      This article does not compute without a lot of background information. For example, someone invented an new term for quantum phase coherence which is renamed contextuality. Great, that is what we need...anopther term to describe something that we do not understand understand in the first place.

      Here is a blurb from a past article that would have been helpful here:

      "The term "contextuality" simply refers to the weird way in which a property of a quantum particle can depend on the context of the experiments you do to investigate it, even if there seems to be no good reason why that should be so. "It's like the colour of your socks affecting the experiment," says Joseph Emerson, an FQXi member and quantum physicist at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, who also researches this area of physics. (See "The Quantum Truth Seeker.") This doesn't hold true in the everyday macroscopic world: a given playing card in a deck is either black or red, and it stays that way regardless of whether anyone looks at it or not, or the way in which they look. This steadfastness does not always apply to quantum systems, where properties may not be set until they are observed, and when and how measurements are carried out can change the outcome of the experiment."

      Yes. Ordinary classical reality does not decohere very fast and so we think of classical gravity reality as permanent. A playing card is either red or black...but that will that be true for all time. In ten years, one thousand years, or one million years, the playing card will indeed be something else. In other words, even our classical reality is subject to a very slow decoherence rate. The usually very slow classical decoherence gives us the illusion of permanence and locality.

      In contrast to classical states, quantum states usually decohere very rapidly into classical states. What seems strange is that quantum states can actually remain coherent for very long times and over very long time separations. This kind of phase coherence makes no classical sense, i.e., that we can know the state of a particle across the universe just because we know the state of an entangled particle right here right now.

      Any discussion about qubits that does not include decoherence rates leaves out a necessary factor for any quantum computer. Decoherence is more than just the inevitable scrambling of information. Decoherence provides the key for understanding all of our quantum reality.

        Why do you utterly confuse unreasonable codswallop with acceptable truth? You wrote: "Yes. Ordinary classical reality does not decohere very fast and so we think of classical gravity reality as permanent." Did you mean that extraordinary unclassical reality does cohere very slowly while you think either that unclassical gravity, or classical levity was temporary? The real unique Universe am infinite.

        Joe Fisher, Realist

        I am afraid that I do not understand what you have said.

        Do you believe in quantum computing with qubits?

        Do you believe in quantum phase coherence?

        That's an excellent point, Rob.

        Without an extra degree of freedom, there is no way to show that quantum mechanics demonstrates more than it assumed in the first place.

        With an extra degree of freedom, entanglement fails.

        In fact. if anyone is interested, I have a draft paper on quantum contextuality at ResearchGate:

        https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275962863_Special_Relativity_and_the_Origin_of_Probability

        Rob,

        I suspect that complex representation with Hermitian symmetry seemingly adds an additional dimension while it actually merely adds arbitrarily chosen redundancy. May physics suffer from unwarranted interpretation in this case too? I expect you to confirm that real part and imaginary part, magnitude and phase are not necessarily independent from each other. Shouldn't we ask ourselves how to interpret such degeneration? While Schroedinger still admitted being not sure, the crowd took his trick that is equivalent to Heisenberg's square matrices as a gospel up to now. I maintain that triangular matrices, IR+ instead of IR and cosine instead of Fourier transformation provide in principle an alternative to the unquestionably more advantageous use of the imaginary unit i.

        ++++

        I know for an absolute fact that I can prove that the real unique Universe am infinite. I know for an absolute fact that I can prove that finite abstract quantum computing with finite abstract qubits is a real physical impossibility. I know that the statement of there being any finite abstract quantum phase coherence is utter codswallop.

        Joe Fisher, Realist

        Kuepfmueller's 1924 uncertainty refers to two different values either 1 or 1/2 where the latter one results from the assumption of positive and negative frequencies. I guess 1/2 is correct and agrees with Heisenberg's 1927 uncertainty. If only the physicists didn't doubt that the restriction to positive elapsed time necessarily implies to accept negative frequencies. Dirac rejected in a textbook negative frequency and he was certainly not the only one.

        ++++

          Is certainty finite? If so, then one cannot be finitely uncertain about certainty can one?

          Joe Fisher, Realist

          Since you do not believe in quantum phase coherence, there is no sense to any discourse. It is not clear why you even bother to comment.

          Thanks so much for that reference:

          Thomas Howard Ray replied on Nov. 26, 2015 @ 17:46 GMT as "In fact. if anyone is interested, I have a draft paper on quantum contextuality at ResearchGate:

          863_Special_Relativity_and_the_Origin_of_Probability">Special relativity and the origin of probability](https://https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275962

          863_Special_Relativity_and_the_Origin_of_Probability)"

          You do not mention Category theory or Moldoveanu's algebraic arguments, elliptic composability. What about these?

          Hi Steve,

          Moldoveanu's contention that the laws of physics are invariant under additional degrees of freedom is fundamentally wrong-headed.

          It would deny quantum mechanics any dimension at all, save the 1-dimension real line. And that is correct as far as it goes -- metric spaces. I agree that is the proper domain of quantum mechanics (as my proof for what I call Khrennikov's theorem establishes). A very useful concept for information theory, not for foundations.

          The Hilbert space quantum formalism is two-dimensional. M's translation to a "para-Hilbert space" deprives complex analysis of its power to generate both real and complex solutions, since he has discarded the fundamental theorem of algebra. In any case, if my informal proof is correct -- the physical existence of reversibility in 2 dimensions contradicts irreversibility in 1 dimension, and favors a topological theory.

          In any case, though M implies (reductio ad absurdum) that the only physics is either classical or quantum, there's nothing classical about his theory. Nor even necessarily physical.

          My approach is compatible with category theory.