unsatisfying quantum talk
Sep. 7th, 2013 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eAs is my habit I had my dinner with a movie. This time it was one of the BrisScience lectures. Specifically, a talk by Prof Howard Wiseman given in October 2011, titled "Are We Living in the Matrix?"
Leaving aside the rather misleading title (which was not about the investigations some are doing into whether the world might be a virtual construct as in the movie "The Matrix", but instead was a reference to the fact that quantum theory was originally referred to as "Matrix Mechanics" by Werner Heisenberg) I found the talk frustrating because he, like many speakers on this topic liked to emphasise the "spooky" aspects of quantum physics with its rather silly "the measurement produces the result" idea that mystics so love. I also become so annoyed when physicists seem to want entanglement to be more weird than it is.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the "weird" effects of entanglement are not weird at all if the two particles are simply seen as two parts of a single thing. Here is an easy way to imagine it:
Imagine a long, stretchy hose which, apart from its two ends, is invisible. That is, the two ends can be seen, but the rotating hose can't be. The hose is rotating on the axis that is running down its length. The two ends are, of course the entangled particles, and the hose is an entangling "field" (I'll talk more about the field in a moment). The particles are rotating in apparently opposite directions because they are just the ends of the rotating hose. If you look at one you'll find it is rotating one way, while someone looks at the other end at exactly the same time they will find it is rotating the opposite way. No information has passed between the two; they are simply parts of the same system. The "spooky" behavior is not spooky at all, but simple logic and geometry.
As for the "field", I've long felt that our dualistic view of particles plus their fields was illogical. It seems to me that an electron is its field, and the electromagnetic field is the electron. When people point to an object, which appears to be tiny, at the center of the field they are merely pointing to an arbitrary contour in the field. One such contour may be where an electron at a certain velocity will bounce off another electron moving in the opposite direction. It doesn't mean there is some "particle" at the center. I see simply a field getting stronger at its center, and that field reaches out, depending on when the electron was born, perhaps billions of light years. If the geometry of that field is such that it can have two parts appearing to rotate two different directions then we can have entangled electron pairs whose spins are opposite.
This seems to me a lot more logical than the bizarre interpretations of some of these modern day mystics who love positing impossible paradoxes and waving their hands to say that the quantum world just can't be understood. It all sounds just a bit too much like religious people telling us not to be skeptical at the contradictory actions of a god because he can't be understood. Or the inquisition, presumably made up of reasonably smart men, never seeing the absurdity and futility of a test for witches that requires them to be bound and thrown into water to see if they float, whereupon they are considered to be witches, or if they drown then they are not. Or those idiots who would sacrifice a virgin or a goat or whatever to appease an angry god -- why did they never wonder if their god (if not imaginary) was angry because they sacrificed virgins or animals?
Smart people can be so easily misled by their own circular thinking and a desire to be titillated by spookiness.
Leaving aside the rather misleading title (which was not about the investigations some are doing into whether the world might be a virtual construct as in the movie "The Matrix", but instead was a reference to the fact that quantum theory was originally referred to as "Matrix Mechanics" by Werner Heisenberg) I found the talk frustrating because he, like many speakers on this topic liked to emphasise the "spooky" aspects of quantum physics with its rather silly "the measurement produces the result" idea that mystics so love. I also become so annoyed when physicists seem to want entanglement to be more weird than it is.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the "weird" effects of entanglement are not weird at all if the two particles are simply seen as two parts of a single thing. Here is an easy way to imagine it:
Imagine a long, stretchy hose which, apart from its two ends, is invisible. That is, the two ends can be seen, but the rotating hose can't be. The hose is rotating on the axis that is running down its length. The two ends are, of course the entangled particles, and the hose is an entangling "field" (I'll talk more about the field in a moment). The particles are rotating in apparently opposite directions because they are just the ends of the rotating hose. If you look at one you'll find it is rotating one way, while someone looks at the other end at exactly the same time they will find it is rotating the opposite way. No information has passed between the two; they are simply parts of the same system. The "spooky" behavior is not spooky at all, but simple logic and geometry.
As for the "field", I've long felt that our dualistic view of particles plus their fields was illogical. It seems to me that an electron is its field, and the electromagnetic field is the electron. When people point to an object, which appears to be tiny, at the center of the field they are merely pointing to an arbitrary contour in the field. One such contour may be where an electron at a certain velocity will bounce off another electron moving in the opposite direction. It doesn't mean there is some "particle" at the center. I see simply a field getting stronger at its center, and that field reaches out, depending on when the electron was born, perhaps billions of light years. If the geometry of that field is such that it can have two parts appearing to rotate two different directions then we can have entangled electron pairs whose spins are opposite.
This seems to me a lot more logical than the bizarre interpretations of some of these modern day mystics who love positing impossible paradoxes and waving their hands to say that the quantum world just can't be understood. It all sounds just a bit too much like religious people telling us not to be skeptical at the contradictory actions of a god because he can't be understood. Or the inquisition, presumably made up of reasonably smart men, never seeing the absurdity and futility of a test for witches that requires them to be bound and thrown into water to see if they float, whereupon they are considered to be witches, or if they drown then they are not. Or those idiots who would sacrifice a virgin or a goat or whatever to appease an angry god -- why did they never wonder if their god (if not imaginary) was angry because they sacrificed virgins or animals?
Smart people can be so easily misled by their own circular thinking and a desire to be titillated by spookiness.