Explanations for quantum entanglement "spooky action at a distance"

[Admin]

Redefining time
The real flow of time is the irreversible collapse of the wave-function, until the collapse takes place time has not truly moved forward and thus what seems to be spooky action at a distance will be observed.

To you it seems like time is moving forward smoothly but thats not actually what's happening fundamentally. Time only really moves forward when quantum free will is exercised (true quantum randomness). If something is already determined it already exist and then there is no real passage of time.

 

[Admin]

Space-time curvature solution
Spacetime can be urved in a way that allow for what seem to be instantaneous communication such as "Einstein-rosen bridge"

https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/article/quantum-entanglement-and-wormholes

It is however impossible to communicate faster than light via quantum entanglement since you dont get any real information until you compare the results, thus special relativity isn't violated and why then invoke wormholes?

 

[Admin]

Superdeterminism
By having global hidden variables it may be possible to get something like quantum mechanics without any true indeterminsm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

This would however result in there not being any true passage of time since the future would already be determined,tthis is a very good reason to be very sceptical about any deterministic unified theory/approach.

Thus we can conclude that the project Stephen Wolfram is doing now will end in failure:

https://www.wired.com/story/stephen-wolfram-invites-you-to-solve-physics/

There are of course plenty of red flags regarding his project, it's very unlikely that he will actually be able to get the physics we can observe and thus it will probably be relegated to being a mathematical curiousity like so many previous failed unification attempts, the Kaluza-Klein model also looked promising initially but turned out to be "unphysical" (not real).

 

[Admin]

A measurement doesn't always collapse the wavefunction
One common false claim is that a measurement will cause the wavefunction to collapse, this is true when the measurement is on a large scale (anything allowing humans to observe it) but it does not hold true for measurements at sufficiently small scale

https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys2682

This is not an issue in the case of the penrose interpretation since if the wavefunction is collapsed due to gravity then you would need it to be at a large scale, so large that we cannot actually test for it with our current technology.

 

[Admin]

The quantum eraser experiment
The quantum eraser experiment can be explained with ordinary quantum entanglement.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03920

We see a hint at that when reading the original paper

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9903047.pdf

We see here that R03 = R01 + R02 meaning whether or not you actually measure which path the particle took doesn't retroactively affect the actual outcome on the screen. The interference patterns you see on R01 and R02 are from BS due the fact that we can get information regarding which slit the particle mostly took from where it landed.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.00049.pdf

 

[Admin]

About "wave-particle duality"
As far as we know the wavefunction might actually be a real thing that is described accurately by the dirac equation meaning it will never actually behave exactly like a classical particle, it is just that in some situation it will behave very similar to a classical particle.

The only exception is the collapse of the wavefunction but then it still doesn't behave like a classical particle.

The fact that the wavefunction is complex does not mean it's not real, there is nothing wrong with complex numbers

Of course this does not mean the wavefunction is fundamentally real, nobody knows the actual nature of reality, it's just that there is no reason to conclude the wavefunction isn't real.

 

[Admin]

Does the wavefunction actually collapse?
It is sometimes claimed that the many-worlds interpretation would resolve the measurement problem without adding anything to the schrödinger equation but that does not seem to actually be the case

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.08881.pdf

 

[Admin]

Regarding the different interpretations
There are different ways to make sense of quantum mechanics but these different interpretations contradict each other so at most one of the current interpretations can be correct.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kngnWF8O80

 

[Admin]

What's up with Sabine Hosselfelder is promoting superdeterminism?
She has made multiple videos/articles in favor of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytyjgIyegDI

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solution-superdeterminism.html

The first obvious objection to it is that there isn't actually any evidence for it (at all) it's not needed to explain quantum mechanics (there are other ways to interpret it that works just fine).

As far as i know there isn't even any actual theory for it that has been shown to be viable (rules a superdeterministic universe would have to follow). There has of course been attempts at deterministic theories (such as the wolfram physics project) but as far as i know nu such attempt has actually worked out.

It's easy to make claims about how physics really works fundamentally but without evidence (which would require actually having a theory in the first place) it really isn't particularly useful.

It is worth noting that you wouldn't have any real flow of time in a deterministic universe since the future would already exist, that really does not match over subjective steady flow of time in one direction (there might be a way to resolve this though).

Implications for "free will"
Different people mean different things with "free will" such as

1. Your consciousness itself not being deterministic (such as determined by randomness outside the consciousness)
2. Your actions as human not being deterministic.

Both of these are potentially possible if our universe isn't deterministic where 1 would require quantum consciousness. Both of these are impossible if our universe is deterministic, this is why people who promote the notion that free will is compatible with determinism has to redefine free will as something else like intelligence rather than what most people actually think of with "free will".

dirac37 wrote:

At my institution, without knowing her, we talked briefly about inviting her for a talk. After 5 minutes of all of us googling her, the consensus was like : 'lol.... nope'

NicolBolas96 wrote:

Yeah superdeterminism is flawed in many ways. And it's not even needed to have a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. This just shows how biased Sabine is and ultimately what a mediocre scientist she is. My fellow researchers and I have never understood why she is become so popular nowadays since in the real scientific community, her opinions have a near-zero weight.

Mr_Cyph3r wrote:

I've not watched the video but had a quick read of the blog post you linked. I don't have a lot of knowledge about super determinism and I agree with you that it seems a weird theory to me. However I think the blog post you link does at least attempt to address some of the issues you raise though.
I absolutely agree with you that there are other interpretations of QM which work fine and I find those more convincing than superdeterminism. However as far as I know right now there's no experimental evidence for one over any of the others so I suppose if she wants to believe super I'd say it's up to her. She seems to suggest that maybe by working on a theory them sole experimentally testable predictions could perhaps be made. This would be great if true right? Then maybe we could actually obtain some experimental evidence for superdeterminism. For what it's worth I don't think she's right about this, but if she wants to try then good luck to her.

You said there is no actual theory for superdeterminism and it looks like Sabine agrees with you here. She seems to be saying I'm this blog post that she thinks a good use of her time would be to develop a theory. I don't really think that's something I want to do because it doesn't "feel" like a good solution to the measurement problem to me, but maybe it does to her in which case developing a proper theory would seem to me like a good use of her time.

Your comments about a real flow of time are interesting to me, I see what you mean. However don't we already abandon a lot of our usual notions about time when we consider SR? For example the order which events happen ceases to be fixed in SR. Unless I'm mistaken you're essentially raising the old presentism be determinism debate here, and you're advocating for presentism, however maybe I'm misunderstanding your point. If I'm not though, then I suspect you'll find most physicists are already eternalists, although I've evidence for that.

As for the free will stuff, I think what you say I more or less agree with. However it's worth noting that other interpretations of QM such as an everedian one bring about the same free will questions.

I do have a number of issues with this blog post though, one example is when she says "Since any solution of the measurement problem requires a non-linear time evolution, that seems a good opportunity to make progress." I think this is just factually wrong. Everedian QM just assumed time evolution is governed by the Schrödinger equation which is manifestly linear.

I also think in general Sabine can be quite a major contrarian, and is doesn't always argue in good faith.

 

[Admin]

Is quantum information (not wavefunction) fundamental?
In the information interpretation of quantum mechanics, information is the most fundamental, basic entity. Every quantized system is associated with a definite discrete amount of information (cf. Zeilinger). This information content remains constant at all times and is permutated one-to-one throughout the system evolution. What is interpreted as measurement is a particular type of information transfer over a fictitious interface. The concept of a many-to-one state reduction is not a fundamental one but results from the practical impossibility to reconstruct the original state after the measurement.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0006033.pdf

 

[Admin]

Superdeterminism isn't viable
Having a deterministic universe would require seemingly random choices on what measurements to make to not actually be random and that said deviation from randomness cause violations of bells inequality to be observed. It would require us to abandom "statistical independence" .

There is no credible mechanism for how "superdeterminism" would even work in the first place, nobody has been able to even come up with a theory for how it could work (most likely that's not possible in the first place).

If we for example would let photons /light) from distant stars decide the choice of measurement we would need what happened millions/billions years ago (the space-time locations where the past lightcones of the stars are in common) to somehow after loads of messy processes and millions of billions of years interact in a such way to cause us to measure particles in a such way that makes it seems like our universe isn't deterministic.

This is just another example of something that is obviously wrong but difficult to theoretically rule out.

 

[Creamer]

my theory is a particle that has 1 quality to it: exist or not exist and it pulses between the 2 states.
with each pulse everything is replicated.

you die and the next moment an exact clone of you is animated.
this would mean time travel is not possible but perhaps teleport or sliding into parallel dimensions is possible.

another theory is the matrix one.