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Wouldnt wave function collapse allow for instant information transfer?
HuronKing:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on May 18, 2024, 03:54:11 am ---
--- Quote from: HuronKing on May 17, 2024, 05:14:31 pm ---Unfortunately, photons are more complex than gloves :D
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:D
And while "complex" is definitely the wrong word for the quip to be exactly right, it is an excellent example of how we don't even have intuitive terms to describe this yet! The only word that comes to my mind here is "weird", but it's even less descriptive!
--- End quote ---
It's doubly funny because "complex" is exactly the word and pun I wanted to make. I don't have time to catch up on all the discussion that's happened (I see you've written another long and insightful post) so forgive me if I retread old ground.
But for me, what the quantum entanglement paradox suggests is how important understanding sampling is to the outcome of the experiments. But, not in a "the experimenter affects the measurement" kind of way - like say, touching a material to find out how hot it is will change the temperature of the material, because you're interacting with it with the temperature of your own measurement device (your hand).
No, the results are more 'fundamental' than that (Heisenberg's Uncertainty is more than just Observer Effect, it's a law of nature) and it requires a firm and deep grasp of "complex analysis" to understand what's going on. And, I think it's more intuitive than we give it credit for - once you're willing to accept Fourier Analysis. ;D
These two videos are my favorites on the topic:
I didn't understand this connection to undergraduate electrical engineering mathematics until I was well into my career and decided to learn some quantum electrodynamics and watched a lecture where Feynman seemed irritated at a line-of-questioning from a student about wave-particle duality, and Feynman kept saying,
"No, a photon is a particle, it's a particle, stop saying it's a wave, no, it's a particle..."
And seeing quantum physics, and its built-in 'weirdness,' as just Fourier Transforms being done on particles. It also led me to see how obvious it should be that there are no-hidden variables - if we accept Fourier Analysis as correct. I sleep much more easily at night. :) :=\
HuronKing:
I'll have to watch this one later - came out just last year and the YT comments seem to imply it's better than either of the two previous videos!
I'm emphasizing this because I think it is much, much harder to grasp why quantum mechanics has to be the way that it is without grasping Fourier Analysis.
RoGeorge:
--- Quote from: HuronKing on May 20, 2024, 08:07:39 pm ---if we accept Fourier Analysis as correct
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I'm not very sure what Fourier Analysis is. If it is about Fourier Transform, yes, the FT is correct in a mathematical way. In physics, however, it is not that easy to say when FT results make sense or not. In order for FT to work, it needs the concept of infinity. In the real universe, however, everything seem to be bounded in a way or another. Infinite is not real.
Even if it were for infinite to be real and applicable in physics (real as in heaving examples in the physical universe, examples independent of our own thought and imagination), it still remains the problem of mapping from physics to math, and back to physics after some math processing. That is why we always have to check if math results make sense, then have to validate them experimentally. Not saying the encoding/decoding between physics and math was incorrect, saying only that it is tricky, and that we do not have any known tool to prove the encoding/decoding to/from math was made correctly, other then double checking the results experimentally.
There are more traps with mathematics. It doesn't have any axioms related to causality, or to time. Causality and time are present everywhere in physics, but in math they are absent. These two treats, causality and time, are left to be represented by our skills in encoding/decoding a problem between the physics domain and the math domain. Very prone to error.
Mathematicians have no problem operating with infinity, having some infinities bigger than others, and so on. Math is all about building an entire world on a set of axioms, but the axioms can be changed. In contrast with math axioms, the physics laws can not be changed, or selected upon our wish.
At first, the math axioms were deduce from the physical observations alone. Then the axioms were modified, or extended, giving birth to different worlds, some results were contradictory (e.g. sum of angles in a triangle is not mandatory 180), but they were coming from different sets of axioms, so no problem, mathematically it is correct. With time, the set of axioms were changed, either to cover more of the physical world, or to allow more advance in math. In time, math became a world in itself. At first, all the math results were about the physicality of our world, but not any more. 1:1 mapping between math and physics was long ago. Now, a math result may or may not be applicable back to physics.
Math is great when applied with care, and when the conclusions are validated experimentally. But math is not evidence. My point is, the FT can work great and be correct mathematically, yet entanglement can no more than synchronized waves.
More arguments for entanglement as being synchronized waves, entanglement does not lasts forever, as suggested in all popular science. That would be only in an ideal situation. In practice the decoherence happens rather fast, just like two oscillators that were once synchronized then separated and let to run freely. This is the main reason why quantum computers in practice only have a handful of qubits. The wave synchronization (of whatever quantum object is used as a qubit) is perturbed, the fancy word is decoherence, or disentangling. This is no different than oscillators getting out of sync. Yes, they qubits are really small and easy to be perturbed and put out of sync.
Another hint that entanglement has nothing weird, is that entanglement happens only when the particles are put in close vicinity (or even born together). It is known that oscillators that are close enough that they can interact, tend to synchronize, and get in lock with each other. It happens at macroscopic scale, too. In EE for example, if you try to do intermodulation distortions, you might sometimes need an isolator between the two generators when summing their waveforms. If they can exchange energy and if they are of a close frequency, the two instruments will tend to get in sync and lock to a single frequency (which is unwanted in this case).
I do not know why the spin pairs, best guess is that is because that's the state with minimum energy, thus the most stable and the most probable to be encountered, but I don't have an understanding of spin (understanding as in growing an intuition about it).
The puzzling property to me is not entanglement, but quantization. Why something that is very small can only exist as a certain "chunk", called quanta? This is a property that seems to be present in everything from the physical world, as long as it is very small. I suspect it is related with the fact that infinity can not exist in the physical world.
Side note, similar with infinite, the concept of "nothing" is also not real, as in not present in the physical world. Just like the infinite, nothingness is an imaginary construct. Nothingness can not exist in the physical world.
Talking about nothingness being only an imaginary construct and not real, because it is related with infinite being imaginary, and because it was asked in this thread a page ago:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 19, 2024, 09:48:25 pm ---What is nothing?
--- End quote ---
RoGeorge:
--- Quote from: HuronKing on May 20, 2024, 08:07:39 pm ---watched a lecture where Feynman seemed irritated at a line-of-questioning from a student about wave-particle duality, and Feynman kept saying,
"No, a photon is a particle, it's a particle, stop saying it's a wave, no, it's a particle..."
--- End quote ---
Feynman irritated at a student is no surprise. :) He was kind of a jerk in real life. Smart, yes, but arrogant even for his times, and unpleasant to work with. Not my opinion, only repeating what I've seen on camera, what were saying other physicists that worked directly with Feynman. He was not exactly the nice and charismatic character, as pictured in the YT interviews with Feynman talking about the beauty of a flower.
Was that lecture, by any chance, about the many paths interpretation (Feynman's Path Integral)?
That interpretation requires particles, and it assumes the particle somehow follow all the possible wiggling trajectories, an infinity of them. Why would a photon do that? The many path idea was not originated by Feynman, but somehow his name remained associated with the many path interpetation, same like E=mc2 was published in physics journal 2 years before Einstein published his E=mc2 ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/was-einstein-the-first-to-invent-e-mc2/ ), yet somehow the formula remained associated only with Einstein's name.
Feynman have had some contribution to the many path idea, even if the paternity was not entirely his, and the many path has some application (IIRC the integral path is the nicest explanation for the backskattering). Though, the many path is not real, the photon does not wiggle through the entire universe, taking all the possible paths before hitting a screen 2 meters away from the light source. That interpretation is imaginary and in math only, and the photons are not particles. I think photons are waves, small packets of undulations.
TL;DR, I guess intimidating a student was to defend the many paths interpretation, I don't think Feynman didn't consider photons as waves.
m k:
A quantum object can't exchange energy, if it does it stops being a quantum object.
Means that entanglement of quanta remains.
Before a probability wave collapse its energy has an equal possibility to be anywhere around a surface of the wave.
After a collapse the probability disappears completely and all the energy is where interaction happens and nowhere else.
The probability is in operation here, not the wave.
The wave is a specifying name, it's there only because probability has a shape of a wave of real world.
Quantization is a result of an experiment.
It just defines that there are steps, not that there are nothing between steps.
The nasty part is that if step is 2 it can't be reached with double 1.
Intensity doesn't do things here, so very intense 1 is still just 1.
OT, pretty much.
If infinite hotel is full, it still has infinite free rooms.
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