No need for spooky action at a distance!

Maui

Hidden variable theories posit that qm does not give a complete description of the system(s) and there are hidden elements of reality affecting quantum behavior, hence qm isn't complete in its descriptions. He's proposing the same and i think he might be correct that qm is incomplete but for different reasons. As somebody already said, without a testable prediction i could come up with at least 10 000 different propositions and ideas. Pure philosophy doesn't appear to have many similarities with physics.

phinds

The forum? I doubt it. I just personally don't like the approach of let's throw out some meaningless words and see if anybody bites.

As Hurkyl pointed out, what you are proposing, to eliminate "spooky action at a distance" is even MORE spooky and as far as I can see has no basis in physics.

But I'm just a cranky old fart, so don't mind me.

phinds

Yeah, that's what I was commenting on in post #5

Suppaman

I made the assumption that the concept of "the fabric of space", what ever that is, has been discussed many times in many different ways. So assuming something does exist I proposed that our entangled items are linked at the time of entanglement to a common point and thus they are never really separate.

Studiot

I don't know why I am bothering to post again since you didn't acknowledge my last one but I pointed you at an explanation of the 'fabric of space'.

Ken G

I thought the four possibilities in bohm2's citation in post #8 were pretty good examples of all the different flavors of "spookiness" we could be entertaining. There was also a thread on here not long ago about the differences between 3-space and configuration space, and the upshot of that is, we are still not very clear on which is the more appropriate "home" for basic physics ontology. For me, this is good evidence, along with much else, that there is no such thing as "basic" physics ontology-- ontology in physics is whatever we use it for in any given context. So the bottom line is, whatever "solution" to the spookiness that we ultimately settle on as our best treatment at any given time, is still likely to seem pretty spooky, just not as spooky as all the others. Saying that there's still some kind of hidden connection is almost inevitable-- it's just not clear if we will say that connection is mediated through some sense of sustained proximity in some other space, as the original post was implying. Note the space in which that proximity might be maintained could be some type of metric on configuration space, or on some hidden variable space, or on some "random generator space", to reprise the 3 possibilities from post #8 that refer to a type of proximity. (Example 2 was the only one that asked for no flavor of proximity at all, so that was the only one completely outside the approach in the original post.)

Neandethal00

It is sometimes frustrating to read some moderator or mentor's comments on PF.
We, some of us, sometimes go off the conventional tracks of physics, not to
spread or force on others our own pet theories. In fact, I myself have absolutely no
theory on anything.

We go off the track only to give other physicists ammunition, 'another way to attack the problem', to rethink another way for a solution.
Some ammunition may be hilarious, some may apparently be hilarious.

This thread is an example, OP suggested 'a connection', physical or not, between entangled particles.
Which may lead to the question, 'what the space-time is made of'?
The correct answer is 'we do not know'.
But some eager physicists may jump to the conclusion, 'It's made of nothing'.
There we go off the track.

Anyway, moderators, mentors of PF are going excellent job. Keep us straight.

zonde

You made assumption that "spooky action at a distance" is the mechanism behind entanglement and tried to describe it.
Certainly there are people who are trying to go that way.

But I would say that you should try to model entanglement using spooky action at a distance before trying to model spooky action at a distance using something else.

audioloop

spacetime connectivity.

scijeebus

There's a theory or two that the particles occupy the same higher-space coordinates, but it can be explained by looking at the simple math. If you look at the math, they are the same particle, their probabilities are the same, which distance doesn't have a part in. It's just like if time stopped, gravity would still work because the force of gravity doesn't have time in it's equation or for how it's strength works, its a correlation of something different.

Petyab

I actually agree that it may not be spooky action at a distance; requiring complex fourier otpics and dynamic solutions with variables for the unknowns perhaps. Can a particle have a mirror particle in another location? Think of water. At some level water crystals look remarkably the way they should for something that on a large scale offers the same qualities, yet also, different forms as the crest of a wave is different from the trough in some real life observation that somebody had at a beach. Maybe it was a hermit crab. I don't know.

Neandethal00

You lost me after mirror particle. Your water analogy is not clear.
But has anyone so far tried to connect quantum entanglement with Higgs Boson?
If Higgs field/boson (if it exists) is everywhere, it may have an effect on entanglement.

scijeebus

Space exists everywhere too, why don't we connect that?

DrChinese

Funny, quantum entanglement is not obviously everywhere - only SOME particles are entangled in a way which can be observed.

bohm2

Figure from linked paper is attached below. I took the OP's argument to be similar to this argument/analogy by that author?
A Potentiality and conceptuality interpretation of Quantum mechanics
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1005.3767.pdf

Attached Files

Figure 1.pdf (20.8 KB, 5 views)