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by semi-extrinsic 3864 days ago
Sorrt, but you're flat-out wrong, and the sources you link aren't credible. (That's not even a journal paper.) I suggest you read Scott Aaronson's explanation of why you're wrong (he understands this better than me): http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?cat=33
1 comments

Here's the credible citation:

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9605002

(It's ironic, BTW, that you should complain that my citation is "not even a journal paper" when yours isn't either.)

And BTW2, Aaronson's blog post doesn't contradict my position. The Bell inequality violations are indeed real. They just aren't caused by "spooky action at a distance." They are caused by the classical correlations that arise when you trace over the quantum wave function of the universe in order to isolate a subsystem.

And BTW3, I actually did submit that paper to Physics Today back in the day. It was rejected, not because it was wrong, but because it wasn't anything new. (It's amazing how the Physics world bifurcates into two camps: those who think that the connection between entanglement and measurement is common knowledge, and those who adamantly deny that it is true.)

>It's amazing how the Physics world bifurcates into two camps: those who think that the connection between entanglement and measurement is common knowledge, and those who adamantly deny that it is true.

The fact that there are two legitimate camps means that no one knows for sure what is happening. And you are obviously in one of those camps. So to insist the world is a particular way is to deny how much is still unknown and acknowledged by others in the physics community.

The difference is that one camp has the math solidly on its side, and the other camp has to invoke the extra-physical hypothesis that measurement is somehow different (non-unitary, non-reversible) from everything else.
(Not constructive, but OK: Obviously a blog is not a journal paper, but it doesn't try to look like one either. It does have references to the journal papers it discusses though. As for the Cerf and Adami paper you linked above: from my searching it appears this is not published anywhere, it's just a 15-year-old preprint on the arXiv.)

So, to be clear: you are advocating some interpretation of quantum mechanics (for instance, but not limited to, the many worlds interpretation) where the measurement process is really measuring the system that produced the entangled pair?

I believe this interpretation fails to explain experiments where people have entangled particles with timelike separation [1], and then have shown that measurement of the second particle (which has never co-existed with the first particle in any reference frame) collapses the wavefunction of the first particle.

I'm not saying that the Copenhagen interpretation is the absolute truth, in particular many-worlds and superdeterminism are valid alternative interpretations, but I think the one you're advocating doesn't work.

[1] http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110... (non-paywall: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.4191 )

> I believe this interpretation fails to explain experiments where people have entangled particles with timelike separation [1]

I don't have time to read that paper right now, but it sounds like simple entanglement transfer, not unlike what is done for "quantum teleportation." In any case, the math behind QIT is simply the math of QM, so anything that QM can explain, QIT can explain.

[UPDATE:] There was a published version of the C&A paper but I can't look it up right now (I'm on the road with very limited internet connectivity). But it turns out that the C&A position is essentially the same as decoherence/many-worlds. There is essentially no dispute over the facts any more. The problem is with the rhetoric in which those facts are wrapped. Even "many-worlds" is highly misleading.

I'm not sure what you mean by "There is essentially no dispute over the facts any more." As far as I understand, no-one has been able (yet) to make a prediction based on the many-worlds interpretation that could (even in theory, with infinite resources and time) be tested experimentally. Same goes for the Copenhagen interpretation. Thus neither of these are proper scientific theories (in the sense of Popper), and so we call them "interpretations". In light of this I don't understand how you can claim it is settled in favor of one side or the other?
Read my paper. It describes exactly such an experiment.