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by jiggawatts 1856 days ago
> Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment

That paper is often misinterpreted. Its breathless conclusions don't look so special once you consider the experiment from the MWI perspective. Notably, they don't talk about the detection intensity much, even though it is quite important to the interpretation. Coincidence counters aren't white cards, and don't work the same! Yet, people interpret the paper as if the experiment would behave identically with an ordinary projector screen as the detector. It wouldn't, and that's the rub...

You too have been indoctrinated into the QM orthodoxy, and you've failed to realise that memorising catechisms might win you accolades with your peers, but doesn't necessarily help you understand the physical universe.

If you peel back modern QM, you'll find it is a very tall Jenga tower wobbling around in the wind, held up by more magical thinking that real science. The experiments it is based on have a very narrow scope, and those caveats and limitations are brushed aside by adherents.

People stating things like instant action at a distance despite special relativity being a thing for a century are just the same as a Christian priest ignoring geology and stating that God created the Earth in seven days. Self-contradictory notions such as the wave-particle duality are no different to the catholic concept of the holy trinity being one god. Giving up your devotion to rational thought is how you prove your devotion to the faith. The greater the nonsense, the stronger the proof of your willingness to be a team member.

1 comments

Can you elaborate on the "detection intensity"? Genuinely curious as I haven't heard a modern critique of QM before and would like to learn the other side of the argument.
So the issue with coincidence counters in general is that they count... coincidences. Only. Nothing else.

White cards measure total photons.

You can fool yourself very easily by ignoring the total intensity of the photons per second measured with coincidence counters. E.g.: going from some distribution at intensity of "1 unit" to some other distribution at intensities of 1/2, 1/4, etc... might all mean different things. Essentially the detector is acting as a filter, "picking out" subsets of the signal. The drop in intensity is due to the filtering being highly selective.

However, if you read through many of these papers, including the quantum eraser paper, you'll note that they normalise the measurements so that they all look like they have unit intensity. This is misleading, because it looks like something is being changed ("erased"), but in reality its just that the experiment is being set up to increasingly filter to smaller and smaller subsets of the photon stream.

Looking at this through the lens of the many worlds interpretation (MWI) completely removes the mystery, making this a very boring and ordinary experiment that reveals nothing new.

Yet, "classical" QM theorists insist on breathlessly promulgating it as clear evidence of "quantum weirdness". It isn't weird. It's just purposefully misinterpreted to increase the mysticism.

This is directly comparable to the behaviour of priests and holy men. Religions wouldn't have as many ardent adherents if there was no mystery. You gotta have the mystery! The magic! The miracles!

Would Christianity be as popular if Jesus hadn't healed the sick and came back from the dead himself?

Would QM get as much funding if it was just some boring maths?