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To: Physicist
I would like to know your thoughts to the link I provided ealier

Regards
105 posted on 07/18/2002 8:16:33 AM PDT by SkyRat
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To: SkyRat
From your link:

The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings.

Codswallop. A lot of mysticism has arisen around the Aspect experiment, but all it did was to confirm the quantum mechanics of the 1920's. More specifically, it verified that nature violates Bell's Inequality, an implication of QM that was first noticed by John Bell in the 1960's. There is no need to "explain away" Aspect's findings; indeed, if they'd been otherwise, it would have been a serious problem for physics.

The correlations do not require any violation of special relativity. What they show is that nature is not locally causal. This was Einstein's main objection to quantum mechanics, its "spooky action-at-a-distance", to use his phrase. (We now know that Einstein was wrong about this.) But QM achieves this correlation without postulating any kind of a signal, so why do we need to introduce one? Just because nature isn't locally causal, it doesn't mean we have to throw out causality. We can simply throw out the notion of locality. Some information in the universe isn't tied to a specific location, that's all.

That's not to say that you can't construct, as Bohm did, a consistent interpretation wherein the correlations are mediated by a faster-than-light signal (which nonetheless cannot be used to communicate, an important point about Bohm's pilot wave). But the primary value in Bohm's work is to demonstrate that multiple metaphysical interpretations can coexist for the same epistemological model. There is no testable consequence of Bohm's interpretation that won't fit the Copenhagen interpretation equally well.

107 posted on 07/18/2002 8:41:56 AM PDT by Physicist
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