Timeline for Could the randomness of quantum mechanics be the result of unseen factors?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 3 at 7:59 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | Obviously, none of these ideas can be ruled out at the current time (or possibly even ever, in principle), but it's striking to see how far people will go to find a substitute for what would normally be seen as the simplest explanation. | |
| Sep 3 at 7:56 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | As a non-QM-focused former physicist, I've always been perplexed about what makes many physicists so uncomfortable with accepting the apparent fundamental probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, to extent of proposing things like unobserved alternate universes, potential violations of causality, or even the initial conditions conspiring to make the apparent randomness not fundamental. I mean, you never see someone trying to figure out how the initial conditions of the universe could obviate the need for some aspect of electrodynamics that strikes them as unintuitive. | |
| Jul 19, 2016 at 17:56 | vote | accept | J.Todd | ||
| Feb 25, 2016 at 2:56 | comment | added | Peter Diehr | @A.S.: sorry, but I don't even know what the word ontological means. I'm an experimental physicist and engineer, not a philosopher! | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 2:48 | comment | added | A.S. | @Peter Why is introduction of non-causal relationships such a big deal? From an ontological point of view, there has to be a non-causal layer that causes everything else and physicists are simply exploring downstream of it. | |
| Feb 24, 2016 at 19:48 | comment | added | Peter Diehr | @Bakuriu: non-locality violates the non-communication theorem of Special Relativity, which permits non-causal relationships. Einstein definitely did not like this! It also makes it non-classical, for classical physics + special relativity is always causal. The non-local effects of ordinary QM don't permit communication faster-than-light, so they only seem non-causal at first glance. Entanglement is a subtle concept. | |
| Feb 24, 2016 at 19:42 | comment | added | Bakuriu | Anyway I remember in these seminars that the speaker showed how we have non locality both if we assume completeness of QM and if we don't. However I don't really see something too wrong about non local hidden variables theories... I mean: QM is non local so it's nothing new. The whole thing seems to be about Einstein premise that we want universe to be local, which simply seems not to be the case, but this only tells us that Einstein was wrong and we should change the notion of physical reality. (But I may have misunderstood/forgot quite a bit of what I heard). | |
| Feb 24, 2016 at 19:27 | comment | added | Bakuriu | @JonofAllTrades As an other non physicist who followed some seminars about hidden variable theories, quantum mechanics etc last year: the problem is not randomness. The problem is non locality, i.e. the fact that we can act on something here and this will instantly affect something far distant away (see quantum entanglement). You can prove that any hidden variable theory that agrees with quantum mechanics will be non local. I believe de Broglie's theory of the pilot wave was already a non local hidden variable theory which should actually work well. | |
| Feb 24, 2016 at 18:52 | comment | added | user20846 | Is there any chance that this can be explained in a way that makes sense to a non-physicist? Intuitively, it certainly seems that there could always be undiscovered factors, but what I've read of QM seems to accept that randomness being inherent to the universe is a proven fact, and your answer seems to agree with this. Can you explain more about these Bell inequalities at a layman's level? | |
| Feb 24, 2016 at 11:08 | comment | added | Peter Diehr | If you read the two papers noted by MvG you will find that at least one unfalsifiable claim remains. The important thing to note is that every experimental result is consistent with quantum mechanics; Einstein didn't even question this. So there is no need for a hidden variable system; and most of the loopholes are closed. Today we are designing systems which rely on quantum mechanical results that violate the Bell inequities, such as quantum teleportation. | |
| Feb 24, 2016 at 10:47 | comment | added | Zaibis | I actually not really read out of it you are answering yes or no to OP | |
| Feb 24, 2016 at 9:59 | comment | added | MvG | Regarding the claim of having closed the loopholes, see Loophole-free Bell inequality violation using electron spins separated by 1.3 kilometres by Hensen et al. and Strong Loophole-Free Test of Local Realism by Shalm et al. | |
| Feb 24, 2016 at 3:34 | history | answered | Peter Diehr | CC BY-SA 3.0 |