Recent content by Derek Potter

Nice post-editing :) Sure, that's what I said, the real variable is a projection of the complex representation. I am surprised that nobody else seems to be interested in whether the idea of complex observables makes sense physically. You and I are clearly not going to agree about that so we...

:headbang:

Well, I'll try one more time. Of course I agree that you can shuffle the real and imaginary names around, in fact the very idea of imaginary frequency for real-valued exponentials only arises because of the convention of excluding the √-1 from the frequency: exp(iωt) has an angular frequency of...

You can't have it both ways. If you want to say that a complex frequency is actually a real-valued function then it isn't an example of a complex-valued observable.

Of course, but we are not talking about whether you can assign a meaning to it. We are talking about whether it represents an observable quantity. Let's be clear, this is not an abstract philosophical or semantic point. A function such as C.exp(iω-k)t is complex-valued and cannot represent...

Yes I know what a complex number is. :rolleyes: But we are not talking about whether complex numbers are handy. We are talking about physical properties necessarily being real. A. Neumaier gave complex frequency as a counter-example. For it to be a valid counter-example it would have to be...

It's not measurable as a complex number though. What we actually have is a typically a second order linear circuit modeled by a couple of linear equations. The general solutions are then complex exponentials. But physics constrains the actual solutions to occur in superposition - the familiar...

But that is not what entanglement means. It's a lot more complicated than just a correlation. See Dr Chinese's earlier post. And even the Alice and Bob scenario where there is perfect anti-correlation only occurs if they chose their detector orientations to be the same. You don't even have...

Obviously you could simulate entanglement. Just use the formulae that Dr Chinese has posted. However it would not and cannot contradict Bell if you properly simulate the spacelike separation and fulfil the conditions stipulated in Bell's theorem. Note that "behind the scenes" pretty well gives...

Do you mean non-causality and non-definiteness etc?

I didn't say quite that. I said that even if they affect each other (Bell non-locality) - perhaps by sending something that we can't control - it doesn't automatically mean we can send signals (signal non-locality).

And there can be no common cause if spacelike separation is present or simulated.

And Bell proved that if you simulate spacelike separation, what you describe cannot be achieved.

Humans don't have to be involved. The question is whether we could in principle send a message using A's effect on B. Humans are in effect a placeholder for a system which is the source of a message. so unless you postulate some way of controlling the radiation externally, there is no...

My apologies, I overlooked that you are a science advisor. "Exactly"? I hope you are using that term colloquially. It is no use asking me for a formal definition of anything. Informally, it means that events at A can cause events at B even though it is impossible for external data to control A...