Bohr's duality paradox 100 years later?

In summary: An elephant? asks the incredulous Westerner. "Yes," replies the guru, "an elephant." And so it goes, layer upon layer, assertion upon assertion, until we reach the bedrock of reality: the ground is supported by a rat.The summary is that there is no consensus on what the duality paradox means. However, physicists have developed several logically consistent interpretations of what it might mean.
  • #71
RUTA said:
The reason I bring it up here is because all the mysteries of QM disappear when you use adynamical explanation, i.e., we don't need to 'fix' QM, we just need to 'fix' how physicists explain physical reality.
That's interesting! I think to the contrary many of the apparent, imho not existing, problems with QM come from the fact that the dynamics is played down in many textbooks. Everything is usually fixed to evaluate eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, i.a., the stationary states. That's nice to evaluate atomic spectra, but that's it more or less.

Physics is about dynamics, i.e., to understand how things change with time given an appropriate initial condition and the dynamical laws (i.e., in QT the Hamiltonian).

E.g., all the mysteries concerning the preparation of spin in a Stern-Gerlach experiment go away immediately if you think dynamically about what's happening when the particles run through the magnetic field: The dynamics provides (to a very good approximation) an entanglement between the spin component in direction of the field and the position of the particle, and thus when looking only at one of the partial beams you get (to very good approximation) eigenstates of the measured spin component.
 
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  • #72
vanhees71 said:
That's interesting! I think to the contrary many of the apparent, imho not existing, problems with QM come from the fact that the dynamics is played down in many textbooks. Everything is usually fixed to evaluate eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, i.a., the stationary states. That's nice to evaluate atomic spectra, but that's it more or less.

Physics is about dynamics, i.e., to understand how things change with time given an appropriate initial condition and the dynamical laws (i.e., in QT the Hamiltonian).

E.g., all the mysteries concerning the preparation of spin in a Stern-Gerlach experiment go away immediately if you think dynamically about what's happening when the particles run through the magnetic field: The dynamics provides (to a very good approximation) an entanglement between the spin component in direction of the field and the position of the particle, and thus when looking only at one of the partial beams you get (to very good approximation) eigenstates of the measured spin component.

But that doesn't explain the Mermin device for the spin singlet state dynamically, unless you want to violate locality or measurement independence (conditions for Bell inequality). Using adynamical/constraint-based explanation of the Mermin device you end up with a very transparent conservation principle (conservation per no preferred reference frame) with no dynamical counterpart, i.e., no causal mechanism or hidden variables. And, it's totally in accord with special relativity in a very fundamental sense (see this talk I'm giving in Växjö next month).
 

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