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. G'day Ray.
. I looked at the video you suggested and found
It Interesting and disturbing. About 20+ years ago I used take a little kit around with me to philosophy conferences held at aussie universities. I Think also at a CSIRO antenna conference. The kit consisted of some Blue Tack several polarizing filters, a needle, a laser, several lenses and a couple of beam splitting diagonals.
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. The aim was to demonstrate the absurdity of Quantum mechanics generally and in particular the ridiculousness of the photon. And of course promote the ease with which Maxwell's equations explain the classical view without absurdity, and demonstrate realism is alive and well. I won't attempt to explain any of the experiments here, other than to say that one group covered the same ground as the video.
. The thing I would like to address is the misrepresentation of John Bell's contribution to physics. He demonstrated formally that classical theory and quantum theory predict different outcomes in certain types of experiments.
. I don't see how that qualifies him as the greatest scientist in modern times,
. Henry Stapp, " the most profound discovery of science",
. Brian Josephson, "Bell's inequality as the most important recent advance in physics".
. Bell himself said, the recent Einstein Podolsky Rosen (EPR) experiments "did not prove anything", and there is no point trying to repeat or improve the experiments. This is a surprising statement in view of the fact that the experiments used his Bell inequalities as a decisive tool, and that the majority of the experiments demonstrated the quantum prediction to be correct, He states that quantum theory is "a dirty theory",
"quantum theory is only a temporary expedient". These experiments have been repeated many times since, with various improvements, mostly huge increases in distance between detectors. The result of experiment stacking: quantum about 30, classic 2.
. Karl Popper famously said you can only disprove theories. not prove them. Does this imply that the two experiments that disagreed with the quantum prediction, or bell tests, are an example of Popper's falsification hypothesis?
. The The majority of the experiments were done with light and polarizing filters And all ignored the fact that classic precepts of light interaction with a polarizer are not the same as photons, also the concept of dark count or accidental subtraction should not be performed when using classical precepts.
. Dark count subtraction was used in every experiment that was performed up until 1998. Popper's falsification theory would reject all of the experiments that subtracted dark counts or accidentals or coincidentals.
. This leaves us with no evidence that Entanglement is a real phenomenon.
. Where does this leave all that beautiful quantum computing, encryption, teleportation? With Santa and the Goblins, where it belongs.
. All the stuff in quotes comes from a book titled: "The Ghost In the Atom" Edited by P.C.W.Davies and J.R.Brown. It Is a transcription of part of some interviews on BBC3 in the eighties. Canto, Cambridge University Press, and Kindle, I think, well worth a read.
. Both sides of the debate were represented, eight physicists were interviewed, I cherry picked what I wanted, the interview with J.S. Bell.
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