Hi All & Malo e lelei,

Just alerting you guys to the interpretation of quantum mechanics via the double slit experiment. Ok, here is a YouTube animation of the double-slit experiment I thought that some in the group find interesting.

Dr. Quantum - Double Slit Experiment

The success of Quantum Mechanics (QM) in its predictive power is unquestionable. But what's wrong with it? Ok, here is a brief description of what's wrong with it. The theory violates causality as we know it. In other words, material things can exist in multiple identities at once, and when the system is measured (or being observed), those multiple identities just collapsed only into one of those identities. Physicist call this, wave-function collapse. Isn't this absurd? QM says that I can be a rock, a car, a human , an ice-cream simultaneously, until someone external to me start doing measurement (observing) on me and the outcome or result, will not be one of those identities but not all. This means that the observer/experimenter will either observe me as a rock, a car, a human, an ice-cream but not all of them at once.

QM says, that when the experimenter is not observing you (ie, not doing measurement) , you exist in a super-position state, ie, you're a rock, a car, a human , an ice-cream simultaneously. This is absurd. You can see it (material multiple identities) in the link above for the Dr. Quantum animation . The animation highlights the dual nature of matter (material objects) where it exists as wave/particle, or simply called wave-particle duality. The wave in the animation is in fact described by QM as both wave and a particle simultaneously. When measurement is done by an observer, this ghostly dual entity material will only materialize into one (ie, either a wave or a particle, but not both). This is why the animation showed that the particle went thru the 2 slits simultaneously. Would anyone believe this QM interpretation crap ? Here is a fact. It is assumed that the single particle went thru the 2 slit holes at once, when the particles are fired from the source one at a time, but there has never been any verifiable observation that detects that the particle indeed went thru the 2 slit holes at once. WHY? QM says that you can't, because of the uncertainty principle. You can see from the animation, that once the experimenter/observer puts a detector near one of the 2 slit holes, the particle went thru one of the holes but not both . When there is no detector in place, the QM math says that the particle went thru both, but any attempt at all to measure whether this is physically exist definitely fails (ie, a single material object that traverses in different points in space at once - it is synonymous with me, if I am a quantum particle writing this message from Auckland and Wellington simultaneously, I am in fact at 2 different places at once).

Is there something wrong with the formulation of quantum mechanics that avoids material things having to exist as a ghost with multiple identities (ie, when not being observed), but only materialize or manifest in a single identity when observed? Some physicist/s of recent times think so.

So, how many times that we often hear in the media or read on the internet about paranormal people claiming that what they have been saying about the existence of paranormal energy/forces has been validated by QM. Yep, heaps of those paranormal proponents often cite QM to support their views. But those proponents are simply deluding themselves. Even some physicists are falling into this crap of tying paranormal into Quantum mechanic as somehow they're related. Physicist Prof. Stenger has criticized proponents of mystics who associate QM with paranormals, he thinks that paranormal supporters are deluding themselves, in thinking that the 2 are connected, which they don't connect in any manner whatsoever.

Quantum Quackery

Prof. Stenger's">Stenger's">Stenger's">Stenger's piece is an excellent one. Next time , I will mention a theory that emerged over the late 1990s that eliminates the ghostly manner of QM. There is no such thing as uncertainty principle, no wave-function collapse (ie, material objects don't exist in multiple identities until being observed which it collapsed into one of those identities but not all of them), there is no such thing as traversing in space at 2 different points at once, ie, objects locate at one place at a single point in time but not at 2 different places at once. So, this theory restores commonsense to physics that quantum mechanics had hypnotized the world into believing over the last 80 years or so. Note that this new theory's prediction are the same as QM, but it avoids the nonsense of its ghostly interpretation.

Cheers,
Sione.

Sione,
I'm often annoyed by the gobbledygook put forward by 'Dr Quantum' (Fred Wolf) because he is used to front for other nonsense (Ramtha and 'The Secret') that is modern-day mystical nonsense. They are using some of the features of QM to try to kid you that their mystical, and if fred's case religious, woo has some form of scientific basis.

Stenger's views are similar to my own in this regard. More of his stuff:
http://www.colorado.e...
http://www.colorado.e...

The stuff you quoted before the section on Stenger, is perpetrating insidious myths :
1) The theory violates causality as we know it. In other words, material things can exist in multiple identities at once, and when the system is measured (or being observed), those multiple identities just collapsed only into one of those identities.
The idea that QM implies such things is not 'fact', some 'interpretations' of QM, (not QM itself) require observer dependent reality. These paradoxes are evidence that those interpretations are just plain questionable, and 'Dr Quantum' is patronizingly spoon-feeding the gullible with the notion that interpretations that suit his prejudices have the same proven basis as the underlying relationships in QM.

2) Physicist call this, wave-function collapse.
Yes, and many physicists think that the need to concoct such a 'collapse' is an indication that the interpretation is flawed. Wave-function collapse is an "ad-hoc" mechanism dreamed up to rescue some questionable interpretations of QM.

3) Isn't this absurd? QM says that I can be a rock, a car, a human, an ice-cream simultaneously, until someone external to me start doing measurement (observing) on me and the outcome or result, will not be one of those identities but not all. This means that the observer/experimenter will either observe me as a rock, a car, a human, an ice-cream but not all of them at once.
To me, this is more mythology that is built by people who want you to believe their pseudo-science, has passed the same scientifically rigorous tests as the underlying QM.

Having read Stenger's articles, I actually think that Stenger himself is still 'hypnotized' by some background assumptions built-in to QM interpretation, particularly the notion that matter must be acting as a wave, in order to scatter in to patterns resembling "wave interference". Nevertheless, this does not take away from Stenger's telling criticisms of the woo peddlers, that try to present QM as 'validating' their snake-oil.

4)It is assumed (note assumed) that the single particle went thru the 2 slit holes at once,
There are a class of interpretations that suppose that QM can only be explained if the incident particle is the sole agent driving the scattering process. In effect, these interpretations start out by assuming that the incident particle spookily 'explores' the whole (and passive) target, acting somehow as a wave would. Only in this view do you need to concoct a "two places at once" scenario for the incident particle.

Stenger appears to hold that matter acts as a wave, whereas if one uses QM differently (but still legitimately), one can readily treat the target as a 'quantum' environment that filters the set of discrete deflections that an incident particle could experience, and surprise surprise, the answer is the exact result required to produce the observed pattern. All this 'acting as a wave' requirement disappears.

John

Hello John,

John is the English translation for Sione.

Anyway, good discussions.

Check out this new theory that emerged in the late 1990s known as TEW (Theory of Elementary Waves), which it claims to describe most of the observations produced by standard Quantum Mechanics (QM) without all of the ghostlike nonsense found in QM. There is some problems with the theory that were pointed out by other physicists when it first came out, but the author of TEW had published a book which is available from Amazon (2009), which I haven't read yet but I am sure that he has worked out all those problems.

TEW author, Dr. Lewis Little has setup a web discussion forum for TEW, where anyone can participate in asking or posting questions about TEW and how it is compared with standard QM.

IMO, I believe that there is something wrong with QM , I don't know what, but it can be refuted on the basis of pure philosophical grounds only, such as that of QM supporting the notion of an object potential multiple identities at once , such as wave-particle duality of object like electrons, neutrons, etc... Metaphysical philosophy says that for anything to be materially existed, it must have a defined single identity at any single point in time and not 2 or more. This means that the notion of particle-wave duality for electrons, neutrons, atoms must be dismissed since things can't have 2 identities at once and therefore can't exist.

Here is a good website for introduction to Metaphysics, which is a good reading:

Importance of Philosophy

I believe that QM is not entirely false, because its predictive power is rock solid, but what attracted me to TEW is that its prediction is claimed to reproduce what QM does, but avoids any meta-physical contradictions and if TEW can withstand scientific tests and scrutinies over time, we can only wait and see.

Hi Sione,
TEW looks to be yet another fairy tale constructed to 'explain' QM by inventing a mechanism that is supposed to account for things that people assume would have to be there. For example, TEW assumes that the mechanism for twin-slit diffraction is in fact interference, whereas I think that even this core assumption is dubious.
Once you start down the track of assumung an interference mechanism, then you have to make up some account that reconciles the distributed nature of interference (waves from all over the source object interfere by cancelling or reinforcing at all possible points of detection) with the local, and discrete, nature of particle detection. TEW has it that the waves arise on the target and propagate backwards in time, in order to set-up the source to radiate in a particular pattern.


I don't know your level of training, but I know from my own work in the field (applied not theoretical) that there is a soundness to the relationships in QM. QM allows us to calculate probability densities and correlation relationships, and it works well. There is no scientific quibble with the accuracy of the theory in that respect.

If interference is the first assumption of the interpreters, the second one is that QM requires non-locality. Again, this assumption is dubious. I read a great paper by Rachel Garden (an NZ expert on quantum logic) that showed that the idea of non-locality depended on bivalent true/false logic values for measurement outcomes whereas the actual measurements in the experiments provide 'denial' type values. A denial would be something like Q) "What's the weather?" - A) "it's not raining"; it tells you much less about the outcome than a definite value as in "it is snowing".
When the same theorems are done using denial style logic then the breaking of 'Bell inequalities' is an expected result. (In QM a photon emerging from a polarizer from an 'A' channel means that the original photon was no at the exact alignment that would always have it going down the 'B' channel, and vice versa. That is the measurement A does not allow you to say the incident particle had value 'A' it just means that the incident particle was 'not exactly B'.
I'm over-simplifying the difficulty here, but what Rachel did, was calculate the problem based on denial-type inferences, and then showed that the requirement for non-locality disappeared. In fact, the breaking of Bell inequalities is not exceptional, but expected.

Back to TEW, here again, TEW buys the notion that QM has to imply non-locality and that it 'solves' it by back-propagating from the target to the source. The fact is, if Rachel is right, then there is no requirement to suppose non-locality and the arguments of TEW become a spurious fairy-tale that explains nothing.

I don't think that QM is broken, I think that our basic assumptions as to what must lie inside QM are broken. Some basic assumptions are always required before can 'explain' these observed relationships, and it is the soundness (or lack of) of these assumptions that determines the soundness of the explanation, be it 'pilot waves', 'TEW', multiple universes etc.

The fact that one has to 'break' causality, locality, or relativity in order to support such interpretations is probably a good indicator that the interpretation in question, is at best, dubious and worst, barking nonsense.

In my opinion, none of the current interpretations work, and the underlying mechanisms (whatever they are) are a fascinating mystery. The only one that has stood up is the so-called "Copenhagen interpretation" because it effectively side-steps the mechanism argument by saying that we cannot form descriptions in terms of either waves or particles and effectively leaves the problem open. However, this drives everyone nuts because it doesn't provide an 'explanation' for the realtionships.

So when you say QM is 'true or false' then I think you are conflating the two different and independent things.
a) QM itself - The relationships how they work and how to extend them.
b) Fashionalble, but ad-hoc, accounts "interpretations" as to why it is that these relationships work the way they do.

The problem with TEW is that it is unfalsifiable, it depends on arbitrarlity made-up mechanisms that can be endlessly tweaked to 'immunize' the 'theory' form falsification. I may be cynical, but I think that the author is somewaht of a narcissist, who makes glaring mistakes regarding the nature of QM (and interference) and is claiming a wonderful victory at solving problems that do not exist.

John

John I once attended a lecture given by Rachel Garden at the University of Auckland over a decade ago and I was impressed.

Anyway, can you reconcile the notion of existence described in the link I provided from my previous message about the importance of philosophy? That means if it is possible to say that object don't have specific identities such as that of wave-particle duality ? Objectivist philosophy says that in order to exist, an object must have one identity only at a single point in time and not multiple as in particle-wave duality of QM ?

Have you read the paper by Prof. Anton Zeilinger, which is an a advances version (double-delay-choice) of the classical Aspect experiment, very interesting.

Violation of Bell's inequality under strict Einstein locality conditions

Anyway, I did Physics/Maths at Auckland but I now write software for a living. I develop numerical software for use in analyzing the financial market data, so my interests covers a wide variety of domains which includes econo-physics.

Just curious, are you an academic John?

Hi Sione,
I'm not an academic and currently a software engineer, developing control systems. I do have a strong physics background, I did a B.Sc (Hons) in physics (at Canterbury) then switched to do a Master's in Electronic Engineering - part of my degree involved investigation in to the quantum properties of solid state imaging devices, so i didn't throw away the physics.

Afterward I did a stint at the then DSIR Physics and Engineering lab as a scientist, then moved to the UK doing hardware for graphics workstations. When I returned, there were no avenues here for digital hardware development, so I moved in to software.

Recently I attended Prof Nola's lectures and tutorials on the philosophy of science as a 'Auditor' - great course for sorting out some of the thinking about what is, and isn't pseudo-science.

I have kept up with QM in my spare time, and ran-up computer simulations of interference that resulted in pictures that were used on the cover of Nature Physics.

I do get the point of the notion that "existence" depends on having a definite properties within some well-defined location. However, I am a little unorthodox in my approach because I think that it is possible that Special Relativity requires an expanded basis for 'reality' - one in which energy can "exist" with two (or possibly more) types of relationship to space-time. In effect, a classical framework involves a background assumption that every object exists within space-time on the same basis, whereas if one regards the photon, then one finds that it a) experiences no time or space going from a-b, b)maintains constant phase (as though 'frozen' in a stasis).
Using this as a starting point, one can flip the relativistic relationships (just shift basis and change nothing in the theory) and hold that time occurs for matter, at light-speed, and that photons are embedded in to the fabric of the 'time' that matter passes (exists) through.

Whether or not this particular view has any value, it serves to illustrate that, there is no way to fully represent the "existence" that occurs for one half (the photon-half) of any quantum interactions within in a classical context because all of the proxies we use to represent the behavior of a photon (particle, wave) have a definite (and classical) relationship to space and time.

Having said all that, almost every QM interaction that we study involves some exchange between something that is behaving in a photon-like way and something acting in a matter-like way with E=MC^2 at the heart.

My conjecture is that what we are seeing in QM is a relativistic set of rules that cannot be modelled by any system that assumes a classical context that has all of the 'players' hold the same relationship to space-time. In plain language, all so-called QM interpretations that do not involve an expanded framework for existence, consistent with relativity, are barking up the wrong tree.

After all, the relationships in relativity directly translate in to Dirac's equations that extended QM, represented spin and then predicted antimatter. Anyway, I find it all pretty fascinating. I would love to collaborate on some ideas I have around simulating the discrete detection of polarized particles as in the Aspect experiment. Do you know your way around C# because I've run-up some simulations in that language.

Finally, the Bell inequality shows the impossibility of modelling QM with any form of 'local hidden variables' that operate in a classical context. If the EPR results are due to some local effects operating under a different context, not available to a classical framework, then the limits of the Bell inequality need not apply. If the effect is local, then the delayed choice experiments will be a red-herring, and show nothing.

Cheers,

John

Hi John,

I do my development in Java, since there are free ready made numerical libraries that I can grab and use without re-inventing the wheel. I use JAMA (Java Matrix Algebra), JLapack (Java Linear Algebra Package), MTJ (Matrix Toolkit for Java), Colt and others.

I also develop Signal Processing & Control System algorithms for my own use (various Kalman Filters , Wavelets, Neuro-Fuzzy Computing, ie, neural-network-fuzzy hybrids, Blind-Source Separations, State-Space Modeling, Linear & Nonlinear ARMAX, ARX, etc...). These techniques are useful in modeling and analyzing the financial market data.

I kept my interest in Physics alive, since they're quite useful in econometric/financial modeling such as the use of Feynman-Path-Integral (FPI) in Quantum Mechanics to derive fair pricing for financial derivatives as options and a good example is shown below:

A Path Integral Approach to Derivative Security Pricing - Formalism and Analytical Results

The use of FPI to derive option pricing model matched the original option pricing model of Black-Scholes who used heat-equation to solve their model and they ended up winning the 1997 Economics Nobel Prize for their efforts.

There has been suggestions from the econo-physics community that the standard economic (or neoclassical economic as they call it) is incomplete or may be totally wrong, because they based on wrong assumptions, such that neoclassical is based on the existence of equilibrium in the market but however we now know that equilibrium doesn't really exist in the market. This has raised eye-brows in the main stream economics community. Research publications in econophysics are being published in Physics journals (Physica) and not in economic journals , so lots of main stream economists haven't heard of physicists developing economic models.

Anyway, that's a different discussion that you and me can discuss at the meetups, since it is really not a skeptic topic, however I say that I saw a Vicki Hyde newsletter from last month posing the question if economics is science. I hope that the skeptics society doesn't start attacking econo-physics as pseudo-science, well whether we like it or not, it is science as far as I can see it, because they (econo-physicists) adopt the formal methods used in Physics to probe economic problems and this is fact.

Cheers,
Sione.

Fascinating discussion.

I did physics at Auckland to an undergraduate level, but switched to computer science. However I have kept an interest in QM, at what you would call an "advanced laymans" level.

I would appreciate your opinions on Stephen Hawking's latest direction - to do with taking a "sum over histories" approach to the universe, calculated backwards from the present point. The initial paper was called "Populating the landscape: A top-down approach". The abstract and full pdf can be found here - http://link.aps.org/d...

What do you think?

By the way, I am proud to say it was Richard Feynman in person who started my journey into atheism, when he lectured at Ak Uni in 1979. I went to his lecture when I was 17. What a wonderful man he was!!! And the sum over histories is one of Feynman's babies. Nice.

Hi Sione,
I went back over my code, and think its so small that one could pretty much port it to anything that had a C-like syntax in under an hour, so the language is probably unimportant. Having written C, Basic, Fortran, Assember for (PDP-11, 8080,8085, Z80, Z8000, 6800, 68hc11, & 68000), C++, Delphi, C# and VB, picking up some java wouldn't hurt me.

You do some, interesting stuff, I once worked with Kalman filtering in C++ as part of a GPS interferometry and gyroscope project I did in the late 90's. I set aside the filtering in that case because I worked out that all it was giving us was an iterative way to calculate a least-squares fit to data that was wrong for reasons other than some noise (the guy who started the project had messed up assumptions regarding relating dynamic gyroscope data over in to rotation matrices).

I learned something; GIGO - that you can filter the wrong information all the sophistication you like, it still won't give you the right answer.

I'm going to see if I can tidy-up the EPR work this weekend and, if things go well, look at getting you to look at it. I think it's quite promising but hard to keep working on because I've been trying to do things in isolation over the top of a heavy professional workload.

As for economics, I think its a great example of applying science to complex and chaotic systems. As we all know the big problem with such systems is the difficulties that emerge when the models diverge from 'reality' as in climate/weather modelling. The science of gasses, thermodynamics and such is all pretty sound, nevertheless we cannot even set up a model of simple turbulence that we can keep aligned with a 'real' system. So I'd be the last to say that either economics, or weather prediction, aren't a science just because they are currently intractable.

John

John

Ok folks, I came across those faith healing quantum bullshit, that I have highlighted at the beginning of this thread and it is someone from New Zealand who is going to run some seminars on this bullshit stuff over the next month or so:

She is , Jane MacKinnon from Christchurch.

Auckland Workshop Dates:

• September 5 & 6
  
• September 13 & 20
  

May be we can invite her to join the Skeptics in the pub.


I am sure that some on this discussion list will be amazed at all the bullshit that all these bullshit quantum faith-healers have to say about their practices on this particular thread from their discussion forum, where a poster posted the following message:

After reading the book i tried distant qt on my grandma with cancer and my mom who has an inflated stomach due to her liver. It had no affect on either of them, I don't understand what i'm doing wrong.

I connect the energy sweeps with the breathing and visualize where i want it to go. What more is there?

Discussion is on this link :Distant quantum not working