Joy Christian, Disproof of Bell's Theorem

[gill1109]

Why should probability not ontologically exist? What kind of prejudice is that? I think quantum mechanics is telling us that it does exist, despite our intuition or instinct to the contrary. Our brains evolved and led us from success to success by hard-wiring in us a belief that nothing happens without a cause... this belief worked just fine, till we ran up against quantum mechanics.

 

[Mathematech]

Its even got infinitisimals (in a sense) Double.Epsilon :)

 

[Mathematech]

Theory of Hidden Authors ... just a thought, is it possible that Joy Christian really doesn't know much math at all and all the math is being ghost written for him by someone else who is trying to rigorize some hand waving from Christian and stuff is getting lost in translation somewhere?

 

[Nugatory]

In C#, though, both negative infinity and positive infinity exist:
Double.PositiveInfinity and Double.NegativeInfinity.

Digression: That's not a C# thing, it's a property of the IEEE 754/854 floating point arithmetic standard, which is honored by just about all modern programming languages and processor architectures. The IEEE "Infinity"values have a number of useful arithmetic properties for dealing with corner cases in numerical computations, but they are not infinity in any mathematical sense, and thinking about them that way almost guarantees a program that will deliver bogus results under some conditions.

 

[mbd]

Why should probability not ontologically exist? What kind of prejudice is that? I think quantum mechanics is telling us that it does exist, despite our intuition or instinct to the contrary.

It is an open question, and, in my opinion, the biggest and most interesting open question. Certainly, though, the evidence points very strongly toward an ontology of randomness. I do in fact think God plays dice with the Universe. But, he rolls spherical dice and the result depends on when you ask the question.

 

[Mathematech]

Maybe this student went on to develop IEEE standards :D

 

[mbd]

Speaking of intuition and instinct, QM depends critically on a point-particle view of matter. It is this view that has, as its consequence, indefiniteness of state, non-locality, and such.

Bell clearly shows that a point-particle viewpoint of matter leads to non-locality, and experiments do seem to confirm this.

If you execute a "loophole-free" EPR experiment against the loopholes that are motivated only by a particle viewpoint of matter, then the results will certainly seem to confirm an ontology of randomness and non-locality. In other words, the definitive experiment can at best claim to say (assuming success), that "If the world is made of particles, then the world is indefinite and non-local."

<Speculation>
However, if the "star stuff" are relationships, rather than particles, each end of which depends on the other at the speed of light, then there's no need for randomness or non-locality. A definitive experiment must rule this out. I call it the "aparticle" loophole.
</Speculation>

Here's a link to some recent work confirming the theoretical potential of an "aparticle" based theory at the astrophysics level. Note they still model the interaction over distance as a particle. I model it as a series of step waves through the relationship with observable events the consequence of a threshold having been reached.

http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.231301

 

[DrChinese]

... QM depends critically on a point-particle view of matter. It is this view that has, as its consequence, indefiniteness of state, non-locality, and such.

Bell clearly shows that a point-particle viewpoint of matter leads to non-locality, and experiments do seem to confirm this.

Actually, it is not QM that depends on that view. It is classical-type theories (that are ruled out by Bell) that depend on that "point-particle" view. There are plenty of folk who do NOT see quantum particles as point-like. If you accept the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as fundamental (or perhaps as a fundamental deduction of QM postulates), you probably will reject the point-like characterization of particles completely. Your conclusion will still be somewhat interpretation dependent. For example, Bohmian class theories typically view particles as point-like with a well-defined position. But in the general case, I see QM as silent on this point (sorry for unintended pun).

 

[mbd]

By point particle I mean in the Dirac delta sense, not in the absolute sense. Sorry for the imprecision.

Perhaps another way to look at it is as something separable from its context, or something that can exist in isolation.

In the Dirac delta sense, it is something for which there is a distance beyond which the upper bound of its influence on any other thing is on the order of 1/d^2.

 

[Darwin123]

Theory of Hidden Authors ... just a thought, is it possible that Joy Christian really doesn't know much math at all and all the math is being ghost written for him by someone else who is trying to rigorize some hand waving from Christian and stuff is getting lost in translation somewhere?

I suspect that if it is ghost written, then the ghost doesn't know much mathematics either. Please show me anyplace where the writer shows any "rigor".

Just out of curiosity, though:

Is "Joy Christian" his original name? The one that his parents gave him? Or did he pick this name as an adult?

 

[mbd]

I'm bothered by the personal attacks and speculation about mental health aimed at the subject of this thread. Can we please keep the criticism to the papers and the science?

 

[Mathematech]

If someone writes something like A(L) = 1 when L = 1 and A(L) = -1 when L = -1 and then denies that A(L) = L when L = +/-1 then you start worrying about some form of mental disorder.

 

[Tomahoc]

While you folks are discussing about Bell's Theorem. Are you aware of any Entanglement experiments which has disproven the theory that as entangled particles separate, they form a spacetime foliation with time synchronized to both of them from T-0 until collapse (this is assuming the wave function is not just in the equations but actually there in spacetime)? Is this possible or disproven already?

 

[Dadface]

I have been considering putting Bell's Theorem on my list of things to look at but I have been unable to get past the statement of his theorem:

"No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum theory"

If any theory cannot predict what is observed then that theory is flawed and should not be considered as a real theory at all.

Suppose that there can be such a thing as a real theory of local hidden variables.If so it
will reproduce all of the observable predictions of QM. The problem is that the details of such a theory are not known and nor are the details and subtleties of any detection methods known.

How then can Bell and his followers make generalised statements about all theories without a detailed knowledge of those theories?

 

[Mathematech]

I just finished reading James Weatheralls paper (see link posted by DrChinese), very good analysis. I think Christian was trying to do a model of the type discussed in the paper where measurement results are represented by rotation orientations - this is the sort of thing everyone tries to come up with when first encountering Bell. I did it myself as a kid after reading d'Espagnet's famous paper in Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com/media/pdf/197911_0158.pdf) - I even built some contraption with cardboard disks connected by a rod to picture what's going on. I didn't know about wedge products and bivectors but got by with good old ordinary 3 vectors and a lot of sines and cosines. If you do that sort of stuff (which is an explicitly realist model) you quickly discover that you simply cannot get by the counting arguments) Now at that young age I hadn't bought into the whole eigenstate ontology (or even known its mathematical details) so non-locality had to be the answer. But assuming relativity it was pretty clear also that some form of signaling or traveling influence couldn't be the answer - the conclusion was that there had to be something analogous to the rod between my cardboard disks in reality, but which truly behaved "rigidly" so that turning one disk turned the other and turned it instanteously not like in a real rod made up of molecules where the influence is pretty fast but not instantaneous. This I found deeply disturbing but became less disturbing over the years as I learned to appreciate that space and time is something that "emerges" from the fact that entities interact via electromagnetism and gravity, it isn't something that is just there in the first place.

 

[Mathematech]

Dadface, the notion of a "local hidden variable theory" has a very precise mathematical definition and this definition is general enough to include essentially any theory that excludes any faster than light (in particular instantaneous) connections between separated particles and assumes one can meaningfully count counterfactual values along with factual ones. The definition then allows us to calculate a numerical constraint that all such theories must obey. However QM doesn't obey that constraint and QM wins when checked experimentally.

 

[Nugatory]

How then can Bell and his followers make generalised statements about all theories without a detailed knowledge of those theories?

It's not a statement about "all theories", it's "all theories that depend on hidden variables with particular properties", and the proof proceeds from those properties.

 

[Greg-ulate]

If you accept the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as fundamental (or perhaps as a fundamental deduction of QM postulates), you probably will reject the point-like characterization of particles completely.

I learned to appreciate that space and time is something that "emerges" from the fact that entities interact via electromagnetism and gravity, it isn't something that is just there in the first place.

I finally like where this thread is going. I've literally been losing sleep over this for some time.

 

[DrChinese]

I have been considering putting Bell's Theorem on my list of things to look at but I have been unable to get past the statement of his theorem:

"No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum theory"

If any theory cannot predict what is observed then that theory is flawed and should not be considered as a real theory at all.

Suppose that there can be such a thing as a real theory of local hidden variables.If so it
will reproduce all of the observable predictions of QM. The problem is that the details of such a theory are not known and nor are the details and subtleties of any detection methods known.

How then can Bell and his followers make generalised statements about all theories without a detailed knowledge of those theories?

I think you have answered your own question! You should DEFINITELY look deeper at Bell's Theorem. I can't believe you have 1800 posts and we haven't been able to pull you in on this previously.

And while you are at it, ask yourself: what does it mean that there are hidden variables? It is only those theories which are ruled out by Bell (unless of course there are nonlocal interactions). You should go all the way back to the 1935 EPR paper to understand this point. They talk about "elements of reality" and define that specifically. Entangled particle pairs evidence EPR elements of reality, and those elements of reality imply hidden variables. Bell tackles that point head on. It turns out that it is not possible to have those elements of reality beyond what can actually be observed and expect a match to the QM predictions. Ergo there are no local hidden variables. We must live in an observer dependent universe.

 

[Dadface]

Thank you Mathematech and Nugatory and thank you DrChinese. DrChinese, your advice looks good. I just tried a google search to find the 1935 paper and your site on Bell came up.
I have visited your excellent site before but have just scanned it and not looked at it in enough detail to get,what I think, would be a thorough understanding. I will certainly look at the 1935 paper but I know I will have troubles with the maths.I haven't looked at that sort of maths for over fourty years.

 

[DrChinese]

Thank you Mathematech and Nugatory and thank you DrChinese. DrChinese, your advice looks good. I just tried a google search to find the 1935 paper and your site on Bell came up.
I have visited your excellent site before but have just scanned it and not looked at it in enough detail to get,what I think, would be a thorough understanding. I will certainly look at the 1935 paper but I know I will have troubles with the maths.I haven't looked at that sort of maths for over fourty years.

You can skip the math in EPR, just assume it is correct.

The real joy of the paper is that they define "element of reality" in a manner that it is difficult to refute. If you can predict a measurement outcome before it occurs, then there must be an element of reality somewhere associated with it. That is the case with an entangled particle pair, you can measure one to learn about the other.

Next: if you think of particle spin along different axes as being different observables (different elements of reality), then these must be predetermined if we are living in an observer independent reality. In such a reality, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is NOT fundamentally true - because complementary elements of reality exist. That was what EPR sought to demonstrate, and they thought they had. Of course, Bohr and others rejected their conclusion as unwarranted. In fact, the two sides were at an impass.

Bell raised the bar by attempting to imagine hidden variables that would determine outcomes at many different angles. It turned out there was a major consistency conflict between the "elements of reality" criterion and the quantum predictions.

 

[Dadface]

Thank you DrChinese.
I will have a read up and give this some more thought. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy seems to give a good account of EPR.

 

[Mathematech]

I read this book years ago

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198242387/?tag=pfamazon01-20

A very good introduction to the subject. The math was at a very rigorous but nevertheless easy to understand level. As a mathematician there were some things I couild nitpick about but they were really only things a mathematician would nitpick about :)

The only things missing from this book were i) a detailed examination of how probabilities of counter-factual incompatible measurements differ from probabilities of compatible measurements (he seemed to be dismissive of Arthur Fine's work or he never really understood it) and ii) a detailed discussion of how a non-local mechanism would work although a lot of what is said these days hadn't been said yet when this book was written.

 

[mbd]

If one constructs a theory that is local, realistic, but not counterfactual definite, then the theory is not ruled out by Bell's Theorem. It is an open question whether one exists.

The interesting space is in the extremely subtle difference between realism and counterfactual definiteness. Here's a paper with a good explanation of the distinction:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3827

An equivalent way to look at it is to consider the experimental constraints that the assumptions of Bell's Theorem require. A recent paper by Antonio Di Lorenzo explains, and defines quite clearly, the assumptions from a more experimental point of view.

http://pra.aps.org/pdf/PRA/v86/i4/e042119

 

[Nugatory]

The interesting space is in the extremely subtle difference between realism and counterfactual definiteness. Here's a paper with a good explanation of the distinction:

http://ajp.aapt.org/resource/1/ajpias/v78/i1/p111_s1?isAuthorized=no

Behind a paywall, unfortunately. Can you summarize the distinction as Blaylock sees it?

 

[mbd]

Behind a paywall, unfortunately. Can you summarize the distinction as Blaylock sees it?

http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3827

 

[Maui]

If one constructs a theory that is local, realistic, but not counterfactual definite, then the theory is not ruled out by Bell's Theorem. It is an open question whether one exists.

The interesting space is in the extremely subtle difference between realism and counterfactual definiteness. Here's a paper with a good explanation of the distinction:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3827

An equivalent way to look at it is to consider the experimental constraints that the assumptions of Bell's Theorem require. A recent paper by Antonio Di Lorenzo explains, and defines quite clearly, the assumptions from a more experimental point of view.

http://pra.aps.org/pdf/PRA/v86/i4/e042119

I haven't looked at the papers but did you mean superdeterminism by local realism without counter-factual definiteness? If yes, it has been beaten to death here. If no, doesn't realism require counterfactual definiteness? Why?

 

[mbd]

I haven't looked at the papers but did you mean superdeterminism by local realism without counter-factual definiteness? If yes, it has been beaten to death here.

Not necessarily. Superdeterminism is only a consequence of a system having realism sans counterfactual definiteness if the system is the last word.

Reality is rich with systems that, at one level of detail, have qualities and structure that are qualitatively different from systems at higher or lower levels of details. There's no definitive evidence to suggest that QT is anything different.

A system that is local, realistic, not counter-factual definite, and that is experimentally distinguishable from QT is the thing to test to answer the question.

 

[DrChinese]

A system that is local, realistic, not counter-factual definite, and that is experimentally distinguishable from QT is the thing to test to answer the question.

As I mentioned in a message to you, your concept requires definitions that are not generally accepted. There is no such thing (except in the mind of a small group of fervent local realists) as the accepted idea that Bell assumes some distinction between counterfactual definiteness and realism.

Realism is defined as a collection of elements of reality assumed to exist simultaneously. That is from EPR (1935). Bell demonstrated that such elements cannot have values which will match the usual predictions of QM. This has absolutely nothing to do with constraints on measuring multiple angles etc. You don't have to measure anything. Bell says that if locality and realism are assumed, you cannot get the QM predicted results. Vice versa, if you get the QM predicted results then at least one of the assumptions of locality and realism are false.

My point is that anyone, anytime, is free to define realism some other way than EPR did. If you do, you may not get the Bell result. But so what? It is the EPR definition that is the gold standard. And with that definition gets you the Bell result.

 

[Nugatory]

I haven't looked at the papers but did you mean superdeterminism by local realism without counter-factual definiteness? If yes, it has been beaten to death here. If no, doesn't realism require counterfactual definiteness? Why?

The paper is arguing for multiple-worlds as a local and realistic interpretation that is not counterfactually definite (no history includes the measurement not made) but also is not even factually definite (you get different facts in diferent histories). It's internally consistent and actually kinda easy to swallow... Although that may be because if you've managed to gulp down the multiple-worlds camel, after that everything is easy to swallow.

The first section has a really good explanation of the small-angle version of Bell's argument.

 

[mbd]

As I mentioned in a message to you, your concept requires definitions that are not generally accepted. There is no such thing (except in the mind of a small group of fervent local realists) as the accepted idea that Bell assumes some distinction between counterfactual definiteness and realism.

For the sake of getting past semantics, then, by realism I mean "scientific realism" per the article I linked to above (here too) which illuminates the distinction.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3827

It must be noted, though, that the definition of "reality" in EPR (1935) is not in fact a definition but, rather, a criterion with scope limited only to the purposes of the argument. And, there is no definition of reality at all in Bell (1964). Bell's own recognition of the implicit assumptions in his work played out over subsequent years.

Einstein's definition is: "If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty (i.e., with probability equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity." He then goes on to say that this a sufficient, but not necessary, condition of reality.

 

[DrChinese]

For the sake of getting past semantics, then, by realism I mean "scientific realism" per the article I linked to above (here too) which illuminates the distinction.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3827

It must be noted, though, that the definition of "reality" in EPR (1935) is not in fact a definition but, rather, a criterion with scope limited only to the purposes of the argument. And, there is no definition of reality at all in Bell (1964). Bell's own recognition of the implicit assumptions in his work played out over subsequent years.

Einstein's definition is: "If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty (i.e., with probability equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity." He then goes on to say that this a sufficient, but not necessary, condition of reality.

He also says that these must be considered as simultaneously real... that any other view is unreasonable. Back then, the semantics was not debated quite like today. Bell didn't even bother to mention the definition, thinking (I believe) that EPR's take was adequate for scientists.

 

[audioloop]

the definition of realism/reality goes beyond physics.

 

[Nugatory]

the definition of realism/reality goes beyond physics.

Quite true, but because physics tries to describe the R-word world, it's not always practical to completely avoid using the R-word.

Often (perhaps in all pre-QM physics and outside of discussions of QM interpretations) this isn't a problem. Samuel Johnson ("I refute it thus") and Potter Stewart ("I know it when I see it") are good enough, and detailed hair-splitting discussions of what the R-word means are irrelevant distractions.

But when we do discuss QM interpretations... It's good practice to try to be explicit about what meaning we have assigned to the R-words, CFD, and the like.

 

[Darwin123]

the definition of realism/reality goes beyond physics.

I thought this was a Physics Forum!
I am so sorry. I am in the wrong place!