What is matter?

[beero1000]

Non-local hidden variables imply faster than light communication. If you want to get rid of quantum mechanics with hidden variables then you need to get rid of relativity as well...

That assumes a lack of "super" determinism (which is simply determinism.. fucking comicbookization of science and philosophy... meh).

Superdeterminism is much stronger than that. If we accept superdeterminism, experiments are essentially worthless when it comes to learning about the universe. After all, how do we know that gravity exists? We could just be superdetermined into missing all the cases where things don't fall down.

As for conscious agent interference, that's true for the result of every experiment ever. We might as well say that a coin flip lands on its edge every time, we've just gotten unlucky in that they've fallen over most of the times we've tried it.

Is it even probable for a rotating coin to hit a surface with something other than an edge? There's your magnum opus: probability of a coin flip landing completely on a face= \(\epsilon\). Side question, is epsilon the accepted symbol for an infinitesimal?

Someone, or SOMETHING, has been knocking over every coin ever tossed...

Nah. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993PhRvE..48.2547M

Union rules, man. Nowadays you even have to give your extra-dimensional coin knocker-over vacation time. What is the world coming to?

 

[DBT]

Non-local hidden variables imply faster than light communication. If you want to get rid of quantum mechanics with hidden variables then you need to get rid of relativity as well...

Entanglement appears to be entail FTL information exchange. Which appears to contradict relativity.

 

[beero1000]

Non-local hidden variables imply faster than light communication. If you want to get rid of quantum mechanics with hidden variables then you need to get rid of relativity as well...

Entanglement appears to be entail FTL information exchange. Which appears to contradict relativity.

No, it doesn't.  No-communication theorem

 

[Speakpigeon]

As I understand what scientists say, the theory is that it's random. Not even, probabilistic as in macroscopic phenomena, but absolute randomness.

Equating an indeterminate system with a non-determinate system

Non-deterministic measures. The laws of the system are deterministic. The result of any particular measure is non-deterministic (i.e. not just probabilistic as Krauss says although maybe it's just what he means). This is the view expressed in the book of a French QM scientist with a foreword by Alain Aspect. The author (sorry, I don't remember his name) talk of "absolute randomness" (hazard absolu).

Also, I like it.

Further, probabilistic would suggest hidden variables, just as a coin flipping or a dice throw is not really random but results deterministically from a number of causes, which only happen to be too many or complicated to observe and enter in calculations.

I am guessing that this idea results from experiments confirming the violation of Bell's inequalities.


And here is the bit about super-determinism, i.e. as I understand it, determinism that excludes even our freedom to choose experimental set-ups, in which case we can't randomise anything and can't say measures are really random, which falsifies assumptions necessary to Bell's theorem. Reality is just what it is and laws are meaningless because we are not in a position to interpret them (i.e. our "interpretations" are also pre-determined and therefore blind) :

“There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the ‘decision’ by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster-than-light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already ‘knows’ what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.”

EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Entanglement appears to be entail FTL information exchange. Which appears to contradict relativity.

No, it doesn't.  No-communication theorem

Gives the man a break, it's a really hard subject.
Also, he said "appears", which is sort of true.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

If we accept superdeterminism, experiments are essentially worthless when it comes to learning about the universe. After all, how do we know that gravity exists? We could just be superdetermined into missing all the cases where things don't fall down.

This is not me saying this, obviously, but this should be enough for the coin to drop in somebody's else brain.

Hello, there!? Do you hear me? You can come back now?
EB

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Zero-Growth Academic Gurus

Snobbish academic contempt for practical value is an aristocratic virus that has obstructed science for almost 3,000 years.

It's a virus that continues to infect many things, academia, politics, economics.

We still have adults in places like England that consider the monarchy legitimate.

Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the smug spoiled aristocratic statement that everything had already been invented, so we have no need for plebeian science ("natural philosophy") and should indulge in leisure-class speculations about theoretical science for our own amusement.

So science became a playboy's toy. The ulterior motive of all this was that the aristocrats suspected the truth that the productive development of nature creates class mobility. The "stinking masses" had to be kept in their place. This is going on today with the Trustfundie Treehugging Eco-Eunuchs killing jobs and feeling morally superior about it, but actually feeding their subconscious urge for Birth-Class Supremacy.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Quantum Quacks All Try to Dismiss the Relevant Fact That Heisenberg Continued His Irrationality Into Nazi Ideology

Non-local hidden variables imply faster than light communication. If you want to get rid of quantum mechanics with hidden variables then you need to get rid of relativity as well...

Entanglement appears to be entail FTL information exchange. Which appears to contradict relativity.

It's not information exchange. It's the same particle going back and forth via 4D, where the maximum speed is c squared. So it doesn't spookily transmit the effect, it transmits itself.

 

[Bomb#20]

Entanglement appears to be entail FTL information exchange. Which appears to contradict relativity.

No, it doesn't.  No-communication theorem

That theorem doesn't imply that entanglement doesn't entail FTL information exchange. It only implies that if entanglement does entail FTL information exchange then it's a privileged instruction and the OS doesn't make the device driver available to non-kernel applications.

 

[Bomb#20]

Not random- unpredictable. Bell's theorem doesn't rule out non-local hidden variables, and in fact, it doesn't rule out local hidden variables of the conscious variety (some beings deliberately interfering with all experiments to obfuscate the true nature of reality-

Actually, you don't need to postulate anything as extreme as a conscious obfuscator in order to keep the local hidden variable hypothesis on life-support. There are "loopholes" in Bell-inequality tests. The main one is that detectors are imperfect -- they miss some of the particles they're supposed to detect. To interpret an experiment as refuting local hidden variables you have to extrapolate and calculate what you would have seen if you'd detected all the particles, applying the "Fair sampling assumption", i.e., assuming that which particles are detected and which aren't is random and unrelated to what you're testing. But if nature is sufficiently perverse, we might be getting a biased sample -- there might be some mechanism causing those particles which tend to support Bell-inequality violations to be less likely to be missed by the detector than those which tend to support local hidden variables.

Non-local hidden variables imply faster than light communication. If you want to get rid of quantum mechanics with hidden variables then you need to get rid of relativity as well...

Hey, that's why God gave us Lorentz Ether Theory.

 

[Bomb#20]

Again, what part of engineering is not the practical application of science?

And how is the application of science not a part of science?

first sentence: Practical application of science is practical application of something, science, removing it one step from being science itself. If derivatives were the thing, applications of science were science, there would be no need for engeenering, for instance, since it would be just application of science.

Second sentence: See first sentence comment.

That is your opinion not the ultimate word on the matter from the Grand Poobah.

Practical application of science is science in action.

How is science in action not science? An actual argument this time instead of an opinion would be nice.

Just tell me, where is the part engineers say, "We don't need science for this"?

But needing science for engineering isn't enough to make engineering science. We need premises to reach conclusions but that doesn't mean a conclusion is a premise.

It seems to me there's a middle ground in this debate. Science is what we call it when the world guides our thinking. Art is what we call it when our thinking guides the world. Engineering is a process in which the world and our thinking take turns guiding each other. To conceive of something that does not exist in the world and bring it into existence is art. To examine what has been brought into existence and investigate why it fails to guide the world into acting as we conceived is science. Computer programming is art; debugging is science; software engineering is their marriage.

 

[fromderinside]

Computer programming is art; debugging is science; software engineering is their marriage.

How romantic.

Those artists? I fired then. I have programs that work for real people.

I'm a retired Human Engineering Scientist for crying out loud. Computer programming is a frickin' trade.

 

[untermensche]

But needing science for engineering isn't enough to make engineering science. We need premises to reach conclusions but that doesn't mean a conclusion is a premise.

Premises and conclusions are both part of logic.

Science is what we call it when the world guides our thinking.

That is engineering. All thinking is guided by science.

This will never rise above the level of opinion but I have yet to see a valid reason why Engineering is not a part of science.

I don't know why people think when you use science that somehow isn't just the practical part of science?

When science get's practical somehow it isn't science anymore?

 

[fromderinside]

Consider the savage squatting on the river bank. Before him are straw and sticks from the bank. If he takes them and builds a hut for his mate he's an engineer making use of local products to build where he is located. If he manipulates them, find the limits of their support, their elemental resistance, notes the best methods for combining them into structures, and communicates his findings to other members of his group is a scientist.

 

[untermensche]

Consider the savage squatting on the river bank. Before him are straw and sticks from the bank. If he takes them and builds a hut for his mate he's an engineer making use of local products to build where he is located. If he manipulates them, find the limits of their support, their elemental resistance, notes the best methods for combining them into structures, and communicates his findings to other members of his group is a scientist.

Trial and error IS science.

Science is learning about and knowing about the world.

But knowing "truths", how the world actually works, not myths.

 

[Bomb#20]

Premises and conclusions are both part of logic.

Yes. There's a larger whole that includes both premises and conclusions: logic. Likewise, there's a larger whole that includes both science and art: intelligence.

Science is what we call it when the world guides our thinking.

That is engineering. All thinking is guided by science.

Lots of thinking isn't guided by science; religious thinking, for instance.

This will never rise above the level of opinion but I have yet to see a valid reason why Engineering is not a part of science.

I don't know why people think when you use science that somehow isn't just the practical part of science?

When science get's practical somehow it isn't science anymore?

It's not an issue of whether it's practical -- lots of science is purely practical; forensic science, for instance. The issue is whether we're learning something. If you apply what you know of science to construct a widget that will do the job you want, and you come out of the process with a widget but without knowing anything you didn't already know, then you've done the part of engineering that isn't a part of science. If you end up richer in both widgets and understanding, then you've done the part of engineering that is a part of science.

 

[DBT]

Entanglement appears to be entail FTL information exchange. Which appears to contradict relativity.

No, it doesn't.  No-communication theorem

I wasn't thinking of FTL information exchange between observers, but the so called FTL 'link' [not literal] between entangled particles.

Quote;
''How fast do quantum interactions happen? Faster than light, 10,000 times faster.

That's what a team of physicists led by Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai found in an experiment involving entangled photons, or photons that remain intimately connected, even when separated by vast distances.They wanted to see what would happen if you tried assigning a speed to what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance."

''When photon A is observed, it has a certain polarization, perhaps "up." The other photon in Boston is always in the opposite polarization, "down." No matter what measurement is made of photon A, photon B will always be opposite. It is impossible to tell what the polarization will be before you measure it, but the entangled photons always seem to "know" the right state to be in, instantaneously. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]''

 

[skepticalbip]

Understanding entanglement is more a case of interpretation. If you assume that both particles are in indeterminate states until observed (the Copenhagen interpretation) then a case could be made that they communicate FTL.

However if you take Einstein's explanation:
Take a pair of gloves and put one of them in one box and the other in another box without knowing which is in which box then ship one box far away. One box will have a right hand glove and the other a left hand glove. Nobody knows which is which box. When one box is opened and observed, the experimenter immediately knows what glove is in the other box even though it may be light years away. Not at all mysterious.

The question really boils down to the question of whether particles are in indeterminate states until observed or if we just don't know the state until we observe it.

 

[DBT]

The question really boils down to the question of whether particles are in indeterminate states until observed or if we just don't know the state until we observe it.

The former appears to imply observer related reality, the act of observation giving form to the world.

 

[untermensche]

Understanding entanglement is more a case of interpretation. If you assume that both particles are in indeterminate states until observed (the Copenhagen interpretation) then a case could be made that they communicate FTL.

However if you take Einstein's explanation:
Take a pair of gloves and put one of them in one box and the other in another box without knowing which is in which box then ship one box far away. One box will have a right hand glove and the other a left hand glove. Nobody knows which is which box. When one box is opened and observed, the experimenter immediately knows what glove is in the other box even though it may be light years away. Not at all mysterious.

The question really boils down to the question of whether particles are in indeterminate states until observed or if we just don't know the state until we observe it.

Do people actually believe the universe bends and distorts in anticipation of human awareness?

And the mere act of human observation changes things?

Is this really a belief held by rational people?