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mikedilger /
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2024-05-06 11:22:23

mikedilger on Nostr: Nobody commented on this, which is probably not up anybody's alley. But I'm ...

Nobody commented on this, which is probably not up anybody's alley. But I'm fascinated and maybe most of you don't understand. So I'm going to ELI5 about this whole thing, without droning on. Let's see how well I can do this.

Hope at last: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.06986

I've never been happy with the possible ways of explaining QM. Non-locality was my 'best' choice but I still didn't like it. I really didn't like throwing out reality. And superdeterminism is just dumb (not that it's not possible, in that sense I think superdeterminism is actually likely -- but there is no compelling reason to believe it would be "just so" as to precisely fuck up all our experiments).

This is the first theory I've read that seems right to me. It's Berkson's bias, an illusion of weirdness that only applies to ensembles, in combination with T-symmetry.


Physicists invented/discovered ways to emit single particles. These emitters emit two particles in opposite directions.

Physicists discovered a property about particles they called "spin". Basically you can draw a plane parallel to the floor that the particle zooms along. Either it's spin is pointing upwards relative to this plane, or it is pointing downwards (let's presume never exactly along the plane). But you could also put the plane upright and then it's spin is defined as either left or right. You could rotate that plane around 360 degrees and measure from any angle you want, and your detector will give you binary answer saying which side of the plane the spin was on.

Interestingly, the opposite particle that comes out the opposite side of the emitter has the exact opposite spin. Every. Single. Time. No matter how you orient these spin detectors, they are opposite. 100% coorelation.

If you measure one particle UP and DOWN, and the other particle LEFT and RIGHT, there is 0% coorelation. These perpinduclar directions are independent.

No suprises. All of this is as you would expect.

Now, if you measure one particle against an UP and DOWN detector, and the other particle against a 45% slanted plane, they are coorelated 86.666% of the time.

That is what is weird.

Amazing! Spooky!

You didn't get it, did you? Yeah, it's not obvious. But that outcome is fucking impossible.

They should be coorelated I think 70.7% of the time maximum IIRC.

And because of this physicts have tried to come up with a hypothesis as to what is going on. How can the coorelations be this high? Some of the hypotheses include the following super crazy and spooky ideas:

1) The particles are "communicating" somehow in order to increase their coorelation. It turns out that they would not only have to be communicating somehow (nobody knows how) but also that communcation would have to be faster than the speed of light. This hypothesis is called NON-LOCALITY, spooky action at a distance. Some kind of instant communcication between these particles, or some belief that the two particles are actually somehow just one particle but in two completely different spatial positions.

2) That the universe isn't locally "real", that what we observe is not objectively real, but depends on who is looking, that the outcome (the spin) is not actually an objective fact, but depends who is looking and is different for different people (but we could never prove that). Things like the multiverse come to mind. They reject realism in order to preserve locality.

3) That the universe is super-determined, that God set it in motion in just such a way that the outcomes of these particular experiments would happen to yield coorelations higher than what is possible.

YES, those are all CRAZY beliefs, but most physicists actually beileve in one of them.

I reject them all.

What I believe is really going on is related to the following observations:

1) The particle emitter might be influenced by the setting of the spin measurement devices, mediated via the particle, backwards in time. Now that backwards in time thing is where my idea seems totally crazy, but actually it is only backwards in time from our Einsteinian relativistic perspective. From the perspective of the particle, it experiences no time at all. The time it was emitted and the time it's spin was measured are the very same instant from it's own frame of reference. I postulate that causation can only travel sideways and forwards in time, as long as somebody's relativistic perspective allows it. So it's not really backwards.

2) This causes the emitter to tend to fail to emit the particles when they would not be coorelated, causing a Berkson's bias or a collider.

3) Relativity is conserved. Locality is conserved. Realism is conserved. Superdeterminism is not needed. All the nutty ideas are unnecessary.
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