mitchellmckain » March 28th, 2017, 9:38 pm wrote:The conclusions of quantum physics is a long standing disagreement between me and Dave. I have told him before that his arguments in opposition to the conclusions of science sound just like the "god of the gaps" type arguments we hear from creationists. It is perfect nonsense to hope for a rescue of physical determinism in the unmeasurability in the Plank scale for science has already demonstrated that hidden variables simply do not exist.
It turns out there are two major `avenues` regarding Hidden Variables.
- (1) An attempt to explain entanglement as a result of a sub-luminal signalling between the separated systems. We can call this the "Loophole avenue".
- (2) An attempt to solidify determinism back into a central place in physics, mostly by demanding that physical systems actually occupy a particular state prior to measurement. We can refer to this as the "Objectivity avenue".
Wikipedia is not for learning, but there is a pretty good article on the Kochen-Specker theorem. Whoever wrote that article uses different verbiage than me. They call topic (1) by the name non-locality. They call topic (2) by the name non-contextuality.
Topic (1) (i'm calling it Loophole avenue) were people who disregarded the experimental findings of entanglement performed in controlled lab conditions. In each experiment, the naysayers always said that some signalling mechanism could have been present that was not properly measured, not measured, or not accounted for. Over the decades these came to be known as "loopholes". It wasn't until like 2011 that a "Loophole free" experiment was performed to validate Bell's inequalities. I'm digressing here.
This thread is a fork from Dave_O's big popular thread on The Mathematical Universe.
viewtopic.php?f=51&t=30776
There are some lingering claims being made that quantum mechanics and randomness which are either unsubstantiated or unclear. Regarding topic (2) , a physical system having no particular objective state does not entail that its measurement at some time in the future must therefore be random. "Random" is not the same claim as "having no state prior to". Let me give a very concrete example which should demonstrate the difference between "has no state prior" and "is random".
Say that I'm a farmer who operates a magical quantum orchard, where I grow pear trees. Every time I grow a new ree , the color of the pears is not known ahead of time. But then when the first fruiting happens, I can verify the color of the pears. I know that there is no particular objective state of any physical system which determines their color ahead of that time, but the color becomes objectively real at the time of first fruiting. Later on, I see that the pears in every third tree that I grow are red. This pattern repeats exactly like this. Two trees are green pears, and then 1 red, then two green. The pattern is GGRGGRGGR...
I cannot say that, after having manifest as real, that there is no pattern in the colors and they are necessarily random. They are clearly not random. Nevertheless, I can still say that there is no objective state within the universe which would determine their color. While the color is uncaused in every tree, the pattern is not random after continual rollout into objectivity.
This is identical to what QM actually shows in diffraction experiments. The location of any 1 photon is said to be "uncaused", but the pattern they form on the collection plate is far from random. If I send thousands of photons, they cluster into definite interference fringes. This is analogous to the GGR-GGR pattern of the pear trees.