Answering Mermin’s Challenge

Stefan Weckbach

The interaction of the gyroscope with the magnetic field in your reference [1] is due to the Lenz law. If that gyroscope would not be mounted by its mass (gravity) and the friction of one pole of the magnet (where it has been put on), but would hover weightlessly between the two poles of the magnet, then the sphere of the electron simply would begin to turn around its center (in the experiment of reference [1] it can't do that because the gyroscope has weight, sits on one pole shoe and the induced force is to weak to turn it!). In any case, the resulting force wouldn't neither be "up", "down" nor would it be "left" or "right" but the sphere of the electron simply would begin to turn around its own center.

If that gyroscope wouldn't float in the outer shell of the silver atom but instead being mounted to that shell in some way, the effect would be the same, just as with the ISS which can change its geodesic around the earth by tilting the axis of rotation of the mounted gyroscope (by some motors) in a certain direction (dictated by the knowledge about gyroscopes to achieve the wished-for new geodesic). The ISS (or the electron's shell) then will change its geodesic, but the earth (or the silver atom) will not be affected by that.

Another problem for the gyroscope model is that in order for the spinning object to avoid an angular velocity that exceeds the speed of light by roughly 10^24 orders of magnitude, the object's radius, mass as well as energy had to be roughly 10^9 in magnitude smaller than what has been experimentally determined. As the author of your reference [1] wrote in his footnote, if the rotation speed greatly exceeds that of the experiment, then anyway the observed effects should become weaker. The rotational speed in these experiments were 1000 rpm. If your gyroscopic spin would have an angular velocity of 10^33 - 10^9 = 10^24, then one can expect that the effects will certainly totally vanish. And i think one cannot make the angular velocity of the electron that small that it behaves as a huge macroscopic gyroscope like it does in the experiments of ref. [1]. But anyway, these effects cannot explain the electron spin, since the dynamics described by Lenz' law is linear and therefore continuous, and not discrete. That means that if electrons behave like kinds of gyroscopes, then everywhere in the interior area of the geometric figure produced by in the Stern-Gerlach experiment there should be the same frequencies of impacts as is the case at the border areas. So, I really do not neither understand how your model will achieve the discrete behaviour of atom impacts nor no I understand how this could be in any way linked to the behaviour of gyroscopes.

Without a viable mechanism that at least demonstrates on the basis of what interactions a single silver atom (or electron) will impact the measurement screen at which area it makes no sense to me to further think about your model. Sorry that I cannot say something other, but without a viable mechanism to produce the outcomes this model in my opinion is rather a ambiguous hypothesis instead of solid theory about what is going on.

John Cox

Georgina,

beg pard, are you suggesting that the unpaired Ag electron is physically rotating on its own axis and perhaps magnetically aligning at some relevant point(s) in the outer shell dependent on the external field orientation?

That may fit with there being no orbital angular momentum attributed to that electron, but how then does it conform to observation of the equi-partitioned electrical lateral CW or CCW deflection 90* from magnetic polar attitude? The electrical neutrality of the Ag atom doesn't seem to influence the UP/DN splitting of results but must be treated as a superposition of positive (proton) and negative (electron0 charge that exhibits an equal probability of lateral deflections; note: the pattern of the typical S-G plot, its not all in a vertical plane of discrete UP or DN... it fans out on both sides of the center vertical plane. best jrc

Georgina Woodward

Stefan, I only referenced that article because it stated that a gyroscopes orientation could be influenced by a magnetic field. I have not written a paper about gyroscopes but am addressing the Stern Gerlach experiments. If you choose not to read i t because I haven't said something you want said about gyroscopes so be it. Re the sliver atom: the electrons are bound to the atom by the electrostatic force. Although the nucleus and electrons are individual parts they can be thought of as a whole. In that case the effect on orientation of the outer electrons could affect the whole atom; the angular momenta of the other electrons being cancelled out. The paper isn't about silver atoms, that's just in the appendix.

Georgina Woodward

If I Understand your first sentence correctly, the answer is yes. But I don't agree with this bit "at some relevant point(s) in the outer shell" JC I don't see why where it is in the shell matters.

Maybe the motion 9flow) of the unpaired electron, taking the rest of the atom with it is not to do with there electrostatic charge of the atom. But instead the rotation of the essence of electron-ness of that outer electron, acting like but not current in a coil, and un-cancelled by a partners opposite rotation.

Why don't you read the paper and ask me about what I have written. How it might apply to silver atoms is an after thought. Unraveling the issues has to start somewhere. I have chosen to start with the simpler situation involving electrons.

Stefan Weckbach

John,

the fan out is not due to a Lorenz force. One can conclude this from how much the atom beam is fanned out at the screen when the SG-experiment does not use a horizontal slit aperture aperture the silver atoms leave before entering the SG magnet, but a circular aperture, hence a tiny circular hole.

So when using a horizontal slit aperture, the resulting original pictures of the experiment with and without a magnetic field being applied to the atom beam look like depicted here:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-74813-4_4

That horizontal slit aperture was originally used by Gerlach, not a circular aperture. The latter does block some of the the horizontal parts of the atom beam, resulting in only two spot-like locations of impact - as depicted here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experiment#/media/File:Stern-Gerlach_experiment_svg.svg

whereas the setup used by SG is schematically shown at this picture:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern-Gerlach-Versuch#/media/Datei:SternGerlach2.jpg

On that picture you can see the horizontal slit aperture. So there is no Lorenz force in play in the SG experiment. Otherwise all the silver atoms would deviate in the same horizontal direction (left or right, depending on the orientation of the magentic field). But that is not what has been observed. So since there is no Lorenz force in play, the silver atom must be considered as electrical neutral. And that neutrality is the reason for that one cannot apply Lenz law in any way as the cause for the silver atoms trajectories (up/down or left/right).

Stefan Weckbach

"One can conclude this from how much the atom beam is fanned out at the screen when the SG-experiment does not use a horizontal slit aperture aperture the silver atoms leave before entering the SG magnet, but a circular aperture, hence a tiny circular hole."

Should be more understandable as

"One can conclude this from how much the atom beam is fanned out at the screen when the SG-experiment does not use a horizontal slit aperture. That aperture was the original one the silver atoms left before entering the SG magnet. By using a circular aperture, hence a tiny circular hole, one can see that the deviations at the x-axis you talked about stem from the use of a different slit architecture. There simply are more silver atoms coming from the oven that are able to enter ghe magnet when one uses a horizontal aperture.".

Reminder: For the experiment with the horizontal aperture, some of the silver atoms will not be in vertical alignment with the blade of the magnet, but slightly shifted horizontally. These are the atoms that experience a smaller amount of deviation from the z-axis, since they are in regions where the magnetic field isn't that inhomogenous than at directly at the z-axis of the blade.

Stefan Weckbach

Georgina,

I read your paper fully and I also read your comments.

In all of my posts within this thread I talk about what your model says when silver atoms are send through an SG-magnet. Since you claim that the outcome at each of the two SG-magnets is governed by local interactions for each side, I tried to learn about what your hypothesis says about the governing laws leading to the Stern-Gerlach pattern I already referenced above to John, namely the "open-mouth"-shaped pattern Stern and Gerlach obtained in their measurements.

If your model of entanglement enables a local description of the measurement outcomes at each side, then at each side of the entanglement experiment the collected outputs should resemble that Stern-Gerlach pattern. Not until the local governing laws for the local outcomes are defined does it make sense to me to think about whether or not your model could be able to reproduce the statistical distributions for all the angles. Clearly, as you explained in your paper, the statistical distributions for the 0, 90 and 180 degree angles are obtained in your model by partitioning all pairwise possibilities into subsets and the symmetry of all these subsets will give the known statistical results.

But this kind of partitioning does not imply that there has to exist a physical mechanism that is able to determine all outcomes. Partitioning and physical mechanism refer to two different subjects. The partitioning refers to the statistics Quantum mechanics predicts, the physical mechanism refers to the belief that it should be possible in principle to find such a mechanism in nature. Beliefs are not forbidden, but are just beliefs - as long as one hasn't defined such a mechanism and has shown that it is responsible for the known outcomes of the entanglement experiment. If your approach is not able to reproduce the "open-mouth"-shaped pattern, one can say with certainty that it does describe neither the SG-experiments for non-entangled particles nor the SG-experiments for the entangled particles.

I have not found any demonstration of these mechanisms, neither in your paper nor in your hitherto comments. Therefore I wrote that any musings about whether your explanations for the 0, 90 and 180 degree cases are self-consistent or not do in my opinion not make sense to me until you provide a demonstration of the physical interactions that lead to the outcomes. Why should I ponder over the partitioning you offered in your paper when even you yourself are not sure about why and how an assumed changing magnetic moment of an electron does change a silver atoms' trajectory?

Georgina Woodward

Stefan, thank you for reading the paper. I'm disappointed that you didn't find it interesting or thought provoking. Don't you love the 90 degree axis orientations and how different they are from 0 and 180? Your goal posts keep moving. You said I needed to explain the 0, 90 and 180 results and now its the 'open mouth' pattern .My initial thought on the matter is that it could be to do with the non homogeneity of the field. It isn't actually vertical, that assumption is just a simplification. The field fans out, from the smaller pointier magnet to the bigger flatter one. As to what silver atoms do, how they move I've tried to flesh out the basic idea mentioned in the paper on this 'page'. Of course I can not know certainly but I'd rather propose a possibility that would be in keeping with the existence of material reality, at the extremely small scale.

Georgina Woodward

Stefan, I may not have spelled out precisely how the additional movement to be added to velocity through the apparatus is happening in the paper. However I do think I have done so on this page. I am saying the rotation of the electron (single or outer of silver atom) acts in nature like current in a coil. The motion of the essence of electron-ness is not current, but like current it involves movement of electron-ness. Acting like current in a coil, the right hand rule can be applied to find the response to the magnetic field.

The response is to the field the individual encounters. Passing along close to the midline the field is vertical. Further to the sides it is not vertical. If the displacement due to the field/electron-ness 'turn' interaction is described by two vectors horizontal and vertical, then further from the midline, the horizontal vector component increases and the vertical component decreases. This gives the result that there are varying amounts of up-ness of the axes of rotation that all give UP bits. There are varying amounts of down-ness of the axes of rotation too, that all give DOWN bits.

John Cox

Stefan,

thank you for those refs; Occam's Razor would admit a simple stochastic scattering exiting the furnace prior to encountering the different architecture of the aperture(s) and hence your account is quite convincing. We are dealing with aggregates not single entities in experiment, and similar to the nuisance of the neutron's neutral charge we can't say that there exists no electrical field. Just one that doesn't behave as do those in aggregate moving in relation to others. So some aggregations might also exhibit neutral behavior, quarks and all. jrc

Stefan Weckbach

Georgina,

you need not be disappointed at all!! I learned a lot about the logic behind various hidden-variable attempts and also about the concept of change of orientation for a magnetic moment as you use it in your attempt.

Georgina and John,

The problem is that as long as one does not look at the physical realisation of the logic one has established for explaining the outcome probabilities for the 0, 90 and 180 degree cases, the attempt seems to work since it suggests to reproduce the probabilities predicted by QM for these angles - because the outcomes on both sides for the 0 and 180 degree cases are a 100% correlated ("correlated" in the sense that if I know the outcome of one particle I can predict the outcome of the other particle with 100% certainty). For the 90 degree case that 100% correlation is thought to be replaced by some functions that should dictate whether the particle is going "up" or "down" (or additionally even "left" or "right") with 50% probability....

But as soon as one asks what these functions represent physically, there is no unambiguous answer available. Since this holds for the 0, 90 and 180 degree cases, logically this holds also for all other angles. The logical result is that it even remains unknown how the model should reproduce the "open-mouth" figure if the magnet is not turned during the whole process of measurements (0 degree). If that would be clear, one theoretically could proceed to the 180 degree and the 90 degree cases. But how should one reconcile the 180 and 90 degree cases with the 0 degree case, if for the latter there isn't even a physical explanation available for its experimentally observed outcomes?

Thinking otherwise means to conclude from a "believed-to-be-established" explanation for the 0 degree case to a "believed-to-be-established" explanation for the 180 and 90 degree cases, and thus one "proves" what one merely has assumed in the first place. One now can say that the same circular ill defined logic is also present in how we think about the formalism of QM and what it says about ontological facts. I think the question which of the two systems of thinking about the ontology of physical systems is the correct one can only be settled by experiment, if at all. If "spin" is really not what QM suggests, namely something whose amount and orientation is fixed, this only could be found out experimentally. But for such an experiment, one needs to know what to look for! Or in other words, for such an experiment one would need a self-consistent alternative theory that predicts something other than QM does for a certain experiment No computer simulation of such an alternative theory could be used for discriminating it from QM, since simulating the alternative theory, for example for the SG-experiment, would simply mean again (as already mentioned above) that the results of that simulation would merely "prove" what had been assumed by that alternative theory in the first place! So, a real physical experiment would be needed together with a prediction of the alternative theory which contradicts a QM's prediction.

Georgina Woodward

Stefan, I began on this page trying to use magnetic moments as an explanation. I found it didn't work for me. In the paper I wrote, I do not talk about magnetic moments but do use the terms South seeking and North seeking. I understand how that could be confusing. In the paper I'm using the terms to give indications of direction of movement within the apparatus. I'm not giving the electron the characteristic of a permanent magnet.

Unless applying a double standard, any alternative would have to be able to reproduce the same results as QM predicts without having to be proven to be what is actually occurring. A point in my favour is that there are potentially experiments that could be carried out , verifying the principle.

Stefan Weckbach

Georgina, I don't know what precisely within your model should be "verifiable" via what kind of experiment. But luckily I need not know unless an experiment of that sort is carried out in physical reality (instead of being "carried out" in the virtual reality of the mind) and the results as well as the physical laws that led to these results are on the table and can be checked by everybody.

Georgina Woodward

Stefan, experiments with micro or tiny macro weightless unsupported gyroscopes (in a vacuum or low pressure might help) that replicate Stem Gerlach experiments on pairs with opposite rotation and on sequential apparatus at different angles. if they replicate the findings of the experiments with electrons and silver atoms it fits the hypothesis that the results for the atomic and sub atomic test objects may also involve gyroscopic motion and its interaction with the magnetic field.

Stefan Weckbach

Georgina, ah, experiments with gyroscopes, thank you for making that clear. Although i do not want to anticipate the results of these experiments until they are on the table, I think it would nonetheless be interesting to do them. I think it would be interesting to know whether or not the gyroscopes for those experiments are equipped with a diamagnetic conductor around their axis'? Or alternatively whether or not all the gimbals of the gyroscopes are made out of diamagnetic materials and therefore each gimbal represents a closed loop of conductive wire.

It further would be interesting to know how your hypothesis handles the orientation of axis' for the incoming gyroscope pairs. Are the identical axis' orientations for each pair all send out by the source with the same orientation relative to the laboratory frame? Or are they send out randomly orientated around 360 degrees (but surely always parallel to each other!) relative to the laboratory frame?

For the case that each pair's common parallel axis' is oriented randomly around 360 degrees, in my opinion another interesting question would be around which axis they would be randomly orientated. There are two options, namely around the x-axis or around the y-axis (y-axis as the axis of direction of flight, z-axis would be the vertical axis). Also a combination of both possibilities would be thinkable and therefore multiple different experiments that each take into account one of these possibilities separately.

Spontaneously i thought of making these experiments on the ISS, maybe there in a vacuum chamber, since there the demand of weightlessness may be satisfied in the most optimal manner.

Sorry for the many questions - you surely need not answer them.

Georgina Woodward

What is important is that the rotating mass of the gyroscopes is a conducting material. Metals, with free electrons would be good . It is necessary to have the electrons moving as the mass rotates like current moving through a coil; so that the right hand rule can apply.

As for gyroscope initial orientations; that will depend on the experiment being replicated.

Stefan Weckbach

Thanks Georgina. Is there a "current flow" ("moving charges") assumed to be present in the rotating masses of the gyroscopes for the points in time where the gyroscopes haven't yet reached the influences of their respective magnet stations?

Or can that answer only be given experimentally?

Georgina Woodward

Stefan, I have used 'turn' and 'flow' for different meanings, both to do with the moving electron-ness, and so also charge. Turn is gyroscopic rotation of the mass of electron/s, Flow is the component of motion that results from the turn of the electrons interacting with the magnetic field. So using my terminology there is turn without a local magnetic field but not flow; just the translation (not the rotation) velocity the gyroscope has. Is turn current? Not as we know it. e- are changing spatial position.

I think taking Stern Gerlach apparatus to the ISS would be prohibitively expensive. It may not be necessary to have everything on my wish list. Perhaps larger gyroscopes are less easily disturbed/ don't loose their seeming coherence so easily. Thinking preliminary work could be done using low pressure and the gyroscopes kept aloft by helium balloon jackets.

Stefan Weckbach

Georgina,

well, if there are charges and rotations involved for the properties of the electron, then classically one could expect a magnetic dipole moment for that particle to be present. But you withdrew that classical picture. Somehow you nonetheless want to establish a connection between the classical assumptions of electromagnetism for a moving gyroscope (rotating around center of mass, conductor, moving charges, currents, magnetic fields of that current, Lenz Law) with the classical picture of an electron (rotating around center of mass, electron-ness, conductor inside, moving charges, currents, magnetic fields of that current, Lenz law). I really do not buy into this kind of analogy. For me it is an analogy, but one that is not fully symmetric when it comes to the governing laws that are responsible for the behaviour of these two distinct objects (see below).

For me it is clear that a Stern-Gerlach experiment with little gyroscopes will not result in the well-known open-mouth figure. There will not new laws of electromagnetism be discovered in such an experiment. The only thing that one possibly could discover is that one had incorrectly applied the known laws of electromagnetism and the result must be explained by properly applying these laws.

But I really do not believe that the same will also be true for the electron's quantized spin, or in other words, I don't think that the concept of a quantized spin is due to incorrectly applied laws of electromagnetism.

Why? If one could take the gyroscope experiments as an alternative replacement of a real Stern-Gerlach experiment, and thus could switch between the micro- and the macro level when making inferences or predictions, then an electron in an inhomogeneous magnetic field should not experience a classical Lorenz force. But the truth is that in the case of a gyroscope in an inhomogeneous magnetic field, Lenz Law must be applied, whereas in the case of an electron in an inhomogeneous magnetic field, the Lorentz force is dominant (there are indeed experiments thinkable where one can measure up- and down spins of electrons in an inhomogeneous magnetic field, but these effects are all purely quantum-mechanical and one needs a different experimental setup than that of an SG-experiment).

For all these reasons I also do not believe that if one replaces electrons in an SG-experiment with silver atoms then a combination of Faraday's law of induction and the Lorentz force should apply (what would be no other than Lenz law giving the directions of forces). This cannot be the case since otherwise the open-mouth figure would look different, means spin was not quantized but the figure would show continuous impacts along the z-axis of the figure.

That's simply the facts: Faraday's law as well as the Lorentz force do not operate according to "all-or-nothing" in relation to the angle an object encounters these forces, but according to trigonometric functions.

For giving you some additional food for thought about the analogies of single particles with aggregates of particles, I post you a section from a wiki article:

"In real materials the Lorentz force is inadequate to describe the collective behaviour of charged particles, both in principle and as a matter of computation. The charged particles in a material medium not only respond to the E and B fields but also generate these fields. Complex transport equations must be solved to determine the time and spatial response of charges, for example, the Boltzmann equation or the Fokker-Planck equation or the Navier-Stokes equations. For example, see magnetohydrodynamics, fluid dynamics, electrohydrodynamics, superconductivity, stellar evolution. An entire physical apparatus for dealing with these matters has developed. See for example, Green-Kubo relations and Green's function (many-body theory)."

Georgina Woodward

Stefan, you have made your opinion very clear. "For me it is clear that a Stern-Gerlach experiment with little gyroscopes will not result in the well-known open-mouth figure. There will not new laws of electromagnetism be discovered in such an experiment. The only thing that one possibly could discover is that one had incorrectly applied the known laws of electromagnetism and the result must be explained by properly applying these laws." SW. I accept that my gyroscope/'entanglement' hypothesis may be incorrect but am not yet convinced it is a dead horse. Accepting that material realty as we know it does not exist at the smallest scales, and there is faster than light conspiracy coordinating distant results is, for me, untenable. Some trial and error may be needed. So excuse me for not rolling over belly up.

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