QM randomness...

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by Seattle, Jun 2, 2017.

  1. The God Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,546
    You have some text on the topic on your website.

    My question: Is there any positive conclusion of Bell's inequality violation? The violation negates local realism but does it prove non-local (beyond c sphere) influence or something else?
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    You mean do the violations limit us to one possible hypothesis for the nature of something and no other, like an actual proof? Nothing in science does that.

    The three most significant modern advances in fundamental scientific theory - QED, Darwinian Evolution, General Relativity - all remove causation from its former central role in comprehension of the phenomena they handle. But that is far from establishing a single satisfactory new way of comprehending these phenomena.

    For instance:
    If your local reality includes probability as a fundamental constituent, a "thing" in the world - playing the role of a "force" or "bent spacetime" or "pressure" or the like - then it is not negated by QED.
    If you describe and analyze your local reality formally using a multiple valued logic - something capable of assigning a single truth value to the statement "This sentence is false" or a non-False value to "both B and not-B" in some circumstances of derivation - then your local reality may be unaffected by Bell violations of certain kinds.

    And so forth.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    It is in general impossible to prove something from observation without making assumptions. And these assumptions may be questioned. If you, say, observe some very strange things, they will be really strange only if you assume that what you have seen has really happened, instead of been simply a presentation of the Matrix movie.

    Without assuming basic things like the rules of logic and probability theory, and without assuming realism and causality, you will hardly be able to prove anything at all.

    In the case of the violation of BI, all you have to rely is realism, or causality. To doubt them does not really make sense. So, I see no reason to doubt that there is non-local influence.

    But it happens that this is what the mainstream is doing. Ok, what the mainstream thinks is not decisive. The mainstream also supports many worlds, or at least behaves as if it would make sense. This is the real "quantum strangeness" - that the mainstream researchers are ready to give up even the foundations of thinking about reality, in favor of some mathematical mysticism.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    As noted, the major advances of science in fundamental theory over the past century all lack - or even reject - a central or fundamental role for causality. I am sorry to hear that they have abandoned their usefulness in proving things thereby, but it's too late now - we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future.

    If you need an authority type reference for this observation, rather than your own eyes, on the net there is a large body of argument and analysis and discussion similar to this: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3...science?page=root;size=150;view=image#pagenav
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2017
  8. The God Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,546

    GR does not remove causation, it is not the central idea, it is just that the mechanism is not known.

    Evolution, we will not discuss here.

    Now coming to QM, I simply asked what is the positive conclusion or at least inference we can draw from BI violation?
     
  9. The God Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,546
  10. The God Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,546

    But then that confirms generally understood causality (there is cause behind) whether local or non local, of course it will end up violating SR in a set of cases.
     
  11. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    I have refrained from making any comments because I just don't have the authority. However if I may be allowed to pose a question that has bugged me since first post.

    Example; the Higgs boson was mathematically predicted and the mathematics were proven correct. But apparently along with the manifestation of the Higgs boson, several other bosons also became manifest at the same time, proving that the mathematics were sufficient to predict the Higgs, but not precise enough to predict the appearance of other bosons in addition to the Higgs boson.
    A similar effect was observed in the Miller-Yuri experiment, which produced many more chemicals in addition to our familiar bio-chemicals, which was a completely unexpected result.

    As I understand it, from our perspective "we" saw those unexpected result as probabilistic uncertainties, but from a universal mathematical perspective, was that really the case, or did we just not have sufficient knowledge at that time, of all the values involved in order to be able to predict those additional outcomes with great precision?

    We often cite the "butterfly effect", or the "weather", or the behaviors of wave functions, as examples of randomness, but I have seen several examples of how at least some of these "random" functions can be mathematically explained, with some degree of confidence.

    Thus, if we knew all the values involved in all events, would we find randomness or determinism?

    I realize it would take a computer the size of the universe itself to be able to contain all the values of all things at all hierarchical levels, but according to Max Tegmark the underlying mathematical functions themselves may not be all that complicated.

    Assuming that all universal events follow a precise mathematical function.

    Question: If we knew all the values of a causality and all the values of the environmental affects, would we be able to calculate the single outcome of the effect?
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2017
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    You didn't read it, obviously.
    My what?

    The only thing I've sourced from that is the term "folk science", which is inspired.

    The problems with causality have been obvious for more than a century, of course, even if you don't count the old Chinese and Japanese analyses. They came up in my life when I was trying to figure out why physicists and mathematicians so often had trouble with Darwinian theory, and engineers had so much trouble with Relativity, and everybody was running around spla when faced with QED. They could handle the math, but their intuitions kept sending them into the weeds when they tried to comprehend, to understand in human terms what was going on, and to make intuitive predictions of reasonable accuracy.

    What became obvious was that they were tying themselves in knots trying to impose intuitive notions of cause and effect on theories (and apparently realities, unless the theories are wrong) unsuited to that approach. It's the same mental glitch that creates the Gambler's Fallacy - the mind invents a cause for strings of heads or reds or whatever, which implies that the odds of the next one (like all effects) are affected by the past. People see causes and effects the same way, and for similar evolutionarily established reasons imho, that they see faces - and people see faces in clouds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy

    I just tried to find a generally clear and reasonable take you could see made sense, if you read it - since you clearly aren't going consider anything I post carefully. You can take it or leave it - it's kindly meant, and would clear up a fair amount of your confusion here.

    As far as "fundamentalism", here's what it looks like:
    I guess we've all been told, then.

    Mind, that's two-valued predicate logic he's talking about (not the rules of logic in general), and in a thread discussing some features of a scientific theory that specifically - in its hardcore mathematical formulation - replaces cause/effect with probability, generating the most accurate and well-vetted predictions and "proofs" thereby that science has ever produced in any field.
     
  13. The God Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,546
    The same sort of idea was discussed earlier on this thread or may be in another thread ("Observation").

    IMO if there is nothing like "True Randomness".

    Whether it is weather or toss or dice or even QM fluctuations .

    (Second disclaimer : This is my take)
     
    Write4U likes this.
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    According to QED: that knowledge is impossible on theoretical grounds. The information doesn't exist.
    According to chaos theory: if what you are trying to calculate includes a nonlinear feedback loop your calculation will be wrong after some finite amount of time (it would eventually take you more time to load sufficiently accurate starting info than you have to make the calculation).
    According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty combined with chaos and QED: you're screwed from jump: the feedback loops will amplify some fraction of the uncertainties and quantum randomness.
    According to Poincare's findings combined with Relativity Theory: you need info you can't get, or can't get in time; that exists but is unobtainable even in theory. illustration - Some guy once calculated how long it would take a billiard ball with perfect elasticity and zero friction on a standard table, at a rate of one rail bounce per second on average, to make visible to the naked eye (about 1mm) the effects of the gravity of surrounding objects on its path. He found that if you want to be able to predict the path for 12 minutes you need the exact distribution of the electrons in space at the boundary of the visible universe.

    So the short answer, in our current state of scientific understanding, is "no". The longer answer is whatever you would present as an answer to this question: If you could be in two places at once and you only got drunk in one of them, would you have a hangover when you woke up?
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2017
  15. The God Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,546
    Some misunderstanding ...

    1. I considered all your material posts as serious and "kindly meant".

    2. I did start reading that philosophy link but as soon this guy declared causality related quest as "folk science" I STOPPED soon after.

    3. "causal fundamentalism"is a single word meaning that 'cause is fundamental to nature's. The use of word fundamentalism is not a comment on you.
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Your loss. He makes a solid case - and it's well illustrated, relevant, here.
     
  17. The God Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,546
    You know what it means to make a solid case for a philosophy guy, still I will do.
     
  18. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    That is why I qualified my question on the premise that ALL universal values were known.

    But while the following does not specifically addressing your example of the billiard ball, this may nevertheless be of interest to the discussion.
    Thus if we could construct a billiard ball that was particularly sensitive to gravitational fields and we had knowledge of all electrons and their values in both the observable and unobservable universe, could we then calculate the effects of the environmental gravitational fields on the billiard ball? I am strictly speaking at the theoretical level.

    Your example speaks of "visible to the naked eye", which IMO, completely invalidates the billiard experiment as it speaks of gross physical expression. My example speaks of the ability to mathematically calculate the behavior of the billiard ball from the environmental gravitational fields for the entire duration of it's movement.

    OTOH, at very large scales we can with great precision calculate the gravitational mathematics of say, planetary orbits, which due to their enormous mass are minimally affected by the values of electrons in the near vicinity, let alone in the rest of the observable universe.

    As I said before I don't have the authority to debate the subject, but I can anticipate the various objections that can be raised ( such as how we could possibly gain any knowledge of the unobservable universe)

    This why I qualified my question with a big IF. I am only trying to introduce a purely theoretical mathematical perspective. Comes to mind Einstein's "God does not play dice", which I know has been also debated at length.

    So, I'll sit back and just continue to follow the conversation, which I find fascinating and informative.
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2017
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    - - -
    If you can't calculate its path more closely than can be seen by the naked eye after 12 minutes, your calculations are not good enough - agreed?
    Heisenberg, QED, and chaos/Poincare theory say no, as described above.

    Again, the "if" part is a source of trouble: compare with someone asking what they could do or see if they could be in two places at once.
     
  20. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    Only if the calculations do not have sufficient information. There is lots of stuff that goes on without being observable by the naked eye. Is that the fault of the mathematical calculations or of the lack of information?
    There a lots of examples where this was the case.
    Why may it take an electron to spend thousand of years inside the sun. then when it escapes, it takes 12 minutes to reach the earth? Is that not comparable to the billiard example?
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2017
  21. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    Thank you very much for the link.
    Why it was necessary to add an insult (as if you would not know that I do not need any "authority type reference") I don't know. But so what, the paper gives interesting arguments.

    Not that it was really impressive. Let's start with the first failure. He quotes Newton:
    and describes it as a failure, writing:
    Which completely ignores that Newton's philosophical point has been completely supported by GR, which defined a gravitational field with finite speed and own gravitational waves which mediated the Newtonian gravitational force. So, Newton's thesis, based on the philosophy of causality, which appeared to be a successful prediction of key properties of a theory found much later, is presented as a big failure.

    I disagree. I see Reichenbach's common cause principle as a substantial restriction. In fact, using it, we can prove the Bell inequalities, which are clearly a substantial restriction. Of course, to prove them, we have to make another hypothesis, namely Einstein causality. But this is nothing but a particular hypothesis about causality, which depends on a particular theory, and is, therefore, not fundamental.

    The logic behind Reichenbach's principle is that a causal theory has to distinguish, somehow, what are causal connections. Then, every observable correlation should be explained by a causal connection. What is a correlation is precisely defined. \(P(AB)\neq P(A)P(B)\) What is a causal explanation is partially precisely defined. For C being a causal explanation, there should be P(AB|C) = P(A|C)P(B|C). This requires that there have to be correlations between C and the A,B,AB. So, we explain one correlation by another one, which we now have to explain? An infinite sequence of explanations required? Not, the end of a sequence is reached the theory accepts for some correlation that it is a causal one.

    The thing which has failed is another one: the many particular proposals of particular theories of what correlations are acceptable as causal, without further need of causal explanation. To modify an Einstein quote: It is the theory which defines what is causal.
     
  22. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,885
    From Write4U Post 68
    This issue has been discussed in many Web Threads for at least 2-3 decades. It is a discussion which might predate our current Web technology.

    The classical world of our senses is built on a quantum level of reality which is based on probabilistic laws.

    Determinism was junked in the beginning of the 20th century due to Quantum Theory.

    Radioactive decay is the most well known random process. There are others. It is an atomic level process & there are those who argue that knowledge of processes below the atomic level might result in a deterministic explanation.

    This argument is fallacious & merely pushes the randomness down a level. If it becomes known that radioactive decay occurs when some quark frazzles, that event will be found to be random (frazzle is a term made up by me).

    A wise person once said
    The above principle should be applied to processes which show all the symptoms of being random (Id est: probabilistic).​

    Also from Write4U Post 68
    The Butterfly Effect refers to deterministic situations too complex to be dealt with computationally. It is one of several (many?) computational problems due to almost infinitesimal differences in initial conditions having huge effects on outcomes.
     
  23. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    Would that be the fault of the mathematics or the extent of knowledge of the observer?
    One would have to first be able to answer the question if that is mathematically possible, no? If that could be mathematically possible then the question would be valid, if not the question would be meaningless.

    Every answer in response to my question ignores the qualification that all values of all the things are known, including intersecting trajectories of all free particles. I admit this would probably forever be an impossible task, and thus can forever only be described as probabilistic.

    But the question was not based on practicality, it was based theoretical mathematics.
     

Share This Page