Good video with a good summation of the state of affairs. However, what it doesn’t touch upon is the real question the confirmation of Bell’s Inequality raises: what is the measurement???
Where/when is the measurement? Is it when the photon passes through the polarizer? When the photon strikes the detector? When the detector sends out an electric signal that moves a meter? Is it when the photon from the meter hits Bob’s retina? Is it when the retina sends an electric signal to the brain? Is it when a neuron receives the signal from the retina? Is it when the brain neuron fires to other neurons? etc etc. This is known as the Von Neumann chain. The termination of the chain at some stage must constitute the “measurement”. Please note that each stage of the VN chain involves quantum wave functions; that is key.
Once again, physics is divided into two camps: one camp says “don’t worry about it”, the other camp, which I belong, says it is fundamental to understand. That camp, somewhat cryptically lays the final end of the VN chain at “consciousness”. Which of course open up even more deep questions. As John Wheeler (famous theoretical physicist who worked on GR) said, “It is in some strange sense a participatory universe.”
Physics Guy;
Help me out here.
If two particles are 100 light years apart, and you change the spin on only one particle, the other particle will immediately change its spin to conserve energy.
But if the speed of light is fixed , how does my example/question not demonstrate that information traveled faster than the speed of light??
Thanks for your help !!
This is a nice short video, but that comes at the expense of clarity in my opinion. If you’re interested in Bells Inequality (and who wouldn’t be), I recommend this video by Brian Greene.
Stick with this for 50 minutes and you’ll completely understand the inequality. But don’t expect to wrap your head around the implications of it.
physicsguy– Do you still keep up with/evaluate COVID stats? Just thought you might like another reminder of why you were wise to leave CT when you did: “Yale University is requiring students to get [the] bivalent COVID booster shot by the 2023 spring semester. Faculty and staff are automatically exempt from the mandates.”
(Hahvahd and Fordham are doing likewise– pour encourager les autres, one assumes. And Pfizer has a whole new income stream.)
JohnTyler, that’s a hard point to understand; I get your confusion. “Information” is different from a quantum entangled state. Watch the last minute of the video. As soon as one tries to put some information, the randomness is destroyed. In QM terms the wave function has already been collapsed. The Navy back in the 80s when the experimenter were first coming out thought they could “code” information to subs via the QM entanglement. They soon gave it up.
PA+Cat,
Yeah I just saw that from Yale…very sad as the vax seems to be killing off young people. I guess they don’t care.
I do still keep up all my data. I keep wanting to stop, but then the governments, and places like Yale keep the hype going. Covid in CT, like all the other states I follow, has reached endemic levels. It’s there, but if they stopped measuring it, you would hardly realize it’s around. For CT, there’s about 300 cases/day compared to 9500/day at peak. Deaths at about 3/day, which is about 2% of the deaths due to all other illnesses.
Right now, that respiratory virus going around is causing much more problems than covid. But with the Ds in charge, it will never go away.
Years ago, before Scientific American turned political, they had an article on “Things that go faster than light.” I’m trying to remember the rest but that was many years ago.
The stock market was down modestly yesterday in the wake of the election, but today it’s having a big rally. An inflation report this morning could be indicating that inflation is beginning to moderate.
how would one detect an object traveling faster then light, by it’s very nature that seems implausible
Jack Sarafatti is an odd semi-New-Age physicist. Supposedly the Mad Scientist in the “Back to the Future” movies was based on Sarafatti. As I recall he worked out a design using quantum entanglement for unbreakably encrypted communication. I suppose nothing came of it.
I went a-googling and ran across his shocking tidbit about physicist Richard Feynman. In the OT spirit here it is:
___________________________________
Feynman died of a cancer that he got because at Alamogordo, at the test of the first atomic bomb in 1945, he stood up when the bomb went off — his young wife had just died. It was very romantic — he stood up as the blast went off and irradiated himself.
physicsguy– Thank you for the COVID update– I’m thinking that Pfizer and Yale may well have some kind of sweetheart deal on the booster shots, as Pfizer (headquartered in Manhattan, a short commuter train ride from New Haven) could give Yale a quantity discount on the vax, while benefiting from using the students (graduate and professional school students as well as the undergrads) as laboratory animals. It stinks, doesn’t it?
huxley:
I don’t think that’s quite true about Feynman. First of all, he was with all the other scientists when the blast went off, and they were 20 miles away and well aware of the dangers of radiation. I would guess that they measured the exposure where they were and made sure it wasn’t dangerous. People get cancer for all sorts of reasons. All Feynman actually did that was different than the other scientists was that he didn’t wear the dark glasses, which would only have affected his eyes and not his total body radiation exposure.
Richard Feynman was present at the first detonation of the atomic bomb on July 16th, 1945. The detonation, codenamed Trinity, took place near Alamogordo in New Mexico. Feynman watched the explosion about twenty miles away from the detonation site. He chose to not wear the dark glasses that were passed out during the detonation. Instead, he watched it from behind a truck windshield as the glass would shield his eyes from the damaging ultraviolet radiation produced from the blast. Feynman described the detonation as a ‘tremendous flash’.
neo:
I don’t believe everything I read. I thought it was interesting. I was at the airport and didn’t have time to check it out. Sarafatti didn’t source his claim in the interview. Nor did I touch bottom on his QE encryption idea.
Feynman was a romantic, for a physicist anyway, and his first wife did die.
I don’t know what to make of Sarafatti. He’s been around a while and has been something of a maverick, fringe character.
}}} how would one detect an object traveling faster then light, by it’s very nature that seems implausible
If it does not interact with the rest of the universe while in that state, true. But that’s a question to be answered. Does it still interact via any of the existing concepts of interactions (Strong Force, Weak Force, EM, Gravity)?
If no, then, probably not. If yes, then, we can detect it by its effects on other things.
There’s a postulate about how, without sending a probe there, “we couldn’t know if there was ‘another Earth’ on the opposite side of the sun” (The “L3” spot). There was even a movie in the 1960s that presupposed the notion: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064519/
This is wrong simply because we can tell if an object of significance was there by its effects on the rest of the solar system. The existence of Neptune was noted before its discovery — there were predictions of where it had to be because other planets did not behave as expected. Even more so, Pluto was found because the area where it was had been identified by its effects on the orbits of other planets, which told us roughly where it had to be. So they were taking photos of the area expected and comparing them over time to find something moving that wasn’t known.
In a similar sense, if it never interacts with anything else, then it might as well NOT BE THERE, it’s part of some “other universe” (and, in fact, there is a supposition of an “inverse universe” where everything moves faster than light and does not generally interact with “our universe”. The Speed of Light in effect becomes a barrier between both universes).
OTOH, if it does interact with “our universe” then we simply need to figure out what those interactions are, and figure out a way to detect them.
An example of this is “neutrinos” (“little neutral one”). These are a particle, even smaller than an electron, with no charge, so, as with neutrons, they are not easy to detect directly. And, unlike neutrons, they have almost no mass.
They were first theorized because neutrons, it seems, are not “stable”. A neutron all by itself in the universe has a “half life” of about 12 minutes (if you had 100,000 of them, then 12m later you’d have about 50,000. @24m you’d have about 25,000… etc., as with radioactive atoms).
When they break up, they split into a proton and an electron. Except there’s also a release of energy… what carries that off? It can’t be charged, because we could detect it, and conservation of charge, also, would not happen (the electron and the proton take care of that). And we know it’s not a photon, which we could also detect. So there was a supposition of a “tiny particle” with neutral charge which carried away the energy in the form of kinetic energy.
Problem is, how do we detect that? No charge, no mass… ? OK, well, the opposite must happen once in a while — a neutrino has to slam into a proton and an electron at just the right moment to make a neutron. And if this happened in an atom, the atom would change from element x (with n protons and m neutrons) to element y (with n-1 protons and m+1 neutrons). Now set up a tank full of very purified element X in some spot where it’s highly isolated from other things, and then see if we wind up with any of element y mixed in.
Some of the first “neutrino detectors” were large volumes of chlorine or gallium which are periodically checked for excesses of argon or germanium, respectively, which are created by neutrinos interacting with the original substance.
tl;dr: We can recognize things by how they interact with the universe, even if we cannot detect them directly… If tachyons interact with the universe, we have yet to figure out a way in which they have — despite experiments to identify them, they have failed to this point, so they remain a “theoretical particle”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon
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Good video with a good summation of the state of affairs. However, what it doesn’t touch upon is the real question the confirmation of Bell’s Inequality raises: what is the measurement???
Where/when is the measurement? Is it when the photon passes through the polarizer? When the photon strikes the detector? When the detector sends out an electric signal that moves a meter? Is it when the photon from the meter hits Bob’s retina? Is it when the retina sends an electric signal to the brain? Is it when a neuron receives the signal from the retina? Is it when the brain neuron fires to other neurons? etc etc. This is known as the Von Neumann chain. The termination of the chain at some stage must constitute the “measurement”. Please note that each stage of the VN chain involves quantum wave functions; that is key.
Once again, physics is divided into two camps: one camp says “don’t worry about it”, the other camp, which I belong, says it is fundamental to understand. That camp, somewhat cryptically lays the final end of the VN chain at “consciousness”. Which of course open up even more deep questions. As John Wheeler (famous theoretical physicist who worked on GR) said, “It is in some strange sense a participatory universe.”
Physics Guy;
Help me out here.
If two particles are 100 light years apart, and you change the spin on only one particle, the other particle will immediately change its spin to conserve energy.
But if the speed of light is fixed , how does my example/question not demonstrate that information traveled faster than the speed of light??
Thanks for your help !!
This is a nice short video, but that comes at the expense of clarity in my opinion. If you’re interested in Bells Inequality (and who wouldn’t be), I recommend this video by Brian Greene.
https://youtu.be/UZiwtfrisTQ
Stick with this for 50 minutes and you’ll completely understand the inequality. But don’t expect to wrap your head around the implications of it.
physicsguy– Do you still keep up with/evaluate COVID stats? Just thought you might like another reminder of why you were wise to leave CT when you did: “Yale University is requiring students to get [the] bivalent COVID booster shot by the 2023 spring semester. Faculty and staff are automatically exempt from the mandates.”
(Hahvahd and Fordham are doing likewise– pour encourager les autres, one assumes. And Pfizer has a whole new income stream.)
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=20582
JohnTyler, that’s a hard point to understand; I get your confusion. “Information” is different from a quantum entangled state. Watch the last minute of the video. As soon as one tries to put some information, the randomness is destroyed. In QM terms the wave function has already been collapsed. The Navy back in the 80s when the experimenter were first coming out thought they could “code” information to subs via the QM entanglement. They soon gave it up.
PA+Cat,
Yeah I just saw that from Yale…very sad as the vax seems to be killing off young people. I guess they don’t care.
I do still keep up all my data. I keep wanting to stop, but then the governments, and places like Yale keep the hype going. Covid in CT, like all the other states I follow, has reached endemic levels. It’s there, but if they stopped measuring it, you would hardly realize it’s around. For CT, there’s about 300 cases/day compared to 9500/day at peak. Deaths at about 3/day, which is about 2% of the deaths due to all other illnesses.
Right now, that respiratory virus going around is causing much more problems than covid. But with the Ds in charge, it will never go away.
Years ago, before Scientific American turned political, they had an article on “Things that go faster than light.” I’m trying to remember the rest but that was many years ago.
The stock market was down modestly yesterday in the wake of the election, but today it’s having a big rally. An inflation report this morning could be indicating that inflation is beginning to moderate.
how would one detect an object traveling faster then light, by it’s very nature that seems implausible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljUmv7TLAtE&t=147s
Re: quantum entanglement
Jack Sarafatti is an odd semi-New-Age physicist. Supposedly the Mad Scientist in the “Back to the Future” movies was based on Sarafatti. As I recall he worked out a design using quantum entanglement for unbreakably encrypted communication. I suppose nothing came of it.
I went a-googling and ran across his shocking tidbit about physicist Richard Feynman. In the OT spirit here it is:
___________________________________
Feynman died of a cancer that he got because at Alamogordo, at the test of the first atomic bomb in 1945, he stood up when the bomb went off — his young wife had just died. It was very romantic — he stood up as the blast went off and irradiated himself.
–Jack Sarafatti, “The Universe, As Seen From North Beach”
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/SUNDAY-INTERVIEW-The-Universe-As-Seen-From-3774064.php
physicsguy– Thank you for the COVID update– I’m thinking that Pfizer and Yale may well have some kind of sweetheart deal on the booster shots, as Pfizer (headquartered in Manhattan, a short commuter train ride from New Haven) could give Yale a quantity discount on the vax, while benefiting from using the students (graduate and professional school students as well as the undergrads) as laboratory animals. It stinks, doesn’t it?
huxley:
I don’t think that’s quite true about Feynman. First of all, he was with all the other scientists when the blast went off, and they were 20 miles away and well aware of the dangers of radiation. I would guess that they measured the exposure where they were and made sure it wasn’t dangerous. People get cancer for all sorts of reasons. All Feynman actually did that was different than the other scientists was that he didn’t wear the dark glasses, which would only have affected his eyes and not his total body radiation exposure.
See this:
neo:
I don’t believe everything I read. I thought it was interesting. I was at the airport and didn’t have time to check it out. Sarafatti didn’t source his claim in the interview. Nor did I touch bottom on his QE encryption idea.
Feynman was a romantic, for a physicist anyway, and his first wife did die.
I don’t know what to make of Sarafatti. He’s been around a while and has been something of a maverick, fringe character.
}}} how would one detect an object traveling faster then light, by it’s very nature that seems implausible
If it does not interact with the rest of the universe while in that state, true. But that’s a question to be answered. Does it still interact via any of the existing concepts of interactions (Strong Force, Weak Force, EM, Gravity)?
If no, then, probably not. If yes, then, we can detect it by its effects on other things.
There’s a postulate about how, without sending a probe there, “we couldn’t know if there was ‘another Earth’ on the opposite side of the sun” (The “L3” spot). There was even a movie in the 1960s that presupposed the notion:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064519/
This is wrong simply because we can tell if an object of significance was there by its effects on the rest of the solar system. The existence of Neptune was noted before its discovery — there were predictions of where it had to be because other planets did not behave as expected. Even more so, Pluto was found because the area where it was had been identified by its effects on the orbits of other planets, which told us roughly where it had to be. So they were taking photos of the area expected and comparing them over time to find something moving that wasn’t known.
In a similar sense, if it never interacts with anything else, then it might as well NOT BE THERE, it’s part of some “other universe” (and, in fact, there is a supposition of an “inverse universe” where everything moves faster than light and does not generally interact with “our universe”. The Speed of Light in effect becomes a barrier between both universes).
OTOH, if it does interact with “our universe” then we simply need to figure out what those interactions are, and figure out a way to detect them.
An example of this is “neutrinos” (“little neutral one”). These are a particle, even smaller than an electron, with no charge, so, as with neutrons, they are not easy to detect directly. And, unlike neutrons, they have almost no mass.
They were first theorized because neutrons, it seems, are not “stable”. A neutron all by itself in the universe has a “half life” of about 12 minutes (if you had 100,000 of them, then 12m later you’d have about 50,000. @24m you’d have about 25,000… etc., as with radioactive atoms).
When they break up, they split into a proton and an electron. Except there’s also a release of energy… what carries that off? It can’t be charged, because we could detect it, and conservation of charge, also, would not happen (the electron and the proton take care of that). And we know it’s not a photon, which we could also detect. So there was a supposition of a “tiny particle” with neutral charge which carried away the energy in the form of kinetic energy.
Problem is, how do we detect that? No charge, no mass… ? OK, well, the opposite must happen once in a while — a neutrino has to slam into a proton and an electron at just the right moment to make a neutron. And if this happened in an atom, the atom would change from element x (with n protons and m neutrons) to element y (with n-1 protons and m+1 neutrons). Now set up a tank full of very purified element X in some spot where it’s highly isolated from other things, and then see if we wind up with any of element y mixed in.
Some of the first “neutrino detectors” were large volumes of chlorine or gallium which are periodically checked for excesses of argon or germanium, respectively, which are created by neutrinos interacting with the original substance.
There are some other mechanisms developed which are used for, among other things, “neutrino astronomy”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector
tl;dr: We can recognize things by how they interact with the universe, even if we cannot detect them directly… If tachyons interact with the universe, we have yet to figure out a way in which they have — despite experiments to identify them, they have failed to this point, so they remain a “theoretical particle”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon