[phkahler]

I hope this is as awesome as it sounds. It sums up everything I've been thinking about quantum physics, from "someone should look closer at Couders work" to "spooky action at a distance is BS" to "Quantum computers will never work - see spooky action".

[lisper]

> I hope this is as awesome as it sounds.

If it's true, it would be even more awesome than it sounds. It would be the biggest breakthrough in physics in 100 years. I'll give you long odds against it turning out to be true, but I won't bet my entire life savings on it.

[EDIT] I have now read the paper and I'm ready to bet my life savings that it's bogus. There's just nothing new here, just a hand-wavy argument that classical mechanics can violate the Bell inequalities because "lines of force." It's possible that QM will be overturned some day, but when it happens it won't look like this.

[phkahler]

Yeah, I don't like when they say it matches XXX to first order... Does it match or not? OTOH it suggests that another model might, just like Couder suggested.

[sp332]

Spooky action has been empirically demonstrated. https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/04/decision-to-entangle...

[phkahler]

I call BS. If that's true, then Victor can not only send information across a distance, but back in time. Victor is changing the correlation of Alice and Bobs measurements after they have already been made. That's going to need serious verification for me to accept.

[john_b]

Or you could just, you know, check the published experimental results:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512281/chinese-physicis...

Physicists are increasingly convinced that time is an emergent property that arises due to low level quantum effects, principally entanglement [1].

The experiment in the Ars Technica article is the equivalent of the universe using lazy evaluation. It's really not so mysterious if you think outside the box of classical physics.

Regarding sending information back in time, from what I've read physicists are divided on the issue. Most agree that sending matter back in time is impossible, but information is still up for debate. In this particular experiment, however, any past observer who measured the information sent back in time would have collapsed the entangled quantum state and prevented the experiment from being conducted successfully. So being able to "successfully" send information back in time doesn't appear too useful if you can't read it.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4691

[sp332]

There are 69 papers that cite that one, but I don't see any attempts to reproduce. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1565984354572506461...

Also, do you have some explanation for violations of Bell's inequality that don't rely on spooky action?

[phkahler]

>> Also, do you have some explanation for violations of Bell's inequality that don't rely on spooky action?

The article that started this thread is one. In some ways it's not even important that the model be a 100 percent match with reality. It behaves very similarly to reality and it matches the Bell inequalities without spooky action at a distance. Bells statement pretty much says this can not exist, yet there it is. So now we can stop talking about models that can not be - because they do - and see if any of them is actually a good fit for reality. Of course I'm assuming the math in the paper turns out to be correct upon review.

[maaku]

Reasoning from intuition has a terrible track record, I'm afraid.

[UhUhUhUh]

Really? Did Einstein have empirical proof of his ideas?

[mikeash]

Einstein won his Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect, a measured phenomenon that didn't have an adequate explanation.

His work on brownian motion showed that the observations of the movements of small particles can be explained by the nature of fluids as being made up of small particles (i.e. molecules).

Special relativity is what you get when you combine the seemingly contradictory observed phenomena that there's no such thing as absolute motion and that the speed of light is a constant to all observers.

General relativity combines that with the observed phenomenon of gravity.

While I don't know whether these constitute "proof," Einstein certainly had a lot of empirical support for his ideas, and they weren't anything like pure intuition.

[darkmighty]

Einstein's idea of "intuition" is bastardized sometimes. He didn't mean "Having a common-sense opinion that something is wrong or right" as intuition, he just meant "Think really hard about the underlying principles and reach a conclusion", as opposed to "Make an arbitrary mathematical model, try to fit the data, iterate".

[tjradcliffe]

Why do you think this addresses the claim "Reasoning from intuition has a terrible track record?"

1) Einstein didn't work from intuition, but from a particularly narrow insistence on that the laws of physics be the same for all observers. This informed both SR and GR, and in fact his "intuition", such as it was, led him wildly astray in the run-up to GR. His papers in the 1913-1915 timeframe were all over the map. Furthermore, the final decades of Einstein's life were almost completely sterile in terms of new physics because he let his intuition guide him: he insisted that "god does not play dice" and so on, which turned out to be a hiding to nowhere.

2) Even if Einstein had worked primarily on the basis of intuition (which he didn't) and had been right (which he wasn't when he relied primarily on intuition) it would not in any way absolve us from the duty of taking experimental results far more seriously than theoretical intuitions, because against that one (actually imaginary) triumph of intuition we would have to balance thousands of years of intuitions from very smart people that turned out to be false.

"Things fall toward the center of the Earth and planets move in perfect circles about it" was intuitively obvious to Aristotle. So were a lot of other falsehoods. Galen had a whole raft of intuitions about human physiology that were false. Everyone from Kant to the Positivists believed it was intuitively obvious that detecting a violation of the law of non-contradiction of the kind implied by the experimental violation of Bell's inequalities was impossible. And so on.

So even if we had a single instance of intuition being correct, we would still be crazy to rely on it given its long track record of abject failure. "It just makes sense" are the most dangerous four words you can speak, because they are the terminus of critical thought.

[AnimalMuppet]

For special relativity, yes. (Maxwell's equations plus the negative result of the Michaelson-Morley experiment.)

[one-more-minute]

Also, Einstein's theories were a little bit more rigourous than "Well, the Luminiferous Aether sounds like bullshit to me"

[sp332]

Einstein started with large amounts of empirical data and created models that explained them.

[nilkn]

How is this different from that?

[maaku]

You can go down to the local diy electronics store and get what you need to demonstrate "spooky action at a distance" in your own garage. Just like how in Einstein's time anyone with decently precise mirrors and measurement apparatus could tell that the changing velocity of the Earth did not change the relative velocity of light. Such experiments have been replicated tons of times. Yet, phkahler is now calling BS based on... what?

[passwordreset]

I would greatly appreciate a link to anywhere that explains how to demonstrate "spooky action at a distance" in my garage or at a makerspace. Provided the materials aren't too expensive, I'd love to do a lab experiment showing it, especially if it can be done with common parts.

[nilkn]

I got lost in the intermingling contexts of this discussion thread. I thought that sp332 meant to suggest that the new model linked to by the OP was not starting with empirical data and finding a model which fit it all.

[sp332]

phkahler said "spooky action at a distance is BS" despite tons of evidence.

[rpcope1]

Special relativity still holds where it is applicable, and general relativity has yet to be refuted, and has been verified in interesting ways (gravitational lensing of Mercury with regards to the precession of it's perihelion for example). Einstein's other ideas about phenomenon such as the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion have been long since verified, so I would say, especially in comparison to some of his contemporaries, his theories oh withstood the test of time very well.

[snowwrestler]

Part of Einstein's genius was that he took seriously the fact that in all the empirical data, no one had yet found a way to distinguish between inertial acceleration and gravitational acceleration. He decided this was not a coincidence, but a fundamental equivalence. It resulted in his elevator thought experiment that predicted that gravity can bend light.

[pbhjpbhj]

It's quite exciting to see these sorts of papers.

What fascinates me is that we have achieved so much in the "quantum age" of the past century using the models derived from a quantum mechanical approach to physics. That the bedrock [or lack of one] of that could be removed and provide a better, more consistent, approach seems so counter-intuitive. But then one recalls how long the Newtonian or Aristotelian approaches [or any other such system] stood.

Also would this be a return to universal models with an aether: wonder how Michelson-Morley works with "flux tubes"?

[lmm]

The wheel of science turns, but it doesn't turn backward. Einstein refined Newton, but in no sense represented a return to Aristotle. Perhaps more to the point, the Bell Inequalities are true and have been experimentally verified; reality provably contains either nondeterminism or nonlocality. If you find the model with instantaneous communication along these "flux tubes" easier to work with then by all means work with it, but it's just another interpretation; most of us find the nondeterministic but local model is ultimately easier to reason about.

[GregBuchholz]

You may like the article, "Clearing Up Mysteries - The Original Goal" by E.T. Jaynes:

http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmystery.pdf

>While it is easy to understand and agree with this on the epistemological level, the answer that I and many others would give is that we expect a physical theory to do more than merely predict experimental results in the manner of an empirical equation; we want to come down to Einstein's ontological level and understand what is happening when an atom emits light, when a spin enters a Stern-Gerlach magnet, etc. The Copenhagen theory, having no answer to any question of the form: What is really happening when - - - ?", forbids us to ask such questions and tries to persuade us that it is philosophically naive to want to know what is happening. But I do want to know, and I do not think this is naive; and so for me QM is not a physical theory at all, only an empty mathematical shell in which a future theory may, perhaps, be built.

...and maybe chapter 10 of his book, "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science".

>We are fortunate that the principles of Newtonian mechanics could be developed and verified to great accuracy by studying astronomical phenomena, where friction and turbulence do not complicate what we see. But suppose the Earth were, like Venus, enclosed perpetually in thick clouds. The very existence of an external universe would be unknown for a long time, and to develop the laws of mechanics we would be dependent on the observations we could make locally.

>Since tossing of small objects is nearly the first activity of every child, it would be observed very early that they do not always fall with the same side up, and that all one’s efforts to control the outcome are in vain. The natural hypothesis would be that it is the volition of the object tossed, not the volition of the tosser, that determines the outcome; indeed, that is the hypothesis that small children make when questioned about this. Then it would be a major discovery, once coins had been fabricated, that they tend to show both sides about equally often; and the equality appears to get better as the number of tosses increases. The equality of heads and tails would be seen as a fundamental law of physics; symmetric objects have a symmetric volition in falling.

>With this beginning, we could develop the mathematical theory of object tossing, discovering the binomial distribution, the absence of time correlations, the limit theorems, the combinatorial frequency laws for tossing of several coins at once, the extension to more complicated symmetric objects like dice, etc. All the experimental confirmations of the theory would consist of more and more tossing experiments, measuring the frequencies in more and more elaborate scenarios. From such experiments, nothing would ever be found that called into question the existence of that volition of the object tossed; they only enable one to confirm that volition and measure it more and more accurately...

http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussia...