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Since the discovery of quantum mechanical math in the 1920's, the physics community has strived mightily to explain away, in materialist, determinist terms, that aspect of the fundamental math quaintly called "the observer". Einstein was bothered by it for the remainder of his life, so much so that came up with a thought experiment called the E-P-R Paradox. The difficulty was, and is, that quantum mechanical math provides only a probability distribution that an event will occur, not that event's outcome. A mathematician, John Bell, came up with a way to test non-locality, a key aspect of quantum mechanics, believing that qm would be shown to be inconsistent in favor of classical mechanics. Elegant experimentation was subsequently undertaken and it established that non-locality is a reality and that quantum mechanical math is thus wholly consistent. There are no hidden variables of a classical nature. Alain Aspect is the best-known of these experimenters.

Alamo-Girl, please correct me if any of the substance of this story is incomplete or incorrect.

After all this time, the physics community cannot get its mind around intangibility, real though it has proved to be. I am thus not surprised that Walker could be considered "fringe" within a group where timidity reigns. A paradigm shift is not required. Quantum mechanics IS a major paradim shift.

Walker covers all this and much more in his clear, eloquent, incisive book. It is a fine and beautiful work and I recommend it unreservedly.

Thank you for your post!

Alamo-Girl, please correct me if any of the substance of this story is incomplete or incorrect.

That explanation is my understanding as well. For lurkers, I offer these two articles to help explain the issue of Bell’s Inequalities:

PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 399 October 26, 1998 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein

NONLOCALITY GETS MORE REAL. "Bell's Inequalities," the set of mathematical relations that would rule out the notion that distant quantum particles exert influences on each other at seemingly instantaneous rates, have now been violated over record large distances, with record high certainty, and with the elimination of an important loophole in three recent experiments, further solidifying the notion of "spooky action at a distance" in quantum particles. At the Optical Society of America meeting in Baltimore earlier this month, Paul Kwiat (kwiat@lanl.gov) of Los Alamos and his colleagues announced that they produced an ultrabright source of photon pairs for Bell's inequality experiments; they went on to verify the violation of Bell's inequalities to a record degree of certainty (preprint at p23.lanl.gov/agw/2crystal.pdf). Splitting a single photon of well-defined energy into a pair of photons with initially undefined energies, and sending each photon through a fiber-optic network to detectors 10 km apart, researchers in Switzerland (Wolfgang Tittel, Univ. Geneva, wolfgang.tittel@physics.unige.ch) showed that determining the energy for one photon by measuring it had instantaneously determined the energy of its neighbor 10 km away--a record set by the researchers last year but now demonstrated in an improved version of the original experiment. (Tittel et al., Physical Review Letters, 26 October 1998.) A University of Innsbruck group performed Bell measurements with detectors that randomly switched between settings rapidly enough to eliminate the "locality loophole," which posited that one detector might somehow send a signal to the other detector at light or sub-light speeds to affect its reading. (Weihs et al., upcoming paper in Phys. Rev. Lett., website at http://www.uibk.ac.at/c/c7/c704/qo/photon/_bellexp/)

PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 414 February 11, 1999 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein

THE FIRST ENTANGLEMENT OF THREE PHOTONS has been experimentally demonstrated by researchers at the University of Innsbruck (contact Harald Weinfurter, harald.weinfurter@uibk.ac.at, 011-43-512-507-6316). Individually, an entangled particle has properties (such as momentum) that are indeterminate and undefined until the particle is measured or otherwise disturbed. Measuring one entangled particle, however, defines its properties and seems to influence the properties of its partner or partners instantaneously, even if they are light years apart. In the present experiment, sending individual photons through a special crystal sometimes converted a photon into two pairs of entangled photons. After detecting a "trigger" photon, and interfering two of the three others in a beamsplitter, it became impossible to determine which photon came from which entangled pair. As a result, the respective properties of the three remaining photons were indeterminate, which is one way of saying that they were entangled (the first such observation for three physically separated particles). The researchers deduced that this entangled state is the long-coveted GHZ state proposed by physicists Daniel Greenberger, Michael Horne, and Anton Zeilinger in the late 1980s. In addition to facilitating more advanced forms of quantum cryptography, the GHZ state will help provide a nonstatistical test of the foundations of quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein, troubled by some implications of quantum science, believed that any rational description of nature is incomplete unless it is both a local and realistic theory: "realism" refers to the idea that a particle has properties that exist even before they are measured, and "locality" means that measuring one particle cannot affect the properties of another, physically separated particle faster than the speed of light. But quantum mechanics states that realism, locality--or both--must be violated. Previous experiments have provided highly convincing evidence against local realism, but these "Bell's inequalities" tests require the measurement of many pairs of entangled photons to build up a body of statistical evidence against the idea. In contrast, studying a single set of properties in the GHZ particles (not yet reported) could verify the predictions of quantum mechanics while contradicting those of local realism. (Bouwmeester et al., Physical Review Letters, 15 Feb.)

I agree! And I am anxious to read the Walker book.

Roger Penrose has taken a lot of heat as well, mostly from the disciplines who are threatened by his assertions. Stephen Wolfram is another who is criticized, in his case by using the very formalisms he seeks to debunk (LOL!)

The aversion to the intelligent design movement is so visceral that the opponent/scientists take to signing petitions of all things. Jeepers!

Old ideas die hard, particularly where there is a “vested interest.”

. I am thus not surprised that Walker could be considered "fringe" within a group where timidity reigns.

You think a community that came up with quarks and string theory is intellectually timid?

A paradigm shift is not required. Quantum mechanics IS a major paradim shift.

It was certainly a paradigm shift in 1924. We've gotten over it, though. Born and Heisenberg and Schroedinger and Bohr and Dirac, that collection of dimwits that missed Walker's great insights, explained it all to us.

Sorry, guy, we know a lot about synapses and neural transmission. Electrons scooting along RNA molecules ain't in the picture. If they were, you'd be out of luck in an NMR imager; you do know what electrons do in a magnetic field, don't you?

The scientific world isn't like FR. A theory that is plausible but controversial gets a lot of citations. But nobody bothers to refute a theory that is bogus on its face. One citation in the last 13 years is a far more telling condemnation than I could possibly write.