#1  
Old 10-01-2020, 04:38 PM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
magical photons

When a photon interacts with a glass air boundary, it has 5 to 10% probability of being reflected.
But when It interacts with a modern multi coated camera lense, It suddenly just knows It has less than 1% probability of being reflected. How so?
Maxwell's equations explain It beautifully without magic.
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old 10-01-2020, 08:00 PM
xelasnave's Avatar
xelasnave
Gravity does not Suck

xelasnave is offline
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Tabulam
Posts: 16,866
Interesting observation.
Alex
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Old 11-01-2020, 07:10 AM
JA
.....

JA is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2016
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 2,945
Quote:
Originally Posted by bgilbert View Post
When a photon interacts with a glass air boundary, it has 5 to 10% probability of being reflected.
But when It interacts with a modern multi coated camera lense, It suddenly just knows It has less than 1% probability of being reflected. How so?
Maxwell's equations explain It beautifully without magic.
Reflectivity is a function of many variables, including: angle of incidence, refractive index of the medium, surface finish, surface treatment, coating, wavelength, etc.... The thickness/number/order of individual layers in the multicoating are chosen to help promote destructive interference in the reflected light and constructive interference in the transmitted light at the interface/s.

Best
JA

Last edited by JA; 11-01-2020 at 07:27 AM.
Reply With Quote
  #4  
Old 11-01-2020, 11:15 AM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
Quote:
Originally Posted by JA View Post
Reflectivity is a function of many variables, including: angle of incidence, refractive index of the medium, surface finish, surface treatment, coating, wavelength, etc.... The thickness/number/order of individual layers in the multicoating are chosen to help promote destructive interference in the reflected light and constructive interference in the transmitted light at the interface/s.

Best
JA
So true JA, classical maxwellian calculations handle all these variables effortlessly without faster than light magical absurdities.
. Newton, Einstein and Feynman, obviously did not have your insight, for they wrestled with this problem for much of there lives. Feynman eventually acquiesced to, "ridiculous" and "absurd" (his words) sets of rules to solve the problem. Einstein went to his grave pondering on the concept of his "light quanta" or photons.
Reply With Quote
  #5  
Old 12-01-2020, 08:47 AM
Shiraz's Avatar
Shiraz (Ray)
Registered User

Shiraz is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: ardrossan south australia
Posts: 4,918
If you are suggesting that light is not subject to the strangeness of quantum physics, try this experiment with three pairs of polaroid glasses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs&vl=en

The results are indeed ridiculous and absurd by normal logic - but you can see for yourself what actually happens with (quantum) photons. Maybe the best example of quantum weirdness bubbling up to the level where we can observe it directly. Cheers Ray

Last edited by Shiraz; 12-01-2020 at 01:36 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #6  
Old 12-01-2020, 07:04 PM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
. 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.
.
. 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.
Reply With Quote
  #7  
Old 02-02-2020, 01:18 PM
Shiraz's Avatar
Shiraz (Ray)
Registered User

Shiraz is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: ardrossan south australia
Posts: 4,918
Thanks very much for the topic Barry.

The Bell interview made very interesting reading - which then lead to a lot of other good stuff.

Re QM, FWIW my thoughts are:

There appears to be overwhelming experimental verification of QM as a predictive tool - it seems that it always gets the right answers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorz.../#79ef02e84046

My reading is that Bell's major advance was to resolve the philosophical issue of whether there is an underlying local realism at quantum scales (there isn't) and to show how that conclusion can be verified experimentally. Seems to me to be an astonishingly significant outcome - when you get to the bottom of Alice's rabbit hole, objects do not have definite properties and there can be instantaneous interactions over arbitrarily large distances - and you can prove it! Recent tests of QM (via Bell's inequality) appear to have plugged all of the possible loopholes that might allow an underlying local realism. eg, >10sigma rejection of local realism in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04431.pdf. Entangled photons (and atoms etc) really do behave in a correlated way, even when they are widely separated (in QM parlance, measurement of the state of one particle instantly determines the state of its separated pair).

Re the need for QM in our hobby, agreed that Maxwell's equations fully describe what happens to light on a lens. However, I think that QM concepts are required to explain why stars do not rapidly disappear in violent flashes of UV, X and gamma rays (the UV catastrophe) or why our photon detecting cameras work the way they do. Classical physics could not do that.

Re quantum encryption/computing being with Santa and the Goblins...I was surprised to find that one can buy a real working commercial 20km comms system that is secured by quantum cryptography (entangled photons). http://qubitekk.com/security/. You could also buy a specialised 5000 qbit quantum computer if you had a major physics lab or a bank https://www.dwavesys.com/media-cover...antum-computer. This stuff is already working here and now and is mature enough to start being used on real world problems https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/...computers-5507 and https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2...fur-batteries/. If you want hands on, IBM offer on-line access to a 20 qbit general purpose quantum computer and to simulators that can be used to explore algorithms.

The simple crossed polariser experiment, mentioned earlier, is a refreshing reminder that the real world is not intuitively comprehensible at the level of the very small - something happens with the third polariser that cannot be explained in any sensible way - it makes it quite clear that physics at the quantum level really is very weird.

Anyway, thanks for the topic - really interesting and thought provoking.

Cheers Ray

edit: More interesting stuff: appears that entanglement can be demonstrated at larger scales: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/45/22413
and there is also a set of images showing entangled photons in action https://phys.org/news/2019-07-scient...e-quantum.html

Last edited by Shiraz; 04-02-2020 at 08:25 AM.
Reply With Quote
  #8  
Old 04-02-2020, 11:52 AM
Shiraz's Avatar
Shiraz (Ray)
Registered User

Shiraz is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: ardrossan south australia
Posts: 4,918
Although a bit off topic, thought this might also be worthwhile background - the presenter has a unique style + sponsor ads, but there are some very interesting glimpses of the technology behind the leading edge of commercial quantum computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60OkanvToFI

Cheers Ray

Last edited by Shiraz; 04-02-2020 at 09:48 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #9  
Old 07-02-2020, 01:10 PM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
Thanks Ray, for your response and interest.
There is a lot of non peer reviewed pop science to address in your response. I will respond in kind to show the futility of this approach.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/...ntum-computing

I have been posting a lot of QM stuff on Cloudy Nights, And have addressed a lot of points you raised. You may want to wander over there.
If you have a genuine interest in the point of view i'm projecting, I can supply peer reviewed material (a bit heavy going at times).

Barry
Reply With Quote
  #10  
Old 08-02-2020, 03:06 PM
Shiraz's Avatar
Shiraz (Ray)
Registered User

Shiraz is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: ardrossan south australia
Posts: 4,918
thanks Barry.

It isn't all pop science - generally the only indication on where company and secured government labs have progressed to with sensitive technology are PR releases or advertising pamphlets that only provide glimpses of the very real underlying science.

The article you linked presented an interesting perspective, but it did not in any way refute QM, Bell's theorem, superposition, entanglement etc. - the author certainly did not suggest that quantum computing will fail because it is based on false ideas in QM (in your words "with Santa and the Goblins").

He did point out that precision quantum computing is difficult - that makes sense, since it is based on very fragile and well hidden phenomena. I guess that the potential payoff could be so significant that a variety of labs are putting in the hard yards on the difficult stuff, now that the extravagant promises are becoming less outrageous and the relatively low hanging fruit has been exploited (ie, quantum computing is following the standard hype profile).

Cheers Ray

edit: this is a quite interesting lecture (if a bit old) https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html

also: Google has announced that their 53 qbit quantum computer has completed a demonstration computing activity in 600 seconds total compute time that could only be simulated by using at least 2.5 days of access to the full resources of the largest conventional supercomputer on earth (2x10^20FLOPS and 250petabytes of disk). The 600 second quantum processing time was required for 3X10^6 runs of the algorithm, results from which were stacked to reduce the random noise to low levels. The "fidelity" of the processing was on the order of a couple of percent, which I guess would be adequate for many otherwise intractable problems. As the researchers note :"We have performed random quantum circuit sampling in polynomial time using a physically realizable quantum processor (with sufficiently low error rates), yet no efficient method is known to exist for classical computing machinery. As a result of these developments, quantum computing is transitioning from a research topic to a technology that unlocks new computational capabilities. We are only one creative algorithm away from valuable near-term applications." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5

Last edited by Shiraz; 12-02-2020 at 06:56 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #11  
Old 10-02-2020, 01:23 AM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
The article you linked presented an interesting perspective, but it did not in any way refute QM, Bell's theorem, superposition, entanglement etc. - the author certainly did not suggest that quantum computing will fail because it is based on false ideas in QM (in your words "with Santa and the Goblins").

Correct, the point I was trying make, is that QM has two hurdles to overcome, the validity
of Quantum Entanglement (QE), and Decoherence.
QE has never been demonstrated, J. S. Bell supports this view(see earlier post).
The claims that Quantum Computers (QC) are already operating, are mostly false (I’m making a bold assumption that one exists out there), it is not generally known that a QC, that fails a Bell test, defaults to Classical Analogue Computer (CAC), which can be 1000s of times faster than a digital computer. There is a trade off between speed and accuracy with a CAC. NASA has several CAC’S of different specialized types, even a wind tunnel, can be classified as a CAC.
A Classical Digital Computer (CDC). is a special case of a CAC.
A telescope object lens, can perform 3d Fourier transforms, at light speed, at room temp. using no input power. The resolution is only limited by the diffraction limit.

The next step I’m afraid is to look at some of the EPR experiments in detail, to see Why Bell, and others, including me, have concluded they don't prove the existence of QE.
I have just started scanning some peer reviewed material on EPR experiments and Bell tests.

As for the nature article, its going to take a while to digest, but I suspect some unfair comparisons going on;
(1) they are comparing there QC with a CDC with accuracy or resolution 1/2^64, or about 20 significant figures, the QC resolution is about 1/2^4 or 0.1%, about 3 sig figures
(2) QC at 20mK v CDC at about 300K.

A CAC running at 20 mK would keep up with it. A better comparison might be to test its performance against a 1 metre telescope objective doing 3D Fourier transforms.

Cheers,
Barry.

PS. You may prefer Einsteins "witches covens" to my "Santa and the goblins"
Reply With Quote
  #12  
Old 10-02-2020, 01:29 AM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
Thanks Ray, for your patience with my prattling

"The article you linked presented an interesting perspective, but it did not in any way refute QM, Bell's theorem, superposition, entanglement etc. - the author certainly did not suggest that quantum computing will fail because it is based on false ideas in QM (in your words "with Santa and the Goblins")."

Correct, the point I was trying make, is that QM has two hurdles to overcome, the validity
of Quantum Entanglement (QE), and Decoherence.
QE has never been demonstrated, J. S. Bell supports this view(see earlier post).
The claims that Quantum Computers (QC) are already operating, are mostly false (I’m making a bold assumption that one exists out there), it is not generally known that a QC, that fails a Bell test, defaults to Classical Analogue Computer (CAC), which can be 1000s of times faster than a digital computer. There is a trade off between speed and accuracy with a CAC. NASA has several CAC’S of different specialized types, even a wind tunnel, can be classified as a CAC.
A Classical Digital Computer (CDC). is a special case of a CAC.
A telescope object lens, can perform 3d Fourier transforms, at light speed, at room temp. using no input power. The resolution is only limited by the diffraction limit.

The next step I’m afraid is to look at some of the EPR experiments in detail, to see Why Bell, and others, including me, have concluded they don't prove the existence of QE.
I have just started scanning some peer reviewed material on EPR experiments and Bell tests.

As for the nature article, its going to take a while to digest, but I suspect some unfair comparisons going on;
(1) they are comparing there QC with a CDC with accuracy or resolution 1/2^64, or about 20 significant figures, the QC resolution is about 1/2^4 or 0.1%, about 3 sig figures
(2) QC at 20mK v CDC at about 300K.

A CAC running at 20 mK would keep up with it. A better comparison might be to test its performance against a 1 metre telescope objective doing 3D Fourier transforms.

Cheers,
Barry.

PS. You may prefer Einsteins "witches covens" to my "Santa and the goblins"
Reply With Quote
  #13  
Old 10-02-2020, 07:14 AM
Shiraz's Avatar
Shiraz (Ray)
Registered User

Shiraz is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: ardrossan south australia
Posts: 4,918
thanks Barry.

Quantum entanglement has been demonstrated over and over again in increasingly sophisticated experiments - latest example is the success of the Google computer. Also, you can buy a commercial comms system with photonic entanglement as the crypto method. Current arguments are not over the efficacy and accuracy of QM in describing how things work, but there are philosophical arguments about what it all means for our view of how the universe is structured (ie how best to interpret QM in a world view) - eg Copenhagen, pilot wave, many worlds etc.

The Google quantum computer is a huge step forward. They did not find any physics that would prevent further expansion of the concepts in their machine and they showed that it could solve a test problem that was right on the edge of what could be done with the best available digital computer. Just to emphasise the enormity of this result, a tiny quantum computer with 53 quantum processing elements is 1000 times faster on a quantum-friendly test task than a supercomputer with ~100,000 state-of-the-art digital processing cores.

Good companions to the Nature article are https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372 and https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csym2f

Cheers Ray

Last edited by Shiraz; 10-02-2020 at 04:52 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #14  
Old 11-02-2020, 11:06 PM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
Ray

I think I'm wasting my time. I'm prepared to discuss crucial historic experiments in some detail to counter misinformation put out by pop science.


i thought I was making good points and you showed some interest, and then you hit me with some crap about "quantum supremacy" and "spoofing".
It turns out, it is a lot of acneyed gamers, employed by two of the biggest Q computer developers, getting their rocks off providing a lot of hype and publicity for Google and IBM. No significant progress was achieved, no entanglement was demonstrated. I have stated before several times, that a Q computer defaults to a classical ANALOQUE computer if no entanglement is at play is play.
Also if it was truly a Q computer it would be several orders of magnitude faster than calculated. That leads me to another interesting point. I don't actually think they ran the IBM because its time is too valuable for such BS, and it was simulated calculation of a simulation. not only that but with wide variation in calculated run time for the IBM, 10,000 hours says Google, 2.5 days says IBM.

The IBM runs at room temperature, it probably has 1/2^64 resolution, about 23 significant decimal places, the Q computer about 0.1 to 1% resolution or about 3 significant decimal places.
The Q computer was originally going to be great for factorizing large primes, lets do it then, or better yet crack the new Q encryption product that is on the market, according to another of your links.

You mention how Q entanglement, has been demonstrated over and over, I claim It has never been demonstrated, and have attached a link to some peer reviewed material supporting my claim.

Have all the realists died, I seem to be all alone , all that I'm doing is simply advocating for some old realists; Einstein, Plank, Bohm, Schrodinger Bell et al.

Barry
Attached Files
File Type: pdf Effective_linearization_by_noise_addition_in_thres.pdf (171.1 KB, 42 views)
Reply With Quote
  #15  
Old 12-02-2020, 06:57 PM
Shiraz's Avatar
Shiraz (Ray)
Registered User

Shiraz is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: ardrossan south australia
Posts: 4,918
Barry

yes, maybe we are wasting our time

the links to the two blogs were included as a courtesy, because they give some useful background when reading the main paper linked to in post#10. This is a peer reviewed paper published in the journal Nature and dealing with the attainment of quantum supremacy by the Google computer. The leader of the team is a distinguished 62 yo scientist "Dr. Martinis was a NIST Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. At the University of California, Santa Barbara he currently holds the Wooster Chair in experimental physics". This is serious work by serious people and it is perhaps excessively dismissive to characterize it as "crap" and "a lot of acneyed gamers, ...getting their rocks off" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5

there have been numerous recent papers dealing with Bell's inequality testing including photons, electron spin, superconducting devices etc. A lot of work has gone into closing off any loopholes that might pollute the tests and still allow a chance for local realism - QM always wins. A very quick search this side of the paywalls yielded the following and there are lots more:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.05949.pdf Experimental loophole-free violation of a Bell inequality using entangled electron spins separated by 1.3 km 2015

https://physics.aps.org/featured-art...ett.115.250401 Significant-Loophole-Free Test of Bell’s Theorem with Entangled Photons 2015

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstrac...ett.117.210502 Experimental Ten-Photon Entanglement 2016

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep30289 Loophole-free Bell test using electron spins in diamond: second experiment and additional analysis 2016

https://www.osapublishing.org/optica...optica-4-4-388 Xianxin Guo et al, Testing the Bell inequality on frequency-bin entangled photon pairs using time-resolved detection, Optica (2017).

https://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for...ett.121.220404 Synopsis: Quantum Entanglement With 10 Billion Atoms, November 29, 2018

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04431.pdf Challenging local realism with human choices The BIG Bell Test Collaboration† Nov2018

and for some pictures of entangled photons,
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw2563 Imaging Bell-type nonlocal behavior 2019

Sure quantum computers are just analog computers if there is no entanglement. (https://www.ornl.gov/event/quantum-s...-supercomputer) The linked abstract may indicate that the Google computer (or a closely related one) is fully entangled across the whole array.

The Google computer is clearly not able to factorise large primes. but that is not what it was built to do. It has however established that functional moderate-scale quantum computers can be built, that even at this early stage one of them works much faster than any conventional processor on a specific quantum test problem, and that there is no fundamental physics yet discovered that will stand in the way of future advances (such as error management). And of course it will not crack the various quantum encrypted comms systems - nothing ever will - that is the point. https://www.researchgate.net/publica...m_cryptography

Re your comment bemoaning the lack of "realists", philosophical arguments about the interpretation of QM/pilotwave/manyworlds etc will continue, but could possibly be of limited interest to many people working on applications of QM - which seems to be a very successful engineering tool that can be applied without worrying in the slightest about concepts of what the universe is really like. The philosophical arguments will continue and will probably lead to new ways of describing the universe, but it seems likely to me that the engineering-level maths has already been so successful in so many fields that it will not change radically.

Cheers ray

Last edited by Shiraz; 13-02-2020 at 04:28 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #16  
Old 13-02-2020, 04:21 PM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
ray

"but it seems likely to me that the engineering-level maths has already been so successful in so many fields that it will not change radically."
.

.
Take the laser for example, what is the QM contribution.
The smart phone, what is the QM contribution.
The Apollo missions to the moon.
QM's can't even agree on how a polarizing filter operates, the polarizing filter is crucial to interpreting Bell tests in EPR experiments.

Perhaps you could explain how a polarizing filter works, without sending me off to some pop science website. More specifically can I ask you, your personal opinion on, whether the wave function collapses on interaction with a polarizer? Better yet explain the Maxwellian view, and your critique demonstrating how Maxwell is in error. I'm assuming you are familiar with Maxwell otherwise you would not be able to logically discount it as a competitor to QM

Barry
Reply With Quote
  #17  
Old 22-02-2020, 12:51 PM
Shiraz's Avatar
Shiraz (Ray)
Registered User

Shiraz is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: ardrossan south australia
Posts: 4,918
Barry

I think that about a century of history stands against any argument that quantum mechanics is fundamentally flawed as a predictive/explanatory mechanism. QM was developed after classical approaches (partly based on Maxwell's equations) failed spectacularly in explaining blackbody radiation and atomic structure https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0101077.pdf. Since then, QM has been very successful - even Einstein (who disliked it and thought it incomplete) described it in 1931 as "The last and most successful creation of theoretical physics, namely quantum-mechanics".
https://www.informationphilosopher.c..._Influence.pdf

QM has been applied to a vast range problems - according to Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler from 2001 https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0101077.pdf

"So rather than dwell on ontological implications of the equations, most workers forged ahead to work out their many exciting applications and to tackle pressing unsolved problems of nuclear physics.

That pragmatic approach proved stunningly successful. Quantum mechanics was instrumental in predicting antimatter, understanding radioactivity (leading to nuclear power), accounting for materials such as semiconductors, explaining superconductivity, and describing interactions such as those between light and matter (leading to the invention of the laser) and of radio waves and nuclei (leading to magnetic resonance imaging). Many successes of quantum mechanics involve its extension, quantum field theory, which forms the foundation of elementary particle physics all the way to the present-day experimental frontiers of neutrino oscillations and the search for the Higgs particle and supersymmetry.
...
In short, the experimental verdict is in: the weirdness of the quantum world is real, whether we like it or not. There are in fact good reasons to like it: this very weirdness may offer useful new technologies. According to a recent estimate, about 30% of the U.S. gross national product is now based on inventions made possible by quantum mechanics."


Many have tried to find an alternative formalism that could expose an underlying local reality and remove the "spooky" bits. However, John Bell showed that it is not possible to get away from all of the counter-intuitive aspects of QM. He said, while discussing his own inequality and Bohmian mechanics (a QM alternative that he favoured): "The theorem says: "No! Even if you are smarter than Bohm, you will not get rid of non-locality," that any sharp mathematical formulation of what is going on will have that non-locality, the theory of quantum mechanics" . https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~olds...ell-weber.html

If you are interested in a quantum explanation of polarisation, Dirac gives a clear summary in section 2 of https://www.informationphilosopher.c...chapter_1.html . This chapter of his book also has a clear summary of the relationship between classical physics and quantum mechanics.

Anyway, thanks for the topic - I found it to be very interesting.
Cheers Ray

Last edited by Shiraz; 23-02-2020 at 11:42 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #18  
Old 27-04-2020, 03:48 AM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
G"day Ray,

I have been busy lately submitting an essay into the FQXi competition, you may like to have a look, or you may have entered? It is my usual Maxwellian "drivel" that I pedal here on this forum.

Cheers
Barry
Reply With Quote
  #19  
Old 27-04-2020, 01:02 PM
Shiraz's Avatar
Shiraz (Ray)
Registered User

Shiraz is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: ardrossan south australia
Posts: 4,918
Quote:
Originally Posted by bgilbert View Post
G"day Ray,

I have been busy lately submitting an essay into the FQXi competition, you may like to have a look, or you may have entered? It is my usual Maxwellian "drivel" that I pedal here on this forum.

Cheers
Barry
Hi Barry

good luck and thanks very much for the tip - I hadn't been aware of that group.

cheers Ray
Reply With Quote
  #20  
Old 28-04-2020, 10:29 AM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
G'day Ray

Thanks for your good wishes, I'll need them as a "flat earther" that I'm often accused of being?.
I should have alerted you earlier knowing that you are a physicist, you may wish to try your hand? I did not want to enter I thought there were too many crackpots submitting their pet theories, then I realized that was me! Also looking back at past entries I noticed some of my colleagues had entered and scored well. So at the last minute, one of my close colleagues who had just entered insisted that I give it a go, just after I submitted Paul Davies entered, that surprised me?
I have managed to get a good response from a heavy hitter who won the competition in 2017, he claims he's a heretic like me so that's encouraging. there is a lot of philosophy on the site, something I steer clear of these days. I dabbled in the History and Philosophy of Science a few years back and I'm still running on the fumes of that experience. The history of science appeals to me and particularly the interpretation of crucial experiments. If I make a couple of good contacts out of it, I'll be happy.

Cheers
Ray
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Rate This Thread
Rate This Thread:

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT +10. The time is now 09:49 PM.

Powered by vBulletin Version 3.8.7 | Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Advertisement
Bintel
Advertisement
Testar
Advertisement