Can Quantum Eraser Experiments Predict the Future?

[Schneibster]

I have been contemplating this experiment for quite some time now, and I have some questions. http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903047.pdf is a preliminary copy of the paper describing the experiment, for reference.

The first and most obvious question would be whether it is possible to actually predict the future, by replacing the beam splitters in the idler photon paths with movable (actually, my thought was LCD electrically switchable) mirrors, and making the idler path longer than the signal path; I believe that the answer to this must almost certainly be "no," because the interference shown by the signal photons cannot be separated left from right without the correlation of the idler photon impacts, but there is a vanishingly small chance based on the data in the paper (and I have seen a more complete version of the paper, and the results were the same) that there might be a way to see the difference between the interference and non-interference cases without reference to the idlers. As I say, I don't believe it will pan out, but the data presented in the paper do not exclude the possibility.

But the first part that I really wanted some feedback on is:
The positions of the mirrors that would replace the beam splitters in the left and right idler paths obviously determine whether the idler photons will go to the which-path detectors, or through the quantum eraser to the eraser detectors.
Is the probability distribution of the signal photons that creates the interference interpreted as the effect, and the probability distribution of the idler photons either to the which-path detectors or to the eraser and eraser detectors interpreted as the cause of that effect?

I have some reasons for interpreting it that way. First, there is obviously a correlation between the probability distribution of the signal photons and the probability distribution of the idler photons. Second, there is no other variable correlated to the probability distribution of the signal photons. Third, a change in the probability distribution of the idler photons such that they are all sent to the eraser and eraser detectors always results in a probability distribution of the signal photons that shows interference, and a change in the probability distribution of the idlers such that they all go to the which path detectors always results in a probability distribution of the signal photons that does not show interference.

While I do know that the correlations between the probability distributions of the signal and idler photons prove a causal link between them, I do not know whether these three facts together constitute proof that the idler distribution is the cause and the signal distribution is the effect, and that is my question.

There is more, but this post is long enough for now.

 

[Schneibster]

Geez, I hate to bump my own post, but is there anyone here with the knowledge to give me any direction on this?

 

[vanesch]

Hi,

I discussed this paper already on this forum a while ago but I cannot find back the thread.
Although it is a nice experiment and so on, I think it is a bit "oversold". You can give it the interpretation given by the authors if you want to, but in fact, something much simpler is going on. When you look at figure 3, you get an interference pattern, because you SELECT A SUBSAMPLE from all impacts at D0, which are coincident with a hit at D1. When you look at ANOTHER SUBSAMPLE, namely the impacts at D0 which are coincident with D2 (figure 4) you get a shifted interference pattern. This shift comes about, if you trace it back, to a difference in optical pathlengths in the polarizing beamsplitter, and this shift is utterly important.
Finally, the third subsample of the D0 events gives you figure 5, the coincidence with D3. It doesn't show any interference, and is infact equal to the sum of the shifted interference patterns of figures 3 and 4.

If the system is 100% efficient, then every event is classified in one of the 3 subsamples, and so at D0, without coincidence, you don't have any interference pattern. It is only when the coincidence information is used to do subsample selection that you see subsamples with or without fringes.

The entire experiment is in fact based upon what I'd call a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. It is assumed from the start that 'atom A OR atom B' emits a photon.
But that's denying superposition !
The incoming pump photon is put in an entangled state:
half goes to A, half goes to B.
THIS ENTANGLED STATE IS TRANSMITTED TO THE ATOMS A AND B, so you cannot say that atom A is emitting OR atom B is emitting.
This entanglement is further transmitted to the outgoing entangled photon pairs: we have in fact a superposition of 2 2-photon states, and the experiment analyses different correlations between these 2-photon states.

The "quantum erasure" idea is based upon a misunderstanding and a TOO EARLY APPLICATION OF THE PROJECTION POSTULATE. You can only apply the projection postulate at the very end of your calculation.

Mind you, I'm not critisizing the very nice experiment, and all that. I'm critisizing the hype around "quantum erasure" which makes people believe that according to whether we "look at remote data or not" we influence a physical phenomenon, and then leave them wonder why you cannot turn that into a faster than light telephone.

Quantum theory, as it stands, doesn't allow for FTL telephones. I explained why in another post here ; it is due to the fact that all local observables derive their expectation values from the local density matrix, which traces out the remote state space from the overall density matrix, and hence is not influenced at all anymore by what happens to that remote state.

cheers,
Patrick

 

[caribou]

Using the consistent histories (also "decoherent histories") approach to quantum theory of Gell-Mann, Griffiths, Hartle and Omnes to analyse the delayed choice paradox, Griffiths shows in his book Consistent Quantum Theory that there are actually many possible descriptions quantum theory allows of the events of the paradox but they can only be combined in certain ways in order to be consistent with quantum theory.

The delayed choice paradox arises from combining certain incompatible descriptions of events to create the paradox and not being aware other compatible descriptions that can be combined that don't create a paradox.

However, these compatible descriptions can have macroscopic quantum superposition states, as in Schrodinger's Cat, so it's perhaps no surprise that physicists are unconsciously avoiding them in this paradox as they aren't intuitive theoretically and decohere experimentally.

The paradox is roughly like combining wave and particle descriptions at the same time and then declaring there to be a paradox, the consistent histories approach being very much the modern version of the principle of complementarity with its rules to avoid this.

So according to this approach, the delayed choice paradox is something which arises from not being aware of macroscopic superposition states predicted theoretically and experimentally and combining descriptions in a way that makes sense to our minds used to classical physics and not following where quantum theory leads us.

Since this is a delayed choice paradox thread, I just thought I'd mention this for anyone who might be interested.

 

[vanesch]

So according to this approach, the delayed choice paradox is something which arises from not being aware of macroscopic superposition states predicted theoretically and experimentally and combining descriptions in a way that makes sense to our minds used to classical physics and not following where quantum theory leads us.

That's exactly what I tried to point out. In fact, EPR and "delayed choice quantum erasure" experiments are more experimental indications of the physical reality of macroscopic superpositions than that they are indications of non-locality or delayed choice paradoxes. In fact, relativity tells us that non-locality and delayed choice paradoxes are of course one and the same.

It all holds in one single rule: you apply the Born rule AT THE END of the calculation, for the final quantities, and not in the middle of your experiment.
(and yes, this implies macroscopic superposition).

 

[Schneibster]

When you look at figure 3, you get an interference pattern, because you SELECT A SUBSAMPLE from all impacts at D0, which are coincident with a hit at D1. When you look at ANOTHER SUBSAMPLE, namely the impacts at D0 which are coincident with D2 (figure 4) you get a shifted interference pattern. This shift comes about, if you trace it back, to a difference in optical pathlengths in the polarizing beamsplitter, and this shift is utterly important.

Examining the diagram in Fig. 2, the exact position of the Glan-Thompson prism is not clear; not to mention Glan-Thompson is misspelled in the paper. However, I see no reason to conclude that the optical path lengths are different between left and right (or, if you prefer, A and B); while the path lengths for the idler and signal photons might be (and in the realization are, by 8ns) different, the path lengths for left and right for either the idler or signal photons need not be so. The fact that the phase shift is precisely π, placing the peaks of one interference pattern precisely overlapping the valleys of the other, argues that in fact that is not the reason for the phase shift.

Finally, the third subsample of the D0 events gives you figure 5, the coincidence with D3. It doesn't show any interference, and is infact equal to the sum of the shifted interference patterns of figures 3 and 4.

Of course it is; they are shifted by π! Since the graph in space of an interference pattern is a cos function, and we all know that a cos function added to a copy of itself with a phase shift of π yields a smooth function, precisely what is seen if there is no interference. So the question is, why should the phase shift be precisely π?

If the system is 100% efficient,

It is not and cannot ever be. D0 is driven back and forth across the field of the interference with a stepper motor. Think about it.

The entire experiment is in fact based upon what I'd call a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. It is assumed from the start that 'atom A OR atom B' emits a photon.
But that's denying superposition !

In the non-interference case, that is exactly true. How is it a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics to state that if you can recover the which-path information, you see no interference?

On the other hand, note also that there is no interference in the combined patterns from the eraser; this is because it is not yet clear whether that information can be recovered. The operation of creating the idler photons, which makes which-path information theoretically available, has phase shifted the two interference patterns exactly enough to cause their superposition to yield what appears to be non-interference; only by scrambling the two possible states (co-incident with a signal photon from A/left, or B/right) can the interference be recovered. This is conceptually equivalent to the notion in Feynman's gedankenexperiment based on the Young dual-slit experiment, done with electrons, in which the slit through which the electron passed is identified by placing a very sensitive coil transducer around each slit. The paths of the electrons are "smeared" by their interaction with the transducer just enough to eliminate the interference. I ask again, how is this a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics?

The incoming pump photon is put in an entangled state:
half goes to A, half goes to B.

Now, this is a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. First, a single photon cannot be entangled with itself. Second, this is an all-or-nothing interaction here, and there are only three alternatives: the whole photon goes to A and generates an entangled pair, the whole photon goes to B and generates an entangled pair, or the whole photon cannot be shown to have gone to either A or B, and generates an entangled pair that cannot be shown to have come from either A or B.

We interpret this third case not as half of one and half of the other, but as both. Repeated analysis and experimentation has left us no choice but to assume in the interference case that the "particle" has not traversed one slit or the other, but both slits. And not half of it went through one and half through the other; both at the same time. The period of the interference (in the Young dual-slit experiment of course; the β-BBO crystal in the DCQE means that the wavelength is doubled there, in order to produce the idler photons) shows that the wavelength of the interfering waves is not twice the incoming wavelength; it is the incoming wavelength. Thus, there can be no question of the individual photons having divided in half and each half traversed one of the two slits.

THIS ENTANGLED STATE IS TRANSMITTED TO THE ATOMS A AND B, so you cannot say that atom A is emitting OR atom B is emitting.

There is no entangled state at that point; a single photon cannot be entangled with itself. It requires two photons minimum to be entangled, and there aren't two photons until AFTER the β-BBO has completed SPDC and created them. Any other assumption leads to a violation of conservation laws.

This entanglement is further transmitted to the outgoing entangled photon pairs: we have in fact a superposition of 2 2-photon states, and the experiment analyses different correlations between these 2-photon states.

While I repeat that there is no entangled state until the pairs are produced, you are correct that there is a superposition of two eigenvalues into an eigenstate. The two eigenvalues are "went through A" and "went through B." Each has a probability of 0.5. It is only if this eigenstate is never collapsed into a state that we ever see interference. And in this experiment, that happens if the idler photons go to the eraser, that is, the beam splitter labeled "BS" in the diagram.

As I have said many times elsewhere, the remarkable thing about a dancing bear is not how well the bear dances. And the remarkable thing about this experiment is not that we cannot see interference directly; it is that we can recover interference at all by any means whatsoever.

The "quantum erasure" idea is based upon a misunderstanding and a TOO EARLY APPLICATION OF THE PROJECTION POSTULATE. You can only apply the projection postulate at the very end of your calculation.

The projection postulate is properly applied at the time when information becomes available about which path the photon took; and that time is the generation of the idler and signal photons, because the idler photons can show the which-path information and therefore constitute a measurement. What is remarkable is that we can retroactively cancel the measurement (quantum erasure) and recover the interference.

Mind you, I'm not critisizing the very nice experiment, and all that. I'm critisizing the hype around "quantum erasure" which makes people believe that according to whether we "look at remote data or not" we influence a physical phenomenon, and then leave them wonder why you cannot turn that into a faster than light telephone.

I agree it's unlikely, but you have misinterpreted the potential results; they are not an FTL telephone, but a device that predicts the future. And I expect that you cannot do that either; but the data do not rule it out, so far.

I have extracted the data points from the two graphs in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, and there remains variation from the mean curve that is greater than the variation in Fig. 5. However, I suspect that this is merely a measurement artifact that would disappear if more careful measurement were done; for instance, the data points in Fig. 5 are at half the frequency of those in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. But it is worth measuring to see if it can be seen. It would be a beautiful demonstration of QM to show that interference cannot be extracted from the signal photons by any means that does not use the idler photons.

Quantum theory, as it stands, doesn't allow for FTL telephones. I explained why in another post here ; it is due to the fact that all local observables derive their expectation values from the local density matrix, which traces out the remote state space from the overall density matrix, and hence is not influenced at all anymore by what happens to that remote state.

I agree that it should not be possible if QM is correct. However, the reasons you state do not necessarily make it so.

-Da Schneib

 

[Schneibster]

Not only that, but interpretation aside, is anyone going to answer my question? The results of the experiment are clear; there is no interpretation necessary. Is there a cause-to-effect relationship (as opposed to a merely "causal" without presumption of one or the other being cause or effect) relationship between the determination of which-path information and the appearance of interference?

 

[vanesch]

Now, this is a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. First, a single photon cannot be entangled with itself. Second, this is an all-or-nothing interaction here, and there are only three alternatives: the whole photon goes to A and generates an entangled pair, the whole photon goes to B and generates an entangled pair, or the whole photon cannot be shown to have gone to either A or B, and generates an entangled pair that cannot be shown to have come from either A or B.

I'll try to show what I meant - which should address a lot of your criticisms - by a half-symbolic calculation.

First, there is the pump-photon, which is written as a superposition of its position through slits A and B:

|pump> = 1/sqrt(2) (|pA> + f |pB>)

I introduced a phase factor f, this will prove to be usefull later on.

The interaction with the crystal (or, in the original proposal, with the atoms, I will take that example, it is symbolically the same) leads then to an entangled state of the excited states:
|excited atoms state> = 1/sqrt(2) (|A> + f |B>)
and then leads to the photon pair state:
|photon pair> = 1/sqrt(2) (|A0> |Ax> + f |B0> |Bx>)

The 0 photon is the one heading for the D0 detector, and the x-photon is the one heading for the complicated mixer setup.
Now, we should rewrite the |Ax> and the |Bx> states of the mixer-photon as a function of the detection eigenstates, |D1>, |D2>, |D3> and |D4>.
We do this by tracing them through the apparatus.
|Ax> can be written as 1/sqrt(2) ( |D3> + 1/sqrt(2) ( |D1> + |D2> ) )
and |Bx> can be written as 1/sqrt(2) (|D4> + 1/sqrt(2) ( |D1> - |D2> ) )

The second part can be checked by noticing that the beam splitter BS gives pure D1 counts for a certain phase combination of Ax and Bx, and that it will give pure D2 counts for a 180 degree phase shift. This is what I called the different optical path lengths. The physical reason is that in one case you go through the beamsplitter, and in the other case, you reflect off it, which always gives you a 180 degree phase shift (otherwise it is not a 50-50 BS).

Substituting, we find our photonstate now in the D basis:

|photon pair> = 1/2 { |A0> (|D3> + 1/sqrt(2) (|D1> + |D2>))
+ f |B0> (|D4> + 1/sqrt(2) (|D1> - |D2>) ) }

= 1/2 {|A0> |D3> + f|B0> |D4> + 1/sqrt(2) (|A0>+f|B0>) |D1>
+ 1/sqrt(2) (|A0> - f|B0> ) |D2> }

And you read off easily the results:
In coincidence with |D3> you get |A0> in the D0 pipe: no interference.
Same with |D4> ; you get |B0> in the D0 pipe.

In coincidence with |D1>, you find |A0>+f|B0> : interference between an "A beam" and a "B-beam".
In coincidence with |D2>, you find |A0> - f|B0>: a similar interference pattern, but with a 180 degree phase shift.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

I will now address your criticisms verbally, but have a look at my small calculation in the other post, please ; it is the essence of what I had in mind.

Examining the diagram in Fig. 2, the exact position of the Glan-Thompson prism is not clear; not to mention Glan-Thompson is misspelled in the paper. However, I see no reason to conclude that the optical path lengths are different between left and right (or, if you prefer, A and B); while the path lengths for the idler and signal photons might be (and in the realization are, by 8ns) different, the path lengths for left and right for either the idler or signal photons need not be so. The fact that the phase shift is precisely π, placing the peaks of one interference pattern precisely overlapping the valleys of the other, argues that in fact that is not the reason for the phase shift.

I probably expressed myself badly: I was pointing to a half-wavelength pathlength difference due to the beamsplitter (sign difference between transmitted and reflected beam).

It is not and cannot ever be. D0 is driven back and forth across the field of the interference with a stepper motor. Think about it.

That's an experimental detail: think of a position-sensitive detector which can measure the impact position of the photon at D0.
What I meant was: D1, D2, D3 (and D4) cover all cases, the second photon has to end up in one of those 4 detectors.

In the non-interference case, that is exactly true. How is it a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics to state that if you can recover the which-path information, you see no interference?

That's a correct statement. The less "correct" statement is that you have "information which you erase"... You only measure correlations, which themselves are the result of (superpositions of) product states.

On the other hand, note also that there is no interference in the combined patterns from the eraser; this is because it is not yet clear whether that information can be recovered. The operation of creating the idler photons, which makes which-path information theoretically available, has phase shifted the two interference patterns exactly enough to cause their superposition to yield what appears to be non-interference; only by scrambling the two possible states (co-incident with a signal photon from A/left, or B/right) can the interference be recovered. This is conceptually equivalent to the notion in Feynman's gedankenexperiment based on the Young dual-slit experiment, done with electrons, in which the slit through which the electron passed is identified by placing a very sensitive coil transducer around each slit. The paths of the electrons are "smeared" by their interaction with the transducer just enough to eliminate the interference. I ask again, how is this a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics?

It is what I call "overselling". The only true information that is available is the correlations at the end of the experiment. I don't know what it means to have potentially available information which is then erased.

Now, this is a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. First, a single photon cannot be entangled with itself. Second, this is an all-or-nothing interaction here, and there are only three alternatives: the whole photon goes to A and generates an entangled pair, the whole photon goes to B and generates an entangled pair, or the whole photon cannot be shown to have gone to either A or B, and generates an entangled pair that cannot be shown to have come from either A or B.

But that's denying the essence of quantum theory ! The exciting photon (pump) was in a superposition of positions at A and B. This superposition is maintained, and the excitations at A and B are then in an identical superposition. The whole story of "which way" information, which denies the superposition of these states, is what gives rise to all these "erasure paradoxes". Have a look at my very simple calculation.
Your third case is nothing else but the interference terms due to this superposition which you deny.

We interpret this third case not as half of one and half of the other, but as both. Repeated analysis and experimentation has left us no choice but to assume in the interference case that the "particle" has not traversed one slit or the other, but both slits. And not half of it went through one and half through the other; both at the same time. The period of the interference (in the Young dual-slit experiment of course; the β-BBO crystal in the DCQE means that the wavelength is doubled there, in order to produce the idler photons) shows that the wavelength of the interfering waves is not twice the incoming wavelength; it is the incoming wavelength. Thus, there can be no question of the individual photons having divided in half and each half traversed one of the two slits.

There is no entangled state at that point; a single photon cannot be entangled with itself.

You missed what I said: a single photon can of course be in a superposition of 2 position states, A and B. That doesn't mean that I think that it is sliced in 2 half photons of course. It is this position superposition which is then propagated and gives rise to all the results.

And the remarkable thing about this experiment is not that we cannot see interference directly; it is that we can recover interference at all by any means whatsoever.

That is only remarkable if you think that the pump photon cannot be in a superposed state, half at A and half at B. But if you do accept that, by simply applying quantum mechanics (and no projections) nicely all the way, a lot of fuzz falls away.

The projection postulate is properly applied at the time when information becomes available about which path the photon took; and that time is the generation of the idler and signal photons, because the idler photons can show the which-path information and therefore constitute a measurement.

No, the projection postulate must be applied when you calculate your final quantities, which are here correlations between D0 and D1 or D2 or D3...
Sometimes, you can get away with intermediate use of the projection postulate, but not in these entangled cases.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Schneibster]

I will now address your criticisms verbally, but have a look at my small calculation in the other post, please ; it is the essence of what I had in mind.

I guess I'm more comfortable discussing it than dissecting the math.

This shift comes about, if you trace it back, to a difference in optical pathlengths in the polarizing beamsplitter, and this shift is utterly important.

I see no reason to conclude that the optical path lengths are different between left and right (or, if you prefer, A and B); while the path lengths for the idler and signal photons might be (and in the realization are, by 8ns) different, the path lengths for left and right for either the idler or signal photons need not be so.

I probably expressed myself badly: I was pointing to a half-wavelength pathlength difference due to the beamsplitter (sign difference between transmitted and reflected beam).

I guess I'm not quite clear on what component you were talking about with the "polarizing beamsplitter." I thought you meant the combination of the β-BBO crystal and the Glan-Thompson prism. I don't see any other component that could be described as a "polarizing beam splitter" in the optical path between the slits and the D0 signal photon detection area, though, so I'm still not clear on exactly what "half-wavelength pathlength difference" you are referring to.

I can see a half-wavelength pathlength difference between either signal path and its corresponding idler path; that is introduced by the β-BBO crystal, and accounts for the phase orthogonality between the signal photons and the idler photons (and thus the ability to sort them in a Glan-Thompson prism). But I cannot see any way that phase difference could make a difference in the positions of the interference patterns; because I also cannot see any difference in the idler photon paths between left and right (or, if you prefer, A and B).

I guess I want you to explain in precise terms what exact component you believe is introducing this difference, and how the introduced phase difference accounts for the "phase shift" between the two interference patterns.

If the system is 100% efficient,

It is not and cannot ever be. D0 is driven back and forth across the field of the interference with a stepper motor. Think about it.

That's an experimental detail: think of a position-sensitive detector which can measure the impact position of the photon at D0.
What I meant was: D1, D2, D3 (and D4) cover all cases, the second photon has to end up in one of those 4 detectors.

But because not every photon that is measured at D0 can be correlated with one measured at one of D1-D4, there is no reason to believe that there would be any visible interference anyway.

I guess I'm subconsciously making reference to a different state of the experiment (and I guess it's fair for me to do so, because it was explicitly mentioned in my OP): what if the BSA and BSB (which send idlers either to D1/D2 or D3/D4, randomly) were replaced with mirrors that always sent the idlers to the eraser D1/D2? Even in this case, the device cannot be anything like efficient, simply because we cannot detect corresponding signal photons for every idler; and conversely, even if we could, by using a CCD sensor with a maximum efficiency at 500nm of about 96%, unless D1-D4 have 100% quantum efficiency, we cannot guarantee to detect every corresponding idler photon for every signal photon that is detected. I'd estimate about 90% maximum efficiency, if we used state-of-the-art CCDs everywhere.

Your conclusion was, "It is only when the coincidence information is used to do subsample selection that you see subsamples with or without fringes." I have to agree with that; but I'm not sure why you felt you needed to precede it with, "If the system is 100% efficient, then every event is classified in one of the 3 subsamples, and so at D0, without coincidence, you don't have any interference pattern." I agree with it without agreeing with (what appeared to be) the premise; however, I also don't think it really was a proper premise, and I still don't see why it is important that the interference is a subset. And last but not least, after the experimental modification I suggested with mirrors, there are only two possible alternatives, not three: no idler photons go to D3 or D4, so there are no non-interfering signal photons.

The entire experiment is in fact based upon what I'd call a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. It is assumed from the start that 'atom A OR atom B' emits a photon. But that's denying superposition !

In the non-interference case, that is exactly true. How is it a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics to state that if you can recover the which-path information, you see no interference?

That's a correct statement. The less "correct" statement is that you have "information which you erase"... You only measure correlations, which themselves are the result of (superpositions of) product states.

OK, then explain the lack of visible interference in the D0 signal detection area when the mirrors are turned to send all the idler photons to D1 and D2. You can't see interference even then- without the correlation. But under what circumstances do you not see interference of two waves? Only when you have which-path information. So I have to dispute your claim that there is no "information which you erase." It appears to me that in this experiment, we have disrupted the photon paths through obtaining which-path information and destroyed the interference- and that we get the interference back when we destroy the which-path information. But in order to protect causality, we cannot see that interference without looking at the correlation between the idler photon detection events and the signal photon detection events. Thus, we preserve both of:
1. Quantum mechanical waves always interfere, unless there is which-path information.
2. Obtaining which-path information always destroys quantum mechanical wave interference.
Both must be true; if there were no interference recoverable, then the first would be rendered untrue, and it would call everything all the way back to Young's original dual-slit experiment into question. If there were any way to see interference when which-path information had been obtained, then causality would be macroscopically violated.

It is what I call "overselling". The only true information that is available is the correlations at the end of the experiment. I don't know what it means to have potentially available information which is then erased.

Then you haven't thought about the experiment when all the idler photons are sent to the eraser. Think about it again that way. Then you'll begin to see the very narrow tightrope that nature has to walk for this experiment to work exactly the way it does; causality must not be violated, but the wave nature must be visible whenever it should be seen.

The incoming pump photon is put in an entangled state:
half goes to A, half goes to B.

Now, this is a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. First, a single photon cannot be entangled with itself. Second, this is an all-or-nothing interaction here, and there are only three alternatives: the whole photon goes to A and generates an entangled pair, the whole photon goes to B and generates an entangled pair, or the whole photon cannot be shown to have gone to either A or B, and generates an entangled pair that cannot be shown to have come from either A or B.

But that's denying the essence of quantum theory !

First, what you specifically said is shown above. Second, I still don't see any entangled state. Nothing you said following this has convinced me that this has anything to do with entanglement. Entanglement and superposition are not the same; they are different. Had you said that the incoming pump photon is superposed into an eigenstate whose eigenvalues are it goes to A or it goes to B, with 50% probability for each alternative, then I might have agreed with you. But I would also have pointed out that just because it is in such an eigenstate does not mean that that eigenstate ever has to collapse into a state, and realize one of the eigenvalues; and in fact, if it does not so collapse, if neither eigenvalue is realized, then we see interference! And that, my friend, is the essence of quantum mechanics!

Feynman once said that you can see everything there is to know about quantum mechanics in the dual-slit experiment with single electrons. I tend to agree with him strongly. He of course didn't mean that all the math is there; what he meant is that all the most important concepts are there.

The exciting photon (pump) was in a superposition of positions at A and B. This superposition is maintained, and the excitations at A and B are then in an identical superposition. The whole story of "which way" information, which denies the superposition of these states, is what gives rise to all these "erasure paradoxes". Have a look at my very simple calculation.
Your third case is nothing else but the interference terms due to this superposition which you deny.

You apparently did not understand the implications of what I said. I do not deny that such a superposition exists; I was referring to it. It is patently obvious that it does. What I deny is that a superposition represents an entangled state in this case. The entanglement does not occur until after the initial superposition.

What I was trying to indicate was exactly that superposition; my first case is the first eigenvalue of the eigenstate, my second case is the second eigenvalue of the eigenstate, and my third case is the uncollapsed eigenstate, which may or may not (depending on whether you erase or read the which-path information) collapse into a state of one of the two eigenvalues. If it does collapse, then the corresponding signal photon will not be part of an interference pattern; in other words, its probability distribution will be a smooth function of the distance from the center of the D0 detection area. On the other hand, if the eigenstate is never collapsed into a state, then the corresponding signal photon will be a member of one of two classes of photons that form interference patterns in the D0 detection area.

Now, represent me the possibility that that eigenstate will not collapse into a state of one of the eigenvalues. That is what is missing from your mathematics above. And that's why I don't critique them directly. I don't think you're applying them right.

You missed what I said: a single photon can of course be in a superposition of 2 position states, A and B. That doesn't mean that I think that it is sliced in 2 half photons of course. It is this position superposition which is then propagated and gives rise to all the results.

No, actually, I have quoted exactly what you said above: "The incoming pump photon is put in an entangled state: half goes to A, half goes to B." And you didn't say "superposition;" you said "entangled." The two are different. Sometimes simultaneous, yes; but different. The "half" part I'll leave to anyone who cares to read it.

And the remarkable thing about this experiment is not that we cannot see interference directly; it is that we can recover interference at all by any means whatsoever.

That is only remarkable if you think that the pump photon cannot be in a superposed state, half at A and half at B.

And again we have an apparent misunderstanding of the meaning of "superposition." It is not "half at A and half at B;" it is at both, and neither. It has a 50% probability of having been at A, and it has a 50% probability of having been at B. But there is a third alternative: it was at both, or neither, and we see interference. And you have not addressed this third alternative. When your eigenstate collapses due to a measurement, then there will be no interference, whichever way the collapse occurs, because the eivenvalue of the state, whichever it is, will preclude seeing interference. If and only if that eigenstate never collapses into a state will we see interference.

But if you do accept that, by simply applying quantum mechanics (and no projections) nicely all the way, a lot of fuzz falls away.

Personally, I think that seeing interference is not "fuzz;" but you are welcome to your opinion.

No, the projection postulate must be applied when you calculate your final quantities, which are here correlations between D0 and D1 or D2 or D3...
Sometimes, you can get away with intermediate use of the projection postulate, but not in these entangled cases.

I don't think that you can prove that, and I assert that the projection postulate can be used any time there is a measurement. And producing the idler photons is a measurement; it measures which-path information. That is the reason that the interference cannot be seen. As I have said repeatedly, what I find remarkable, and a beautiful illustration of quantum logic, is that there is any way at all to recover the interference.

-Da Schneib

 

[Schneibster]

I'll try to show what I meant - which should address a lot of your criticisms - by a half-symbolic calculation.

First, there is the pump-photon, which is written as a superposition of its position through slits A and B:

|pump> = 1/sqrt(2) (|pA> + f |pB>)

I introduced a phase factor f, this will prove to be usefull later on.

This right here is what I don't understand. I thought this was what you were talking about with the "half-wavelength pathlength difference due to the beamsplitter." Tell me the exact physical origin of this "phase factor."

 

[Schneibster]

...and I still haven't received an answer to my question!

 

[vanesch]

This right here is what I don't understand. I thought this was what you were talking about with the "half-wavelength pathlength difference due to the beamsplitter." Tell me the exact physical origin of this "phase factor."

You don't really need it, strictly speaking, because you can absorb it into the state it goes with. I wanted to do something nasty with it. It is NOT the phasefactor that is responsible for the interference pattern, but can be used to do so. But I realized that that would make the issue confused.
So put it equal to 1.

It has nothing to do with the lambda/2 shift ; this one comes from the |D1> + |D2> and the |D1> - |D2> sign difference when I rewrite the Ax and Bx states as a function of the detector eigenstates.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

I guess I'm more comfortable discussing it than dissecting the math.

Mine is the opposite: I'm probably much clearer on the math than the words.

I guess I'm not quite clear on what component you were talking about with the "polarizing beamsplitter."

Sorry, that' s an error on my part. The BS is not a polarizing one. I have to say that when I first commented the article, I confused it with one, very similar, that I already commented here (and in fact, the issues are very very close). There the "which path" information resided in the polarization of the photon, and they used a setup with polarizing beam splitters and quarter wavelength plates to "allow or deny" the extraction of the polarization information and hence the path information.
Just read "beam splitter". I'm talking about BS in the figure.

I guess I want you to explain in precise terms what exact component you believe is introducing this difference, and how the introduced phase difference accounts for the "phase shift" between the two interference patterns.

If you have a setup like the one with the beam splitter BS, and you have, simultaneously, two incoming beams interfering in it, then, according to the phase relationship of these two incoming beams, you can send all the outgoing light to D1 or to D2. The difference in phase relationship is exactly 180 degrees. So you can re-express this in the following way: the difference between going through, or reflect from the BS is given by a lambda/2 extra optical pathlength. But I now realize that it can be confusing to say it this way.
The point is simply that when we have a photon in a state
|Ax> + |Bx> it will go for sure to detector D1, and if we have a photon in a state |Ax> - |Bx> it will go for sure to detector D2.
We can then invert this base transformation, and rewrite Ax and Bx as a function of the D1 and D2 states. And the minus sign of Bx between D1 and D2 is that famous 180 degree phase difference.

But because not every photon that is measured at D0 can be correlated with one measured at one of D1-D4, there is no reason to believe that there would be any visible interference anyway.

In a 100% efficient setup, I would think that for every D0, there is one D1-D4 click, no ? Where does the other photon end up then ??

I guess I'm subconsciously making reference to a different state of the experiment (and I guess it's fair for me to do so, because it was explicitly mentioned in my OP): what if the BSA and BSB (which send idlers either to D1/D2 or D3/D4, randomly) were replaced with mirrors that always sent the idlers to the eraser D1/D2? Even in this case, the device cannot be anything like efficient, simply because we cannot detect corresponding signal photons for every idler; and conversely, even if we could, by using a CCD sensor with a maximum efficiency at 500nm of about 96%, unless D1-D4 have 100% quantum efficiency, we cannot guarantee to detect every corresponding idler photon for every signal photon that is detected. I'd estimate about 90% maximum efficiency, if we used state-of-the-art CCDs everywhere.

I'm of course reasoning in a simplified way, not taking into account efficiencies, losses etc... just on a gedankenexperiment with a comparable setup. The true experimental analysis of the setup is more complicated, but we're talking about principles here.

I still don't see why it is important that the interference is a subset. And last but not least, after the experimental modification I suggested with mirrors, there are only two possible alternatives, not three: no idler photons go to D3 or D4, so there are no non-interfering signal photons.

I wasn't actually answering your post, but commenting on the paper (which initially I even took for another, very similar one - so I start to see why my comments were confusing :-)
I stressed the subsample thing because the way these papers are formulated seem to give the impression that a poor soul looking at the interference picture are D0 will see fringes or not, according to whether someone else, far away, has put in a mirror in the other branch or not. THIS IS NOT TRUE.
Locally, the D0 picture is ALWAYS the same (in this case, a blob without interference).
It is only when you get information from measurements done by that other person, and you do that to select a subsample of the recorded clicks at D0, that you see an interference pattern arise or not. So you cannot use it to transmit a message to D0 by having him, on his own, see appear, or not, interference fringes. Maybe this was clear to you. It is often the question that comes back.

I'll comment on other issues later...

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

OK, then explain the lack of visible interference in the D0 signal detection area when the mirrors are turned to send all the idler photons to D1 and D2. You can't see interference even then- without the correlation. But under what circumstances do you not see interference of two waves? Only when you have which-path information.

Several points have to be made here.
The first one is "why don't we have interference at D0".
The answer is that, because of the entanglement of the "D0" photon with the "mixer" photon, the local state at D0 is not a pure state anymore but an (improper) mixture obtained by tracing out the "mixer" states out of the overall density matrix. You then get the local density matrix

( 1/2 0 )
( 0 1/2)

which describes a non-interfering statistical mixture of two incoherent sources at A and at B.
I can do the calculation explicitly if you want to.

I realize now that this is in fact a beautiful experimental illustration of decoherence theory ! When considered locally at D0, the beams coming from points A and B have "decohered" with "the environment" which is now still limited to the mixer photon. So if we can distinguish the states of the mixer photon, we can still potentially find correlations which show interference.

The second point is your "eraser" which doesn't in fact erase anything.
Do you realize that the socalled eraser, where the two paths are mixed up in BS, is just a linear transformation of basis (my transformation with D1 and D2).
You can UNDO that with another BS, at least in principle: if, instead of a detector D1, you put mirrors so as to redirect the "D1" beam onto a new beam splitter, and you do the same with D2, recombining the D1 and the D2 beams, if you choose the pathlengths right, what will come out of this new beam splitter will be your A or B path information. So, no, the mixer didn't ERASE any information, it just transformed two states |path A> and |path B> into two other states |D1> = |path A> + |path B> and |D2> = |path A> - |path B>
Mixing |D1> and |D2> AGAIN in the same way would give us
a |D1-bis> = |path A> and a |D2-bis> = |path B>.
So if you do not put your detectors D1 and D2 there, but you send your beams off in space, YOU HAVEN'T erased your information. You could still capture them by mirrors on Jupiter, and reconstruct path A and path B. And still, you wouldn't see any interference in D0, because that's only determined by the LOCAL DENSITY MATRIX, which gives you an incoherent mixture.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

Let's do some further calculations, a few lines of algebra are probably clearer and more precise than hundreds of lines of proza.

I have my state as follows:

|photon pair> = 1/2 { |A0> (|D3> + 1/sqrt(2) (|D1> + |D2>))
+ f |B0> (|D4> + 1/sqrt(2) (|D1> - |D2>) ) }

= 1/2 {|A0> |D3> + f|B0> |D4> + 1/sqrt(2) (|A0>+f|B0>) |D1>
+ 1/sqrt(2) (|A0> - f|B0> ) |D2> }

I will work in the product basis:

(|A0>|D1> ; |A0>|D2> ...|B0>|D1> ...)

In that basis, the state at hand is written by the 8-tuple:

(1/sqrt(8), 1/sqrt(8), 1/2, 0, f/sqrt(8), - f/sqrt(8), 0 , f/2)

You can put f = 1 if you want to. It could also be used to indicate whether different phaseshifts from A and B to D0, along the D0 axis, will give rise to an interference pattern or not, but although correct, it is a bit messy.

The density matrix is then given by (calculated with mathematica) the matrix in the attachment picture.

DAMN THIS DOESN'T SEEM TO WORK !
How do you add an attachment ? It says "upload", but nothing seems to be attached ?
In ugly numerical mathematica format, this gives:
{{0.125, 0.125, 0.176777, 0., 0.125, -0.125, 0., 0.176777}, {0.125, 0.125,
0.176777, 0., 0.125, -0.125, 0., 0.176777}, {0.176777, 0.176777, 0.25, 0.,
0.176777, -0.176777, 0., 0.25}, {0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0.}, {0.125,
0.125, 0.176777, 0., 0.125, -0.125, 0.,
0.176777}, {-0.125, -0.125, -0.176777, 0., -0.125, 0.125,
0., -0.176777}, {0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0.}, {0.176777, 0.176777,
0.25, 0., 0.176777, -0.176777, 0., 0.25}}


If you trace out the Dx degrees of freedom (by cutting the matrix in 4 (4x4) matrices), and you take the trace in each of these submatrices, you get the
local (A0,B0) density matrix which is

1/2 0

0 1/2

and that proves that the state at the D0 detector is an incoherent mixture of photons that come from A and photons that come from B, without any interference.

cheers,
Patrick

 

[vanesch]

Entanglement and superposition are not the same; they are different. Had you said that the incoming pump photon is superposed into an eigenstate whose eigenvalues are it goes to A or it goes to B, with 50% probability for each alternative, then I might have agreed with you. But I would also have pointed out that just because it is in such an eigenstate does not mean that that eigenstate ever has to collapse into a state, and realize one of the eigenvalues; and in fact, if it does not so collapse, if neither eigenvalue is realized, then we see interference! And that, my friend, is the essence of quantum mechanics!

Up to here we are saying exactly the same (except that - I grant you that - I used "entanglement" too early: the pump photon is indeed in a superposition of states, but this turns immediately into an entanglement of the regions A and B: |A-emitting a pair>|B-not emitting a pair> + |A-notemitting>|B-emitting>). Yes, I was sloppy with the words.

You apparently did not understand the implications of what I said. I do not deny that such a superposition exists; I was referring to it. It is patently obvious that it does. What I deny is that a superposition represents an entangled state in this case. The entanglement does not occur until after the initial superposition.

Granted, I used superposition and entanglement sometimes interchangedly, because the initial superposition turns quickly into an entanglement. But it was sloppy.

What I was trying to indicate was exactly that superposition; my first case is the first eigenvalue of the eigenstate, my second case is the second eigenvalue of the eigenstate, and my third case is the uncollapsed eigenstate, which may or may not (depending on whether you erase or read the which-path information) collapse into a state of one of the two eigenvalues.

It is this collapsing business which leads to all these "paradoxes" and so on. But if you do not insist on a "collapse" when a remote detector gives a click, but just apply linear quantum theory until you arrive at your final observations, all these paradoxes and mysteries disappear.

If it does collapse, then the corresponding signal photon will not be part of an interference pattern; in other words, its probability distribution will be a smooth function of the distance from the center of the D0 detection area. On the other hand, if the eigenstate is never collapsed into a state, then the corresponding signal photon will be a member of one of two classes of photons that form interference patterns in the D0 detection area.

Now, represent me the possibility that that eigenstate will not collapse into a state of one of the eigenvalues. That is what is missing from your mathematics above. And that's why I don't critique them directly. I don't think you're applying them right.

I'm applying them correctly. The best proof is that I find back all the results that are observed. I'm simply not using "intermediate collapse". I work straight through everything with linear quantum mechanics, and use Born's rule to find the final probabilities of the quantities we will discuss, such as correlations.

No, actually, I have quoted exactly what you said above: "The incoming pump photon is put in an entangled state: half goes to A, half goes to B." And you didn't say "superposition;" you said "entangled." The two are different. Sometimes simultaneous, yes; but different. The "half" part I'll leave to anyone who cares to read it.

All right, all right Ok, I could be nasty and ask you mathematically what is the difference between a superposition and an entanglement, and you'd have a hard time if you are not allowed to define about which subspaces we're talking: I can turn any superposition mathematically in an entanglement and vice versa. But I won't be so nasty :-)

And again we have an apparent misunderstanding of the meaning of "superposition." It is not "half at A and half at B;" it is at both, and neither.

When I say that, I am talking about the superposition of AMPLITUDES
1/sqrt(2) (|A> + |B>).
I'm not talking about a statistical mixture.

It has a 50% probability of having been at A, and it has a 50% probability of having been at B. But there is a third alternative: it was at both, or neither, and we see interference. And you have not addressed this third alternative.

But I did ! It is in the superposition of amplitudes.

When your eigenstate collapses due to a measurement, then there will be no interference, whichever way the collapse occurs, because the eivenvalue of the state, whichever it is, will preclude seeing interference. If and only if that eigenstate never collapses into a state will we see interference.

Nope, nothing ever collapses before the end of your experiment. Sometimes you CAN get away with it, because you will only consider one branch in the superposition in all what follows (like in a state preparation). But when you use collapse indifferently, in this kind of experiments, then you shouldn't be surprised to have "paradoxes" like "predicting the future" and so on. And be even more surprised that nature does it in such a way that you cannot use it really.

I don't think that you can prove that, and I assert that the projection postulate can be used any time there is a measurement. And producing the idler photons is a measurement; it measures which-path information.

No, it is not. Producing idler photons is just a physical process which can be described by linear quantum theory.

 

[Caroline Thompson]

... It is NOT the phasefactor that is responsible for the interference pattern, but can be used to do so. But I realized that that would make the issue confused ...

I'm afraid the experiment is too complicated for any discussion here to be of much use. I'll have a little try, but everyone is bound to get confused!

The interference patterns always depend on phase factors, of course -- ones introduced by means of path length changes -- but the way in which scanning the (invisible) pattern on one arm enables its existence to be revealed in the coincidences with the other is too subtle to be understandable without writing a complete paper.

The general principle probably (though I still haven't looked at the actual paper you're talking about!) involves the existence of identical phase differences in the two arms, combined with the fact that these phase differences must always be initially (if frequencies are constant) one of just two values, 0 and 180 deg.. The reason the interference patterns are not immediately visible is that the two patterns, one for each phase value, are superposed and wash each other out. The use of coincidences enables the selection of just one of them.

Caroline
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/

 

[vanesch]

The interference patterns always depend on phase factors, of course -- ones introduced by means of path length changes -- but the way in which scanning the (invisible) pattern on one arm enables its existence to be revealed in the coincidences with the other is too subtle to be understandable without writing a complete paper.

? If you're scanning an image with a "point" detector, or you use a position-sensitive detector which gives you each time the impact position of a click (I'll avoid the word photon in order not to make you nervous :-), I don't see what's the difference ?

Of course, without the use of photons, it is a bit hard to think of WHY these independent intensity measurements of classical beams by photomultipliers could ever disentangle interference patterns, but I leave it up to you to explain that

As my back of the envellope quantum calculation shows, with the concept of photons and a bit of basic quantum theory, I haven't got the slightest difficulty in deriving these results.
By results, I mean results of principle, like "I will clearly see fringes" or "I won't see fringes at all". A thorough analysis needs of course to take into account all effects of all optical elements, but nevertheless, we clearly see fringes (raw data :-) when we trigger in coincidence with D1 or D2, and we don't see when we don't take these coincidences, or with D3 or with D4, exactly as predicted by a simple calculation in QM, 5 lines long.
So try to find a classical wave description that fits this (it may be more than 5 lines long)... I am curious :-)

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Schneibster]

On edit: please be sure that you have read all of this post and the following two before you start responding. I don't believe that you have understood the thrust of my assertions; you are apparently assuming that I am arguing that it is possible to see into the future, and that is not what I am arguing at all. You will understand better if you read all three. End of edit.

Mine is the opposite: I'm probably much clearer on the math than the words.

My problem with this is that, while I'm certain that the math properly describes the beginning and end of the experiment, I'm not certain it describes the middle.

See, the way I'm used to relating to things, and using math, is you figure out a story about what happened, then you apply mathematics and observations to show whether that story could have happened that way or not; if not, then your story is wrong. You keep at this until you have a story that fits the facts. When you deal with quantum mechanics, that story is going to incorporate some elements that are impossible from the point of view of classical mechanics, and you have to be aware of where those elements are so that you don't wind up describing something that can't happen.

Telling that story is what interpretations of QM are all about. That's what the CI originally was about, that's what Cramer's TI is about, that's what MWI is about, that's what Gell-Mann and those guys made Consistent Histories for, that's why Bohm made his non-local interpretation, and that's what Feynman's Many Paths is about. All of them allow you to tell a story about what took place. And if you can keep the peculiarities of QM and of your chosen interpretation in mind, then you can tell a consistent story (although, as I say, it will- not may, but will- incorporate some elements that are incompatible with classical mechanics, and therefore with what we think we see in the world around us).

It's my belief that if you can't tell that story, then you don't understand what is taking place. I think that a great many physicists have missed that point; they (and you) seem to think that the entire story is in the math. I'm in the process of learning the math- and that's not easy for someone who's been out of college as long as I have (twenty years). But it's my experience in dealing with these types of things that once I have learned it, I'm going to find exactly what I'm saying- that it works to describe the beginning and end, but it doesn't describe the middle. Furthermore, I'd be willing to bet that once I know the math, I'll be able to show you exactly what's been left out, and what that implies about the story. The reason I believe this is because of all the trouble everyone's been to to create these interpretations in the first place. I believe that the physicists who have made the various interpretations have come to the same conclusion I have- that the math doesn't tell the whole story; it just describes the beginning state, and the end state. And if you had the right math, and there might be more than one (has to be more than one, if both MWI and Bohm's interpretation can both give correct results- and they can), then you can describe all of the middle stuff too. There are many ways to slice the cake and still get the right number of pieces.

Let me give an example.

Let's take a game of pool. We know that we will begin with the cue ball at one end of the table, and all the other balls racked up at the other end. We know that we will end up with all of either the stripes or the solids in pockets, and the eight-ball in a pocket. What you are telling me is that that is the entire story of the game. And I'm asking you, "what about the killer shot, a kick off the head rail and a combination of the twelve-ball into the nine, in the corner? Are you trying to tell me that shot never happened?" And you're saying, ""you can't prove it happened- the twelve and the nine are in the corner pocket, and by the way, that's all that's important!"

Here's another example.

There's a meteor falling out of the sky. On it's way to the ground to become a meteorite, it hits a plane, and the plane crashes, but the pilot was skillful enough to make it a ditch instead of just an impact, and all the people got out before the plane sank, so they were all saved. It also went through an office building, and five people's desks and the entire filing department of a major insurance company were destroyed, and three people died. Then it hit in the middle of the street and made a crater. And you're telling me that the only thing that's important is the crater, and that's all we can talk about. And I'm saying, "What about the plane? What about all the people that pilot saved? What about the filing department of that insurance company, and all the trouble that people who are trying to collect insurance will have? What about those people who died?" And your response is, "the only important thing is the crater and the meteorite at the bottom of it; you can't prove any of the rest of it ever happened. The math only talks about the crater and the meteorite."

Do you see now my problem?

Sorry, that' s an error on my part. The BS is not a polarizing one. I have to say that when I first commented the article, I confused it with one, very similar, that I already commented here (and in fact, the issues are very very close). There the "which path" information resided in the polarization of the photon, and they used a setup with polarizing beam splitters and quarter wavelength plates to "allow or deny" the extraction of the polarization information and hence the path information.
Just read "beam splitter". I'm talking about BS in the figure.

I think I know the experiment you are talking about. I tried to find a really cool site that went into it in detail, but couldn't find a link or the site on google. I think this will make our conversation more profitable- we'll both be talking about the same experiment!

If you have a setup like the one with the beam splitter BS, and you have, simultaneously, two incoming beams interfering in it, then, according to the phase relationship of these two incoming beams, you can send all the outgoing light to D1 or to D2. The difference in phase relationship is exactly 180 degrees. So you can re-express this in the following way: the difference between going through, or reflect from the BS is given by a lambda/2 extra optical pathlength. But I now realize that it can be confusing to say it this way.
The point is simply that when we have a photon in a state
|Ax> + |Bx> it will go for sure to detector D1, and if we have a photon in a state |Ax> - |Bx> it will go for sure to detector D2.
We can then invert this base transformation, and rewrite Ax and Bx as a function of the D1 and D2 states. And the minus sign of Bx between D1 and D2 is that famous 180 degree phase difference.

OK, yes, I follow that now. It's actually a really good explanation of why the interference is recoverable- the phase of the idler photons controls which of D1 or D2 they go to, and their phase is determined by the original phase of the pump photon, and that phase also determines whether the signal photon is a member of the first or second interference pattern.

To put it in terms of a story, the pump photon's phase results in a particular phase for the resulting signal and idler photons that are created in the β-BBO crystal; and the phases of those two photons are orthogonal. The phase of the signal photon determines whether it is in the first or the second interference pattern, or in the non-interference pattern. The phase of its associated idler then determines whether it goes to D3/D4 at BSA/BSB, or to the eraser; and if it goes to the eraser, then the phase determines whether it goes to D1 or D2. Do I have that right?

In a 100% efficient setup, I would think that for every D0, there is one D1-D4 click, no ? Where does the other photon end up then ??

Hrrrmmm, we're talking at cross-purposes. I wasn't talking about the 100% efficiency case, because it's impossible; that was clear from the two paragraphs that follow this one, which you have quoted below; your response there is clear enough. I was talking about the real world case; and real-world detectors might not click for a particular photon; so one might just be lost. I'm not sure it makes any sense to talk about the 100% efficiency case, because you can't ever see that in the real world. To answer your question, the other photon ends up not being detected, because the detectors aren't 100% efficient.

I'm of course reasoning in a simplified way, not taking into account efficiencies, losses etc... just on a gedankenexperiment with a comparable setup. The true experimental analysis of the setup is more complicated, but we're talking about principles here.

Problem is, I'm pretty convinced that those principles can't be correctly applied without taking the real world into account. I guess you see now why I quibbled about 100% efficiency in the first place.

I wasn't actually answering your post, but commenting on the paper (which initially I even took for another, very similar one - so I start to see why my comments were confusing :-)
I stressed the subsample thing because the way these papers are formulated seem to give the impression that a poor soul looking at the interference picture are D0 will see fringes or not, according to whether someone else, far away, has put in a mirror in the other branch or not. THIS IS NOT TRUE.
Locally, the D0 picture is ALWAYS the same (in this case, a blob without interference).
It is only when you get information from measurements done by that other person, and you do that to select a subsample of the recorded clicks at D0, that you see an interference pattern arise or not. So you cannot use it to transmit a message to D0 by having him, on his own, see appear, or not, interference fringes. Maybe this was clear to you. It is often the question that comes back.

As a matter of fact, I believe that you are correct- there cannot be a way to detect whether there is interference without the correlation to the events at D1 and D2- but it is only an opinion. So far, I can't prove you are correct, based on the experimental data. I recovered the data (photon counts for various positions of D0, variously correlated with D1, D2, and D3) from the charts in Figs. 3, 4, and 5, and analyzed it to see if I could prove that you can't see the difference between the non-interference case and the combination of the two interference patterns. The data were inconclusive; this is at least partly because they only took non-interference data at half the spatial resolution of the interference data. In fact, I saw what could be interpreted as a greater mean deviation from the "best curve" of the non-interference case in the combined interference data than in the non-interference data, leaving open the possibility that you could tell the difference; but it's inconclusive, because of the lower frequency of the non-interference data. I wish they'd taken more care to relate the non-interference and interference cases to one another rather than concentrating on the interference cases; I can understand it based on what they were trying to show, but it still is a little hinky. It leaves a loophole that you can drive a truck through.

 

[Schneibster]

Up to here we are saying exactly the same (except that - I grant you that - I used "entanglement" too early: the pump photon is indeed in a superposition of states, but this turns immediately into an entanglement of the regions A and B: |A-emitting a pair>|B-not emitting a pair> + |A-notemitting>|B-emitting>). Yes, I was sloppy with the words.

Granted, I used superposition and entanglement sometimes interchangedly, because the initial superposition turns quickly into an entanglement. But it was sloppy.

OK, we're in agreement on this part.

It is this collapsing business which leads to all these "paradoxes" and so on. But if you do not insist on a "collapse" when a remote detector gives a click, but just apply linear quantum theory until you arrive at your final observations, all these paradoxes and mysteries disappear.

And, as I pointed out in my previous post, you also have no idea what happened in the middle. This type of math will only give you the beginning eigenstate, and the ending eigenvalues- you don't know anything substantive about what happened in the middle.

I should probably not have used the word "collapse." It brings in CI-with-reality-of-the-wavefunction, and that was not what I intended. I don't really know the terminology for the change from an eigenstate with eigenvalues and a mixing angle, to a state in which one of the eigenvalues has a probability of one and all other eigenvalues have a probability of zero. What is the correct terminology for this?

And my point is, if that eigenstate is which way the photon went, with eigenvalues "A" and "B", each with a probability of 0.5, it is only if this eigenstate never becomes a state where the probability of one alternative eigenvalue becomes 1.0 and the probability of the other becomes 0.0, that we see interference.

I'm applying them correctly. The best proof is that I find back all the results that are observed. I'm simply not using "intermediate collapse". I work straight through everything with linear quantum mechanics, and use Born's rule to find the final probabilities of the quantities we will discuss, such as correlations.

I'm not saying that you applied them improperly and got a wrong answer- I should have been more clear. I'm saying that you aren't using equations that describe the intermediate states of the experiment and add up to that same right answer that you got. Thus, we have a description of the beginning and end, but no description of what happened in between. Physics isn't just about describing what happened- it's about explaining it, too.

That's why we care about the shots in the pool game, not just who won. And you'll note that there is a complete explanation of each shot- if you care to take it that far, you can in theory describe the probability distributions of all the quarks and leptons and photons that make up the balls, and the table and its bumpers and pockets, and the cue stick and the human who is using it, and the energy and heat distributions that took place when the balls hit each other and the rails and the pockets, and the heat in the room which is greater when you're done than when you started. And it doesn't matter that it's all just probabilities at that level- you've still described it as fully as it is possible to do given the uncertainty limits.

So why can we not describe the DCQE in the same detailed manner, and get the right answer? My contention is that we can explain it, in detail, at every step, and that if that explanation is correct, we will get the same result that we actually see and can prove happened based on the data we collect. Not only that, but it appears that there are multiple different explanations that all give the same, correct result; these different explanations are the different interpretations of QM, such as CI-with-real-wavefunction, CH, TI, MWI, Bohm, MPI, etc.

And my ultimate question is, what do these explanations look like? What do they have in common? Is there any way to differentiate between them? If so, can we prove that some of them do not happen that way? So far, the answer to that last question appears to be, "No, we cannot prove that any of them did not occur." So why is that? What are the common parts of each explanation? What can we really tell about what happened?

All right, all right Ok, I could be nasty and ask you mathematically what is the difference between a superposition and an entanglement, and you'd have a hard time if you are not allowed to define about which subspaces we're talking: I can turn any superposition mathematically in an entanglement and vice versa. But I won't be so nasty :-)

Thank you. But I have a question: if every superposition can be turned into an entanglement, is this not an important feature of quantum behavior? So can you actually show that? If so, I'd like to know it.

When I say that, I am talking about the superposition of AMPLITUDES
1/sqrt(2) (|A> + |B>).
I'm not talking about a statistical mixture.

True enough. However, what are the amplitudes you are superposing? Are they not the amplitudes of the Schroedinger wave equation? And aren't those just probabilities (or, more correctly, the square roots of probabilities)? So what is wrong with just cutting to the chase and stating that they are probabilities in the first place, and using statistics to describe them?

Nope, nothing ever collapses before the end of your experiment. Sometimes you CAN get away with it, because you will only consider one branch in the superposition in all what follows (like in a state preparation). But when you use collapse indifferently, in this kind of experiments, then you shouldn't be surprised to have "paradoxes" like "predicting the future" and so on. And be even more surprised that nature does it in such a way that you cannot use it really.

Well, but that's the whole point- the correct story accounts for the fact that you can't use it in this manner. That's what's so interesting about it.

No, the projection postulate must be applied when you calculate your final quantities, which are here correlations between D0 and D1 or D2 or D3...
Sometimes, you can get away with intermediate use of the projection postulate, but not in these entangled cases.

I don't think that you can prove that, and I assert that the projection postulate can be used any time there is a measurement. And producing the idler photons is a measurement; it measures which-path information.

No, it is not. Producing idler photons is just a physical process which can be described by linear quantum theory.

See, here is what you're not getting- what I'm saying is that in a correct explanation, you can explain why you don't see interference at D0, not just that you don't. Your explanation is, "you just don't." Mine is, "there is no visible interference because it was destroyed by the process of creating the idler photons." We get the same result; but yours contains only a description, there is no explanation. I am contending that the explanation is missing from your view; and that while you can correctly describe what happens, you cannot explain it, whereas every other theory in physics not only describes, but explains.

Example: Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation is not just wrong because it assumes instantaneous propagation of gravity; but also because it does not explain gravity. The General Theory of Relativity is not just more correct because it more properly describes gravity as propagating at the speed of light, but also because it explains gravity as a distortion of spacetime.

Example: Newton's three Laws of Motion are not just wrong because they do not account for Lorentz-Fitzgerald effects, but also because they do not explain forces, or motion. Quantum mechanics is not more correct just because it better describes the forces that govern the behavior of particles, but because it better explains that a force is the result of a symmetry. Note also that an explanation always winds up describing a deeper behavior, which then also requires an explanation; but this is very deep philosophy, and while we might end up wanting to discuss it, I think we'd need another thread to do so.

Does that make my ideas a bit clearer to you? You are probably swinging at a straw man: you think I am saying that it is possible that we might be able to tell the future using the effects we see in the DCQE. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm actually saying is that I believe that it is not possible but that I'd like to prove it's not possible, and I don't believe that either the data or your description of the experiment are sufficient grounds to prove it. I believe that only an explanation can prove it, or more sufficient data; and I'm interested in finding out what that explanation looks like, to increase my understanding of QM in particular, and the world in general. Please keep in mind: you aren't fighting against the demons of stupidity telling you that you can violate causality macroscopically; if you think you are, then you are tilting at windmills. It is not my position that we can tell the future; it is my position that we cannot, and that the explanation of why we cannot is interesting.

 

[Schneibster]

I realize now that this is in fact a beautiful experimental illustration of decoherence theory ! When considered locally at D0, the beams coming from points A and B have "decohered" with "the environment" which is now still limited to the mixer photon. So if we can distinguish the states of the mixer photon, we can still potentially find correlations which show interference.

Now you are going where I am going. You are beginning to analyze this experiment not merely in terms of describing it correctly, but in terms of explaining it. Yes, the explanation provided by Consistent Histories using decoherence is very nice. Here is something else to consider: the explanations provided by TI, and MWI, and all the other interpretations, are also very nice! So what do they have in common? Why are they all capable of explaining this experiment? What do they describe that might lead us either to conclude that one of them is correct and the others are not, or that might lead us to some other interpretation that is the most correct one?

The second point is your "eraser" which doesn't in fact erase anything.
Do you realize that the socalled eraser, where the two paths are mixed up in BS, is just a linear transformation of basis (my transformation with D1 and D2).
You can UNDO that with another BS, at least in principle: if, instead of a detector D1, you put mirrors so as to redirect the "D1" beam onto a new beam splitter, and you do the same with D2, recombining the D1 and the D2 beams, if you choose the pathlengths right, what will come out of this new beam splitter will be your A or B path information. So, no, the mixer didn't ERASE any information, it just transformed two states |path A> and |path B> into two other states |D1> = |path A> + |path B> and |D2> = |path A> - |path B>
Mixing |D1> and |D2> AGAIN in the same way would give us
a |D1-bis> = |path A> and a |D2-bis> = |path B>.
So if you do not put your detectors D1 and D2 there, but you send your beams off in space, YOU HAVEN'T erased your information. You could still capture them by mirrors on Jupiter, and reconstruct path A and path B. And still, you wouldn't see any interference in D0, because that's only determined by the LOCAL DENSITY MATRIX, which gives you an incoherent mixture.

See, again I think you are missing the point. You are arguing that the description is all there is- and I am arguing that there is an explanation out there that gives deeper insight than your description does.

 

[Schneibster]

Hah! Here is precise experimental proof of what I was saying! Note figure 6; note most carefully the caption: "Weak interference is observed due to some residual entanglement of the state."

Now, the question here is, what principle will operate to prevent detection of this weak interference and consequent prediction of the future? That is the really interesting part of this experiment!

Holy s**t, my ideas turned out to be correct! Weirder yet, I am as surprised as Einstein must have been when they denied locality to explain EPR! This continues to hint that we might actually be able to predict the future- but I remain convinced against the experimental evidence that we cannot; the explanation for this should get somebody a Nobel prize! I can't wait to see that.

 

[vanesch]

Hi,

this discussion is becoming interesting (but long ). I will address the "explanation" part here. Science is the activity of thinking up theories to... to do what ? For a long part in history, it was thought to be the "explanation" of physical phenomena, which came in fact down to reduce them to "intuitively clear - or evident - objects and interactions". However, there turned out to be 2 problems with that: the first one is that what is "intuitively evident" is a matter of opinion. Newton had A LOT OF CONCEPTUAL DIFFICULTIES with his concept of force at a distance. But given the power of the idea, he nevertheless reluctantly used it in his theory on gravity.
The second difficulty is that, when pushed, you would like to have an "explanation" for your "intuitive concepts", using even more fundamental "intuitive concepts", and so on. So where does this stop ?
Generations of scientists were raised within the Newtonian mechanics framework, up to a point where any explanation which reduced a phenomenon to Newtonian mechanics was considered satisfactory.
It is an interesting read to see how people struggled in the 19th century with the concept of electric and magnetic field which had no mechanical explanation. (read the historical introduction in Born and Wolf for that).
The idea of a "field" which was not something related to stress in matter, was inconceivable. In the 20th century, people got used to classical fields which had no mechanistic explanation.
Quantum theory still has its difficulties, because we cannot reduce them easily to classical field theory and its related concepts. But does that mean that it is missing an "explanatory power" ? It is a question which is difficult to address, and brings us back to what is science.
Science tries to be different from other human activities by adhering to a strict method: your theories must stand the test of experiment. Simple and evident as this may sound, it implies that trying to distinguish between different theories that yield the same predictions of experiments is not part of a scientific activity.

In a response to "what do all these different interpretations have in common, that they work, and which one will prove right", I would say that what they have in common is the "scientific" part: they all adhere to the formalism of quantum mechanics, and hence will all yield identical predictions for the outcomes of experiments.
Of course that doesn't mean that they are all equivalent on the non-scientific footing. But we do not have at our disposal this powerful technique which is empirical verification. As long as there is a "much more intuitive" interpretation than all the others, clearly it is to be favored. But when all of the interpretations are "weird" in some way, there's no way to distinguish them. So it is a matter of personal taste. Like art critique.

I will tell you my personal pet interpretation. It is that there is an "outside objective world" which obeys strict linear quantum theory (a la many worlds), and that it is my consciousness which applies the Born rule. That is, in all copies of myself, the one that is "really me" is determined by the Born rule. I don't really know what's the name for that interpretation, but I will explain you why I like it.

- the first thing is, that each time the superposition principle is challenged, it wins. So I don't think that there are physical processes out there that "collapse the wave function". Once you say that, you are in a kind of "many world" interpretation.
- I don't believe in strict MWI, because they DO have a problem that they still didn't solve: they never found a way to derive the Born rule (and I think I found a proof why they won't).
- I don't think that there are "measurements" and other processes out there. This is less evident, but what I don't like about it (apart from the vagueness of what is a measurement), is that - as you said somewhere - it makes nature walk on a thin line: locality and causality have to be violated in some way, but only in such a way that you cannot use it. I find that disturbing, in that OR locality and causality are strict principles, OR they aren't. If they aren't, they shouldn't be in special circumstances.
- Finally, on a philosophical side, the only thing you really know is your conscious existence (in the style "I think, therefore I am"). So a theory that only explains your conscious observation of the universe, is, although the strict minimum, enough as a scientific theory.

But I don't take this VERY seriously, because it is only a temporary interpretation, as long as quantum mechanics holds, in its current form. I will adapt my interpretation to whatever theory comes after quantum theory. I only think that it will not become conceptually simpler, but more involved...
As for now, I find this explanation, although weird for sure, satisfying.
Also, it is my own, personal view, adapted to my mindset. Others may prefer other things. As I said, it is like the appreciation of art: it is personal. And it is not science in the strict term.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Caroline Thompson]

Hi Patrick and Schneibster

Please see my contributions in the "Questions about Other Tests of EPR" Paradox thread. I've had a look at the Gogo et al paper at http://people.whitman.edu/~beckmk/QM/qe/qe.pdf and added a comment this morning. I'm confident of finding a full "classical" explanation, using facts about the actual correlations of phase and polarisation that I've deduced from a number of other PDC experiments. There is, I think, less randomness than QM suggests.

One thing is for certain: there is a fully causal explanation just around the corner, and I think I'm on the right road to find it.

Caroline

 

[vanesch]

One thing is for certain: there is a fully causal explanation just around the corner, and I think I'm on the right road to find it.

Again, Caroline, we differ strongly in opinion on that point (but that's our right).

Only, your partial analyses of experiments and the attempts to show that, assuming otherwise unexplained but possible behaviours of PDC xtals (0 and 180 degree phases but nothing else), beamsplitters (unknown left-right splitting of intensities according to never observed spectral or other filtering), photodetectors and so on, classical-like theories are still a possibility, are, by themselves, for a physicist, not very interesting.

There's no offense meant in that, but it is as if I tried to explain to you that this silly theory of gravity of Newton is, for metaphysical reasons, totally unacceptable, and that Aristotle's view, that motion is the result of an object seeking its natural place, is still a possible explanation for falling apples, because ripe apples belong on the floor, where people can pick them up to eat. After analysing a lot of experimental data on apples, I come to the conclusion that they all fall on the floor, fully compatible with Aristotle. Ok, the movement of the planets and so on, yes, Newton is successful, but I'm sure I will find a way to explain that using Aristotles concepts. I'm just only not there yet.

Physicists (you included) know ONLY ONE WAY as of this day to explain ALL observed interactions between EM and matter, and that is quantum electrodynamics. It DOES tell you how a beamsplitter works, how a PDC xtal works, how a photodector works, and when you put this behaviour into your experiments, you do predict correct results.

As I pointed out earlier, that doesn't tell us that there cannot be any other theory doing just as well, but AS LONG AS YOU DON'T SHOW US ONE, the point is moot. Of course, what you are doing can be an encouragement for yourself, and who knows, one day... But I personally am affraid you didn't capture the scope of the problem you're trying to tackle.

However, if, for your peace of mind, you want to believe that such a local realist theory is a possibility, then please be my guest. Personally, I wouldn't bet a dime on it, but hey, you can't know what the future will bring.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Hans de Vries]

because the way these papers are formulated seem to give the impression that a poor soul looking at the interference picture are D0 will see fringes or not, according to whether someone else, far away, has put in a mirror in the other branch or not. THIS IS NOT TRUE.

But it is exactly this what is claimed!

And they have an experiment and measurements...

http://people.whitman.edu/~beckmk/QM/qe/qe.pdf

"We have demonstrated quantum erasure using a source of polarization entangled photons.
By using such a source, erasure is performed not by modification of the apparatus traversed by
the beam traveling through the interferometer, but instead by modifying the measurements made
on a second beam which is entangled with the interferometer beam. This is a classic example of
quantum mechanical "action at a distance". Measurements made on one beam affect the
visibility of interference fringes in another, spatially separated, beam."

Regards, Hans

 

[vanesch]

But it is exactly this what is claimed!

See how terribly misleading these claims are ? If you look at the figures, they say "coincidence counts". Look at the phrase (6 th line, 3rd paragraph, page 2) "By looking at the outputs of detectors A and A' in coincidence with B..."

What you observe are interference patterns or not in SUBSAMPLES which are in coincidence or not with detectors on the other beam. If you don't have that information, locally, nothing changes. This is not surprising because it is a theorem in quantum mechanics (of which I already outlined a few times the proof: it is the local density matrix)

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Hans de Vries]

See how terribly misleading these claims are ? If you look at the figures, they say "coincidence counts". Look at the phrase (6 th line, 3rd paragraph, page 2) "By looking at the outputs of detectors A and A' in coincidence with B..."

Arghhh...

It's indeed a only subset of 3% of the total. So a different situation in B selects
a different subset in A...

Regards, Hans.

 

[Caroline Thompson]

Only, your partial analyses of experiments and the attempts to show that, assuming otherwise unexplained but possible behaviours of PDC xtals (0 and 180 degree phases but nothing else), beamsplitters (unknown left-right splitting of intensities according to never observed spectral or other filtering), photodetectors and so on, classical-like theories are still a possibility, are, by themselves, for a physicist, not very interesting.

Hmmm ... Yes indeed, that's a large part of the problem: my solutions are boring! Fortunately for myself, I don't find them so, but over the years I've come to realize that a lot of people really wallow in the incomprehensible. They like a hint of the supernatural in their theories.

There's no offense meant in that, but it is as if I tried to explain to you that this silly theory of gravity of Newton is, for metaphysical reasons, totally unacceptable ...

Well, yes again! If you look on my website you will find my papers on the Phi-Wave Aether, which do precisely that. Incidentally, Newton himself had ideas about the actual cause of gravity that were quite distinct from his formula for it. For a few years of his life he supported Le Sage theory, and at another stage seems to have had his own pet aether theory, in which gravity was due a pressure gradient. See:

Edwards, Matthew, Pushing Gravity. (Apeiron 2002). http://redshift.vif.com or Roy Keys by mail at 4405 St-Dominique, Montreal, Quebec, H2W 2B2 Canada (or by e-mail at apeiron@vif.com).
[For a brief review seehttp://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/Critiques/Edwards.htm]​

Physicists (you included) know ONLY ONE WAY as of this day to explain ALL observed interactions between EM and matter, and that is quantum electrodynamics. It DOES tell you how a beamsplitter works, how a PDC xtal works, how a photodector works, and when you put this behaviour into your experiments, you do predict correct results.

Hmmm ... but when it comes to the kind of quantum optics experiment's we've been considering, they forget all this and just manipulate wave function symbols. Where can I find the QED model for a real beamsplitter, complete with its layers of dielectric etc, or a real photodetector, with its dark counts and saturation levels and voltage settings? And if you had all this, how would you incorporate it into a complete model for the Bell test experiments, say?

As I pointed out earlier, that doesn't tell us that there cannot be any other theory doing just as well, but AS LONG AS YOU DON'T SHOW US ONE, the point is moot. Of course, what you are doing can be an encouragement for yourself, and who knows, one day... But I personally am affraid you didn't capture the scope of the problem you're trying to tackle.

Have you looked at the couple of papers in which I do give a fair amount of meat? See quant-ph/9912082 and my new paper on homodyne detection etc on my web site.

However, if, for your peace of mind, you want to believe that such a local realist theory is a possibility, then please be my guest. Personally, I wouldn't bet a dime on it, but hey, you can't know what the future will bring.

cheers,
Patrick.

Right, but the bottom line at present is that such a theory is boring. If I'm right, how can science be made interesting to the present generation, who crave excitement? I wonder if their allegiance could be switched? There is a certain addictive power in a theory to which you can relate intuitively and which makes you feel at one with the universe ...

Caroline
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/

 

[vanesch]

Hmmm ... Yes indeed, that's a large part of the problem: my solutions are boring! Fortunately for myself, I don't find them so, but over the years I've come to realize that a lot of people really wallow in the incomprehensible. They like a hint of the supernatural in their theories.

You still miss the point. It is not because your theories are "boring" that they are not interesting, it is because they have far less predictive power, and you need to invent special behaviours of the apparatus each time to open the possibility of your explanation.

You ask for specific descriptions of a photodetector or a beamsplitter ? Sure they exist (of course using approximations and models).
The photo-electric effect is studied in solid state physics (Zzapper who is sometimes on this board knows a lot about it - I much less) and is the basis for photomultipliers.
Multi-layer beam splitters can even be handled classically. You shouldn't point your finger here: QED reduces to classical physics in many cases ; it is called the correspondence principle.
I don't know up to what point there is a good solid state description of PDC, but you can model it with a non-linear dependence of the refractive index on the E-field. The quantification of such a model then leads automatically to the production of entangled pairs.

Of course there is a lot of approximation in all this, but the point is that we know what the thing does before we do the experiment: we don't have to fit its behaviour in order to explain the results, which is what you do.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Caroline Thompson]

You still miss the point. It is not because your theories are "boring" that they are not interesting, it is because they have far less predictive power, and you need to invent special behaviours of the apparatus each time to open the possibility of your explanation.

It's not that I have to "invent" special behaviours, just that I can deduce that they occur and need someone to investigate experimentally my various hypotheses re the behaviour of the instruments before I can complete any of my models.

You ask for specific descriptions of a photodetector or a beamsplitter ? Sure they exist (of course using approximations and models).
The photo-electric effect is studied in solid state physics (Zzapper who is sometimes on this board knows a lot about it - I much less) and is the basis for photomultipliers.

Yes, but if the theory assumes indivisible photons, it must, in my book, be wrong. Given photons, the only way one photomultiplier can differ from another is in the single parameter, "quantum efficiency". Under classical wave theory (and in the real world! ) this is not enough. The detectors need to be modeled using an empircally-determined function. I don't think anyone is pretending that they have a theoretical model that will allow for dark counts and saturation and can be relied upon to do better than an empirically-determined graph when it comes to predicting the actual probability of response for a given "individual photon intensity". Under QM, all photons are the same, so my doubts are meaningless!

I don't know so much about QED. Perhaps it can, if applied carefully, do better than the crude models used in practice in the Bell tests. Indeed, I have for a long time suspected that not all variants of quantum mechanics agree in predicting entanglement, and certainly would not be surprised to find some "quantum theorists" who, at the end of the day, effectively support the local realist model.

Multi-layer beam splitters can even be handled classically. You shouldn't point your finger here: QED reduces to classical physics in many cases ; it is called the correspondence principle.

Yes, I've seen such a model within Stochastic Electrodynamics. I feel this does not quite give the whole story, though.

I don't know up to what point there is a good solid state description of PDC, but you can model it with a non-linear dependence of the refractive index on the E-field. The quantification of such a model then leads automatically to the production of entangled pairs.

I'm distinctly unhappy with the SED model here. It gives what I think is a wrong explanation for a key experiment:

Zou, X Y, Wang, L J and Mandel, L, “Induced coherence and indistinguishability in optical interference”, Physical Review Letters 67, 318
(1991)​

It fails to recognise that, in the special case (the "degenerate case") where the outputs of PDC are exactly half the frequency of the pump, the phases of the outputs are linked to that of the pump and hence to each other.

Of course there is a lot of approximation in all this, but the point is that we know what the thing does before we do the experiment: we don't have to fit its behaviour in order to explain the results, which is what you do.[

Hmmm ... I think the reason you think my approach inferior is that you are failing to recognise that what I'm suggesting is what is done in practice in every experiment! Prelimary runs are performed in order to calibrate the apparatus.

Cheers
Caroline
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/

 

[vanesch]

Hi Caroline,

I think I'm going to limit my discussions with you ; somewhere else you indicated that your goals are different than what is usually accepted as the definition of science (have theories make quantitative predictions), so we can discuss things endlessly and continue to talk next each other.
I don't mean any offense in this. It is just that I will spend tens of hours typing long posts and that that effort will not have had any fruitful effect, on either of us. I'm not interested in seeing arguments which will never lead to quantitative predictions, and I don't think I will learn anything from that. I also don't think you will learn anything from me, as I belong to the deluded scientist lot. That doesn't mean that individual points cannot be addressed, but I will try to cut on the long arguments.

Yes, but if the theory assumes indivisible photons, it must, in my book, be wrong. Given photons, the only way one photomultiplier can differ from another is in the single parameter, "quantum efficiency". Under classical wave theory (and in the real world! ) this is not enough.

 

[Caroline Thompson]

Hi Caroline,

I think I'm going to limit my discussions with you ; somewhere else you indicated that your goals are different than what is usually accepted as the definition of science (have theories make quantitative predictions), so we can discuss things endlessly and continue to talk next each other.
I don't mean any offense in this. It is just that I will spend tens of hours typing long posts and that that effort will not have had any fruitful effect, on either of us. I'm not interested in seeing arguments which will never lead to quantitative predictions, and I don't think I will learn anything from that. I also don't think you will learn anything from me, as I belong to the deluded scientist lot. That doesn't mean that individual points cannot be addressed, but I will try to cut on the long arguments.

Fair enough, and I've realized how things stand. You're aiming at useful formulae whilst I'm aiming at understanding. I'll try and keep quiet on this quantum eraser-type experiment until I've done my next paper.

On the other hand, though, I think you're being a bit unfair, in that my paper on homodyne detection does use my approach to come up with quantitative predictions. [See http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/Papers/Homodyne/Homodyne.htm.]It predicts that the coincidences will, in the ideal case, form a step function, but one that will depend on both detector settings individually, not just their difference. It thus differs in its prediction quite markedly from QM which predicts the usual cos^2 (angle), where the angle is the difference in settings. This predicted difference is much more striking than that for most other Bell test setups.

Does anyone know if they've actually done the experiment yet? If not, why not, since there is no real technical difficulty. The component parts have all been tested.

See:

R. García-Patrón Sánchez, J. Fiurácek , N. J. Cerf , J. Wenger , R. Tualle-Brouri , and Ph. Grangier, “Proposal for a Loophole-Free Bell Test Using Homodyne Detection”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 130409 (2004)
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0403191​

Another almost identical proposal is:

Hyunchul Nha and H. J. Carmichael, “Proposed Test of Quantum Nonlocality for Continuous Variables”, PRL 93, 020401 (2004), http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0406101​

Equally, has this yet been done?

I'll copy this stuff re loophole-free experiments to a new thread as it doesn't really belong here.

Caroline
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/

 

[Schneibster]

Hi,

this discussion is becoming interesting (but long ).

Yes.

I will address the "explanation" part here. Science is the activity of thinking up theories to... to do what ? For a long part in history, it was thought to be the "explanation" of physical phenomena, which came in fact down to reduce them to "intuitively clear - or evident - objects and interactions".

Well, I have a different view. My view is that science is the activity of coming up with descriptions of what happens, and then trying to construct explanations of the facts in those descriptions. The explanations are called "hypotheses," and are subjected to a battery of standard tests, including:

1. Attempted falsification; identification of an element or consequence of the hypothesis that fails to agree with previous measurements or observations, or that is self-contradictory.
2. Attempted prediction and/or postdiction; identification of either known behavior that the hypothesis makes predictions about but is not based upon, or identification and measurement of previously unmeasured behavior that the hypothesis makes predictions about.

Once the hypothesis has been shown to properly predict the initial behavior which it was devised to explain, and to resist falsification, and to predict and/or postdict, which can take quite some time, it is accorded the status of theory. If it is sufficiently fundamental, and has stood the test of time and succeeding theories, it may eventually be accorded the status of a Law of Nature.

However, there turned out to be 2 problems with that: the first one is that what is "intuitively evident" is a matter of opinion. Newton had A LOT OF CONCEPTUAL DIFFICULTIES with his concept of force at a distance. But given the power of the idea, he nevertheless reluctantly used it in his theory on gravity.

What is experimentally evident, on the other hand, is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact. And so this has no relevance to the creation of a scientific hypothesis or its testing to see if it is a valid theory.

I am familiar with the difficulties Newton had with his Theory of Universal Gravitation and the action at a distance that it implied.

The second difficulty is that, when pushed, you would like to have an "explanation" for your "intuitive concepts", using even more fundamental "intuitive concepts", and so on. So where does this stop ?

We do not know; we have never encountered this situation before. However, I can suggest a looser, "squishier" criterion, and a more formal one:

• When the number of assumptions required to support the lowest level theory is a small integer. This is part of the ineffable quality known as "elegance."
• When all of the assumptions required to support the lowest level theory are unfalsifiable.

Generations of scientists were raised within the Newtonian mechanics framework, up to a point where any explanation which reduced a phenomenon to Newtonian mechanics was considered satisfactory.
It is an interesting read to see how people struggled in the 19th century with the concept of electric and magnetic field which had no mechanical explanation. (read the historical introduction in Born and Wolf for that).
The idea of a "field" which was not something related to stress in matter, was inconceivable. In the 20th century, people got used to classical fields which had no mechanistic explanation.

Hmmm, well now, I have used Maxwell's Equations (though not recently) and they seemed relatively basic to me. Charge, permittivity, space, time, and the electric and magnetic fields themselves which are defined by the equations. Current density and charge density are both clearly matters defined in terms of the charges and either space (charge density) or time (current density). Then again, I was always aware of the underlying reality of QED; while I did not and do not know the specific equations that describe the behaviors of photons and electrons, I knew that there was such a description. Not only that, but it is a significant postdiction of QED that it is capable of serving as a basis from which Maxwell's Equations can be derived, so you don't have to take them a priori.

I'm not at all sure what you mean when you speak of "classical fields with no mechanistic explanation." What would you describe the field of quantum field theory as?

I see cranks all the time denying relativity; why is it that they do not deny Maxwell's Equations? I think we both know the answer to that; there are far more electronics engineers than physicists, so the knowledge is far more widespread. Their crankiness would therefore be evident to a much larger group of people, and many people give more credence to EEs than to physicists. I think this is a defect in most peoples' thinking, rather than anything based on objective fact; but the reason for it is that we see the effects of electronics all around us, whereas physics has progressed to the point where people don't feel like they are connected with it.

Now, on the other side of the argument, sure, everyone accepted Newton's Laws and his math and so forth, but the chemists never stopped searching for atoms. And anyone who stopped to think about it for more than a moment knew perfectly well that all of the familiar objects of the world around them had to be made up of simpler things. But when Dalton proposed the atomic theory, it was at first rejected, because the atomic weights were not whole integers. They eventually accepted it nevertheless because it made so many predictions and postdictions, and they couldn't falsify it, but it was a long time before they found the reason for the non-integer atomic weights; it turned out to be a combination of isotopes and the Aston packing fraction.

Quantum theory still has its difficulties, because we cannot reduce them easily to classical field theory and its related concepts.

Again, I say you are tilting at windmills. Of course one cannot explain quantum theory in terms of classical field theory; it is ridiculous on the face of it to think that you can. The only reason I can come up with for you including this statement in this post is that you think somehow, despite all of my previous statements to the contrary, that that is what I am trying to do. I have stated repeatedly that it is not; I have made explanations and descriptions based on well-known and well-accepted interpretations of quantum mechanics. But you keep saying this. What is your problem with this? How can I help you get over this conceptual barrier?

Let me be more clear: this is a strawman argument, in which you misrepresent my position so that you can attack the misrepresentation and claim to have successfully attacked my position.

But does that mean that it is missing an "explanatory power" ? It is a question which is difficult to address, and brings us back to what is science.

No, it is a question that is easy to address. No, quantum mechanics is not missing explanatory power because it gives only probabilities, nor because it cannot be reduced to classical mechanics.

The only inherently missing explanatory power in quantum mechanics is due to its assumptions about the structure of spacetime and about the base characteristics of the charges, and the particles that carry them. As a result of these assumptions, quantum mechanics cannot make definitive statements about the origin of the dimensions, nor about the reasons for the particle masses. Worst of all, it cannot be used to construct a theory of gravity.

Science tries to be different from other human activities by adhering to a strict method: your theories must stand the test of experiment.

No kidding? Gee, I'd never heard of that before!

Simple and evident as this may sound, it implies that trying to distinguish between different theories that yield the same predictions of experiments is not part of a scientific activity.

First of all, prove that they all are of equal utility in every situation. It is common to find that there are multiple different descriptions of events, but that one particular description fits a particular set of events better than another, and to find other situations where that particular description is almost useless. Thermodynamics, electronics, and chemistry are places where this is glaringly obvious, and common enough to be a cliche.

Now let me ask you something: proving that these multiple, equally valid descriptions are in fact equivalent, is that a scientific activity?

Last but not least, if you are speaking of the interpretations, we do not yet know that they are not differentiable. Certainly it is worth examining them closely in the light of new facts to see whether something has taken place that has rendered one or another more probable, or one or another less probable. And if you are telling me that that is not a scientific activity, then I'm going to ask you to rigorously define what you think a scientific activity is, because it has nothing to do with what I think of as such nor with the dictionary definitions of "scientific" or "activity."

In a response to "what do all these different interpretations have in common, that they work, and which one will prove right", I would say that what they have in common is the "scientific" part: they all adhere to the formalism of quantum mechanics, and hence will all yield identical predictions for the outcomes of experiments.

First, this is unproven, and second, you have been arguing against an interpretation of the DCQE that is firmly based on one of these interpretations! And it isn't even an interpretation I wrote; it's the one in the paper.

Of course that doesn't mean that they are all equivalent on the non-scientific footing. But we do not have at our disposal this powerful technique which is empirical verification. As long as there is a "much more intuitive" interpretation than all the others, clearly it is to be favored. But when all of the interpretations are "weird" in some way, there's no way to distinguish them. So it is a matter of personal taste. Like art critique.

Ahhhhhh, but you see, you have failed to state that some of these interpretations make statements about physical facts that may or may not become observable in the future; not only that, but we already know that things we cannot in principle ever observe can have profound effects on the behavior of the world around us. Vacuum fluctuations are a perfect example; they lead to the Lamb shift and the Casimir effect, but even though we can detect the shift and the effect, we still cannot detect zero point energy directly. Analogously, we may be able to make predictions about things we can find physical consequences for in some of these interpretations as a result of those consequences and their being observed or not observed. As a result of this, one or another could be bolstered or denied.

The only way to do this is to examine these interpretations in the light of new evidence as that evidence accrues. Which you are telling me here is a waste of time.

Uh-huh. Pull the other one a while.

- I don't think that there are "measurements" and other processes out there. This is less evident, but what I don't like about it (apart from the vagueness of what is a measurement), is that - as you said somewhere - it makes nature walk on a thin line: locality and causality have to be violated in some way, but only in such a way that you cannot use it. I find that disturbing, in that OR locality and causality are strict principles, OR they aren't. If they aren't, they shouldn't be in special circumstances.

My take on this is that I see nature walking on a thin line all over the place. In fact, so much so that there is a little story about Fitzgerald's original reason for creating what eventually led to Lorentz' equations for the Lorentz Transform. You know, the one about the white knight in that Lewis Carroll book. Friend, from my viewpoint, nature appears to behave like this so often that it is nearly a cliche.

Shall we have more examples? How about the twin paradox in SRT? What about the sensitivity of the predicted characteristics of the universe to the exact value of the fine structure constant? What about the precise and interrelated values of the permittivity of the vacuum, and the speed of light? There are many more of these extremely constrained behaviors. So it comes naturally and intuitively to me to believe that nature generally behaves in this way, constraining things that have much wider-ranging implications to a very small part of the "possible" behavior, and only expressing the wider behavior under special circumstances.

- Finally, on a philosophical side, the only thing you really know is your conscious existence (in the style "I think, therefore I am"). So a theory that only explains your conscious observation of the universe, is, although the strict minimum, enough as a scientific theory.

Our feelings on the first subject are nearly identical. However, I have taken an additional step: I assume that what I sense is real, and that the other creatures that surround me are real as well. From this postulate comes not only my stance on the reality of experimental results, but my ethics as well.

But I don't take this VERY seriously, because it is only a temporary interpretation, as long as quantum mechanics holds, in its current form. I will adapt my interpretation to whatever theory comes after quantum theory. I only think that it will not become conceptually simpler, but more involved...

I haven't ever found my postulates to be falsifiable, and therefore don't accept them as anything that requires adaptation. My conclusions based on them, and on evidence, are, however, falsifiable, and therefore subject to change. I think you left a few steps out in this analysis, but it is not the subject of this thread, so I'll leave it be.

As for now, I find this explanation, although weird for sure, satisfying.
Also, it is my own, personal view, adapted to my mindset. Others may prefer other things. As I said, it is like the appreciation of art: it is personal. And it is not science in the strict term.

cheers,
Patrick.

Cool. As you can see, I have done some thinking of my own.

Can I get an answer to my questions now?

 

[Schneibster]

Well, dang it, I went and analyzed that experiment, and it turns out that the residual interference is because they used a liquid crystal-based variable delay, and it takes non-zero time to transition between states. This risetime creates the residual interference, not any quantum effect.

Oh, well.

 

[vanesch]

Well, I have a different view. My view is that science is the activity of coming up with descriptions of what happens, and then trying to construct explanations of the facts in those descriptions.

You use different words, but in essence we agree: "a description of what happens" can, to me, be completely mathematical. Only I call that "a theory". It can, for instance, be, that the state of "the world" is a vector in Hilbert space, and that "my eyes" are hermitean operators. What's inherently wrong with that ?
The thing I call my car is then a shorthand for a subspace in that Hilbertspace. A bit abstract, but a perfectly good "explanation", no ?

What is experimentally evident, on the other hand, is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact. And so this has no relevance to the creation of a scientific hypothesis or its testing to see if it is a valid theory.

Here, we differ fundamentally. I don't think that there is anything "experimentally evident". There are just "observations", and it is us who make up a story out of that. That story can change with the wind, and they only make sense within the framework of a theory. Without theory, there's no link between observations, they are just raw impressions, colors, sounds...

Hmmm, well now, I have used Maxwell's Equations (though not recently) and they seemed relatively basic to me. Charge, permittivity, space, time, and the electric and magnetic fields themselves which are defined by the equations.

I was talking about these fields themselves E, and B. They are "vectors in each point in space", and that was inconceivable for people in the 19th century, because vectors, that had only a sense as material displacements. So some matter had to displace, and then you had vectors.
What is this crazy idea of an abstract function from R^3 to R^3 ?? What was the E-field made of ?

I'm not at all sure what you mean when you speak of "classical fields with no mechanistic explanation." What would you describe the field of quantum field theory as?

An operator over Fock space.

Again, I say you are tilting at windmills. Of course one cannot explain quantum theory in terms of classical field theory; it is ridiculous on the face of it to think that you can. The only reason I can come up with for you including this statement in this post is that you think somehow, despite all of my previous statements to the contrary, that that is what I am trying to do.

No, I'm not doing that. I'm only wondering what you call "an explanation", and I thought that you wanted to base that on something "intuitively clear", such as an underlying mechanism or so, because it is only that which is given by our intuition.

I don't know what's wrong in saying that the real universe, out there, is a vector in a Hilbert space. It has been an Euclidean space with points in it, it has been 4-dim manifold and its associated fibre bundle (that's classical field theory), so why for a change can't it be a vector in a Hilbert space ?

Now, you are going to say that that is the MATHEMATICAL FORMALISM, but not the "story". I'm trying to point out that I don't know what's the difference between the story and the formalism. That the essence IS the mathematical formalism, and that you can then invent a few stories that can go with it. Of course, every century or so, the formalism changes, and the story changes. It will change again. That's the progress of science. It also tells you that your story isn't worth a ****, because it will not be around anymore in 100 years.
So Newton's dust points in Euclidean space were not right. The 4-dim manifold isn't right. And the hilbert space vector will not be right. But for the moment, that's what's working, so that's the story I tell myself.

I have stated repeatedly that it is not; I have made explanations and descriptions based on well-known and well-accepted interpretations of quantum mechanics. But you keep saying this. What is your problem with this? How can I help you get over this conceptual barrier?

Let me be more clear: this is a strawman argument, in which you misrepresent my position so that you can attack the misrepresentation and claim to have successfully attacked my position.

I'm not attacking any position. It is just that you are complaining that quantum theory is a "formalism" but that it lacks an "explanation". Naively, I don't see what can be an explanation outside of the classical realm, because we have no intuition outside of that realm. So what's wrong with taking the formalism as the explanation ?
That's btw exactly what I do: my personal "interpretation" is that the universe IS a vector in hilbert space which evolves according to a unitary transformation, and that the Born rule must be applied when I observe something.

The only inherently missing explanatory power in quantum mechanics is due to its assumptions about the structure of spacetime and about the base characteristics of the charges, and the particles that carry them. As a result of these assumptions, quantum mechanics cannot make definitive statements about the origin of the dimensions, nor about the reasons for the particle masses. Worst of all, it cannot be used to construct a theory of gravity.

You apparently didn't see my message in another thread where I told you exactly that: these are indeed the big questions theoretical physicists are working on for the last 2 or 3 decennia. And out of it will come (or not) the next theory (in vogue are superstring theory and loop quantum gravity).
Of course that will "explain" our current theories. But we don't have them yet. Probably it will radically alter the interpretation I give now to QM. Just as QM radically alters the interpretation that is given to Newton's theory.

First of all, prove that they all are of equal utility in every situation. It is common to find that there are multiple different descriptions of events, but that one particular description fits a particular set of events better than another, and to find other situations where that particular description is almost useless. Thermodynamics, electronics, and chemistry are places where this is glaringly obvious, and common enough to be a cliche.

Now let me ask you something: proving that these multiple, equally valid descriptions are in fact equivalent, is that a scientific activity?

It is a word's game: if they are equivalent in all their predictions, then they are called an "interpretation" of the same theory. If they are not, they are called different theories. By definition, distinguishing interpretations is not science per se. What can of course be the case, is that certain interpretations give rise, by induction and extrapolation, to new theories, which CAN differ. If these new theories are successful, then you can in a way "keep" that explanation, and it probably will become the favored interpretation of the former theory.

But this didn't happen in the past. The "spacetime" manifold in GR wasn't the extention of some older interpretation of classical physics, but a new idea, and the Hilbert space stuff wasn't really an extension from a former idea either: it was radically different.

Last but not least, if you are speaking of the interpretations, we do not yet know that they are not differentiable. Certainly it is worth examining them closely in the light of new facts to see whether something has taken place that has rendered one or another more probable, or one or another less probable. And if you are telling me that that is not a scientific activity, then I'm going to ask you to rigorously define what you think a scientific activity is, because it has nothing to do with what I think of as such nor with the dictionary definitions of "scientific" or "activity."

By definition, interpretations of a theory don't change anything to the formalism of the theory, and hence to the quantitative predictions of outcomes of measurements. So what could possibly render one more probable than another ?

Let me give you a silly example:
Consider Newtonian mechanics, and it is stated that space is 3-dimensional and Euclidean. Now, imagine that I give you an alternative interpretation in which space is actually 5-dimensional, Riemanian (3+,2-) but that the two coordinates which aren't Euclidean are always equal to 0, for everything.
This interpretation is different from the standard interpretation: indeed, space around us is 5-dimensional and not 3-dim, and on top of that there seems to be a funny thing that constrains us to have these 4th and 5th coordinate equal to 0. What a strange world view !
Now tell me, shall we go and do experiments to see which one is favored ? Or is there little chance to distinguish both interpretations by experiment ?

First, this is unproven, and second, you have been arguing against an interpretation of the DCQE that is firmly based on one of these interpretations! And it isn't even an interpretation I wrote; it's the one in the paper.

It is only because in order to have this DCQE, you have to do violence to strict quantum theory. Indeed, nowhere in the strict sense of quantum theory it is stated that you can apply Born's rule in the middle of your experiment. You normally only apply Born's rule at the end.
Now, you CAN interpret the DCQE the way they do it. I wanted to point out that you don't have to do it that way, and that you are not obliged to think that things here change because you there decide, or not, to measure something or not. I found that remark, by itself, enlightening. That was maybe pretentious on my part.

Ahhhhhh, but you see, you have failed to state that some of these interpretations make statements about physical facts that may or may not become observable in the future;

If that's the case, you're not talking about two interpretations of a same theory, but about two different theories.

not only that, but we already know that things we cannot in principle ever observe can have profound effects on the behavior of the world around us. Vacuum fluctuations are a perfect example; they lead to the Lamb shift and the Casimir effect, but even though we can detect the shift and the effect, we still cannot detect zero point energy directly.

I'm not talking about things which are "directly observable", I'm talking about modifying, or not, the mathematical machinery that cranks out predictions for measurements: if you do not change that formalism, clearly, you'll get out, in all circumstances, the same numbers, so the same predictions. You're dealing with an interpretation.
If you change the formalism, you have a different theory. It is open to scientific enquiry now.

Analogously, we may be able to make predictions about things we can find physical consequences for in some of these interpretations as a result of those consequences and their being observed or not observed. As a result of this, one or another could be bolstered or denied.

No, because if that's the case, you're dealing with different theories.

Shall we have more examples? How about the twin paradox in SRT? What about the sensitivity of the predicted characteristics of the universe to the exact value of the fine structure constant? What about the precise and interrelated values of the permittivity of the vacuum, and the speed of light? There are many more of these extremely constrained behaviors. So it comes naturally and intuitively to me to believe that nature generally behaves in this way, constraining things that have much wider-ranging implications to a very small part of the "possible" behavior, and only expressing the wider behavior under special circumstances.

Yes, of course. So what you are saying is that there must be a deeper theory beyond what we have today. Big deal. OF COURSE ! That's what theorists try to do all day, since about 20 years ! But you can hardly say, that, say, superstring theory is an interpretation of quantum mechanics :-)

Our feelings on the first subject are nearly identical. However, I have taken an additional step: I assume that what I sense is real, and that the other creatures that surround me are real as well. From this postulate comes not only my stance on the reality of experimental results, but my ethics as well.

I didn't say that the world out there is not "real" in a certain sense. But its reality may be much stranger than our familiar perception of it indicates. Think about it: it is quite difficult to argue that the state of the "real" world IS NOT a vector in Hilbert space! In its full Platonic sense. Until the next theory comes along.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Schneibster]

We're awfully close. This is almost an argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

 

[vanesch]

We're awfully close. This is almost an argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

In a way you are right that discussing about different interpretations or explanations of a mathematical formalism comes down to this

But do YOU know how many angels can danse on the head of a pin ? I always wondered if that didn't depend exactly on what is a pin ?

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Schneibster]

You use different words, but in essence we agree: "a description of what happens" can, to me, be completely mathematical. Only I call that "a theory".

I'm not sure we're talking in quite the same terms of "description." For instance, it is a description to say that the rock falls at 32 feet per second per second. This is not theory; it is observable, measureable fact. That is what I mean by "description of what happens." Our first theory is Newton's Second Law; F=ma. We then postulate a force that makes the rock fall that way. Next, we make another theory: TUG, where we have this "force of gravitation" thingie that works as F(g) = gmm'/d^2. Now we have not only described the experimental behavior of the rock, but also the behavior of this "force" thingie. Finally (so far), we wind up with GRT, which describes the "force of gravity" thingie as a result of curvature of spacetime. To get beyond that level of description, and describe the cause of the curvature, we will need a quantum field theory of gravity, which is a little difficult considering we have a field theory of gravity but no quantum theory of gravity.

It can, for instance, be, that the state of "the world" is a vector in Hilbert space, and that "my eyes" are hermitean operators. What's inherently wrong with that ?
The thing I call my car is then a shorthand for a subspace in that Hilbertspace. A bit abstract, but a perfectly good "explanation", no ?

Heh, sure. Pretty damn big Hilbert space, though.

Here, we differ fundamentally. I don't think that there is anything "experimentally evident". There are just "observations", and it is us who make up a story out of that. That story can change with the wind, and they only make sense within the framework of a theory. Without theory, there's no link between observations, they are just raw impressions, colors, sounds...

How about that rock? Everybody's observation better have it accelerating at 32 feet per second per second, or we're going to start questioning some basic assumptions. "Were you in orbit? On another planet?" So, how is it not "experimentally evident" from some pretty basic experiments that the force of gravity is quantified as 9.8m/s? Given some basic assumptions, like on the surface of earth, etc., we are all going to observe the same things.

I was talking about these fields themselves E, and B. They are "vectors in each point in space", and that was inconceivable for people in the 19th century, because vectors, that had only a sense as material displacements. So some matter had to displace, and then you had vectors.
What is this crazy idea of an abstract function from R^3 to R^3 ?? What was the E-field made of ?

I get your point, but I have to point out that I myself do not believe that a field itself has an independent physical existence. The exchange of virtual quanta causes the change in the action that we generalize as a "field." So it is not "action at a distance" after all, is it?

Now, you are going to say that that is the MATHEMATICAL FORMALISM, but not the "story". I'm trying to point out that I don't know what's the difference between the story and the formalism.

This is a very slippery point, isn't it?

Let's see if we can get some guidance on these matters from where we started. Well, what do you know- I told you that your description was about the beginning and end, not about the middle. And that a description need only tell about the beginning and end, but that an explanation needs to tell what is happening in the middle. The basis of this argument was your first maintaining that the only true information that is available is the correlations at the end of the experiment, and second that the projection postulate must not be applied until after the end of the experiment. Both of which, by the way, I still disagree with.

That the essence IS the mathematical formalism, and that you can then invent a few stories that can go with it.

Nope- the math is just another language to describe it with!

Of course, every century or so, the formalism changes, and the story changes. It will change again. That's the progress of science. It also tells you that your story isn't worth a ****, because it will not be around anymore in 100 years.

I disagree, and present the story of the rock as evidence.

I'm not attacking any position. It is just that you are complaining that quantum theory is a "formalism" but that it lacks an "explanation".

No, that is the box you have been trying to stuff me into. I never said that it is a formalism, and I also never said it lacks an explanation; I said you are trying to treat any explanation as "not physics" when in fact it is physics.

Naively, I don't see what can be an explanation outside of the classical realm, because we have no intuition outside of that realm. So what's wrong with taking the formalism as the explanation ?

That's because you have excluded from "explanation" any description whose story does not agree with classical causality and therefore any and all descriptions of quantum mechanics. QM does not always behave according to classical causality, and so a proper explanation of it cannot either.

I am very much against the (IMO) pure fiction that it is impossible to understand quantum physics. Feynman started that in the 1960s, and it was no more true then than it is now. It is possible to tell a complete and consistent story about what happens in quantum mechanics; you just have to allow what would ordinarily be considered inconsistencies if it were a story of a classical event.

You apparently didn't see my message in another thread where I told you exactly that: these are indeed the big questions theoretical physicists are working on for the last 2 or 3 decennia. And out of it will come (or not) the next theory (in vogue are superstring theory and loop quantum gravity).
Of course that will "explain" our current theories. But we don't have them yet. Probably it will radically alter the interpretation I give now to QM. Just as QM radically alters the interpretation that is given to Newton's theory.

See, when you stay stuff like this, I don't really think you have thought it all the way through. QM doesn't alter the motions of macroscopic objects. Relativity does- but only has a measurable effect on objects that are moving very fast. So Newtonian mechanics are still applicable.

It is a word's game: if they are equivalent in all their predictions, then they are called an "interpretation" of the same theory. If they are not, they are called different theories. By definition, distinguishing interpretations is not science per se. What can of course be the case, is that certain interpretations give rise, by induction and extrapolation, to new theories, which CAN differ. If these new theories are successful, then you can in a way "keep" that explanation, and it probably will become the favored interpretation of the former theory.

As our knowledge pushes forward, formerly indistinguishable interpretations may become distinguishable. Worthwhile to keep an eye on things IMO.

Furthermore, you did not answer the question I actually asked; look at it again, and look at your answer. The question you answered was, "is distinguishing interpretations science?" but the question I asked was, "is proving that different interpretations are equivalent science?"

But this didn't happen in the past. The "spacetime" manifold in GR wasn't the extention of some older interpretation of classical physics, but a new idea, and the Hilbert space stuff wasn't really an extension from a former idea either: it was radically different.

Actually, it has happened often in the past. Proving that the new theory gives the same results as the old theory in most areas is generally a major industry once the new theory is established. GRT may be different in its methods from Newton's Laws; but the results are mostly the same unless you go fast or deal with gravity. There's always a startling and generally unheralded new idea at the core, but it has to agree with all the old experiments. And if you look at the crop of interpretations, you'll find that many of them contain just these sorts of elements.

For another example, how about matrix mechanics and wave mechanics? It doesn't make sense to say that one or the other is "correct," so it is not an example in that regard; but it does make sense to say that proving that the two are the same is science. In fact, that proof was a major accomplishment of Schroedinger's.

By definition, interpretations of a theory don't change anything to the formalism of the theory, and hence to the quantitative predictions of outcomes of measurements. So what could possibly render one more probable than another ?

New information or new ways of looking at the problem. After all, Bell didn't invent his inequality the day after EPR proposed their experiment- it took a couple decades, didn't it?

It is only because in order to have this DCQE, you have to do violence to strict quantum theory. Indeed, nowhere in the strict sense of quantum theory it is stated that you can apply Born's rule in the middle of your experiment. You normally only apply Born's rule at the end.

No, you normally apply Born's rule at any time where there is an emission or absorption of a quantum. This is a central error in your analysis.

I have come across your analysis in the thread "how com my shoes where I left em last night," and I disagree with your analysis there; I will quote from The Infamous Boundary, David Wick, 1995, Copernicus, chapter 4, page 35: "Although Schroedinger's wave evolves continuously and deterministically for most of the time, during the emission or absorption of light Bohr's 'quantum jumps' nevertheless occur." In an SPDC, the mechanism by which the idler and signal photons are created involves emission and absorption of the photon. Thus, we apply Born's rule at that point, and then go on calculating probabilities from there.

Now, you CAN interpret the DCQE the way they do it. I wanted to point out that you don't have to do it that way, and that you are not obliged to think that things here change because you there decide, or not, to measure something or not. I found that remark, by itself, enlightening. That was maybe pretentious on my part.

Well, that clears a lot of things up. Your statements didn't sound to me like you admitted the possibility that there was any valid interpretation but the one you were using, and I simply didn't buy that.

If that's the case, you're not talking about two interpretations of a same theory, but about two different theories.

We don't yet know that; it depends on experimental results and analyses that are not yet available. In fact, we could conceivably complete an analysis ourselves and come to a conclusion that no one else has (although I admit it is unlikely), and based on that an experiment might be performed. In other words, right now some of these interpretations are hypotheses; some formally, some informally, and some not really anything but rationalizations. In the light of further information, it is possible that one or another might become more or less probable.

I think that your thinking is incomplete; you have a tendency to cut off valid avenues of inquiry for the sake of clarity, and this is a bad habit because as a result there are many potentially fruitful avenues you will not explore. I think that you should not be so dogmatic.

I'm not talking about things which are "directly observable", I'm talking about modifying, or not, the mathematical machinery that cranks out predictions for measurements: if you do not change that formalism, clearly, you'll get out, in all circumstances, the same numbers, so the same predictions. You're dealing with an interpretation.
If you change the formalism, you have a different theory. It is open to scientific enquiry now.

Well, without wishing to be rude, merely forthright, I have to ask who the hell told you? Because if it wasn't God himself, then you just plain flat DO NOT KNOW THAT!

Take a look at Jack Cramer's Transactional Interpretation. It seems a bit dense and carefully crafted, not to mention kind of a little bit mathematical and connected with existing mathematical physics, to be an "interpretation" the way you mean it. While it is not falsifiable given our current state of knowledge, I can see several ways in which it could become falsifiable. Other interpretations share these characteristics, though not all of them. My tendency is to dismiss the ones that do not, since I cannot see circumstances under which they could become falsifiable.

I think you have "collapsed the wave function of the interpretations" too early! ;)

No, because if that's the case, you're dealing with different theories.

And once again, you cannot possibly know that.

 

[vanesch]

This discussion is not going to have an end. So I think I'll stop here...

 

[vanesch]

I will quote from The Infamous Boundary, David Wick, 1995, Copernicus, chapter 4, page 35: "Although Schroedinger's wave evolves continuously and deterministically for most of the time, during the emission or absorption of light Bohr's 'quantum jumps' nevertheless occur."

Well, I said I was going to stop, but I cannot let this pass :-)
Wick is of course bluntly wrong here. If he were right, then lasers wouldn't work, for instance. But also, mirrors, lenses etc... There wouldn't be coherent phonon-photon scattering (or, what we do here, phonon-neutron scattering).


cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Schneibster]

Wick is of course bluntly wrong here. If he were right, then lasers wouldn't work, for instance. But also, mirrors, lenses etc... There wouldn't be coherent phonon-photon scattering (or, what we do here, phonon-neutron scattering).

I'm not sure I follow that at all. Why would lasers not work? Not to mention mirrors and lenses.

I should point out that phonons are an epiphenomenon that arises from analysis of pressure waves in solids; they have as much and as little real existence as "holes" in a semiconductor. I do not know enough to do the analysis myself, but I am confident that a quantum-mechanical interaction between the members of the crystal via their van der Waals forces is responsible for periodic changes in the probability distributions of the electrons in the shells of the atoms, and the interaction and its periodicity are due to the pressure waves.

To put this another way, the scattering matrix of a photon from an atom at the peak of the pressure wave is different from the scattering matrix of a photon from an atom at the trough, and we can mathematically represent this difference using the contrivance called the phonon. It is then possible to account for "photon-phonon scattering" as this difference in the matrix. But the phonon has no real existence, just as the "hole" does not.

 

[Schneibster]

And, to top it all off, I still haven't any answers to my questions!

 

[vanesch]

I'm not sure I follow that at all. Why would lasers not work?

Because in a laser, the "quantum jump" when an atom emits a photon, has to be "in phase" with the incoming photon (that's stimulated emission). If, at that moment, you apply the Born rule, there's no way to preserve this phase relationship between the incoming and the emitted photon.


cheers,
patrick.

 

[Schneibster]

Because in a laser, the "quantum jump" when an atom emits a photon, has to be "in phase" with the incoming photon (that's stimulated emission).

OK, yes, I'm familiar with that.

If, at that moment, you apply the Born rule, there's no way to preserve this phase relationship between the incoming and the emitted photon.

This I don't get.

The phase of the outgoing photon is determined by the phase of the emitting electron- and that phase is a probability function. If the phase of the electron at the point of the application of Born's rule decoheres into the right phase to match the phase of the incoming photon which also has decohered and exhibited a phase due to interaction with the electron, then the probability of creating an outgoing photon is much higher than it normally is; if not, then it is the normal probability. The photon so emitted is in phase with the triggering photon. At least, that was my understanding of the effect of stimulated emission.

As the pulse bounces back and forth along the material between the silvered ends, many individual photons pass many electrons in many different phases- and whenever they match, this higher probability exists. Thus, as the pulse bounces, it gathers more and more photons, as more and more electrons give up their excited states. Eventually, the probability of passing the half-silvered end of the laser grows high enough that the pulse exits.

So I don't see how you can say that applying Born's rule at the point where the incoming photon makes a measurement of the phase of the electron would cause the laser not to work.

 

[vanesch]

The phase of the outgoing photon is determined by the phase of the emitting electron- and that phase is a probability function.

Can you explain me what you mean by "the phase of the outgoing photon" outside of a superposition ?? Normally, it is the (relative) complex factor in a superposition, but I don't know what it means outside of it (once you have probabilities). Keeping these phase relations is what superposition is all about (and which is eliminated by the Born rule).

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Schneibster]

Can you explain me what you mean by "the phase of the outgoing photon" outside of a superposition ?? Normally, it is the (relative) complex factor in a superposition, but I don't know what it means outside of it (once you have probabilities). Keeping these phase relations is what superposition is all about (and which is eliminated by the Born rule).

cheers,
Patrick.

Phase means the relationship of two waves to one another. "In phase" means that the phase angle of the waves in time is zero; "out of phase" means it is not. "Opposite phase" means that the phase angle is 180 degrees (or if you prefer, pi radians), and the waves cancel.

An electron and photon that are not interacting cannot have an actual phase, because they do not have actual positions, which means that the times of the peaks and troughs of their waves cannot be determined; this is the meaning of the energy/time uncertainty conjugation. (Yes, yes, I know, they are both actually not plane waves, but that is the best way to describe it intuitively; the math works out the same in any case, and in phase is in phase whether it is a toy plane wave or a real-world elliptical wave.) However, at the point where they interact, they must have a definite position so that they can have a definite phase. This phase is essential to the outcome of the interaction. We normally think in terms of the probability distribution, and use a scattering matrix, but there is a real phase in there between the photon and electron.

At the point where the Born rule is applied, rather than having a probability distribution that describes the possible phases between the electron and incoming photon, the photon and the electron have actual positions, which means that their waves also have an actual phase relationship between them, rather than a probability distribution of phases. If that phase relationship is that they are making a peak at the same time, then they are in phase. If this is the case, then the probability of the electron to release a photon is altered, that is, increased; and if the electron emits a photon, that photon will be in phase with the incoming photon. The fact that the electron and photon have different wavelengths makes this phase relationship a fleeting thing; and the fact that it must happen "on the fly" as the incoming photon breezes by makes it even more ephemeral; nevertheless, it happens, as we well know because lasers work.

One of the characteristics of laser light is that it is coherent; from the optical point of view this means that it is not only monochromatic, but monophasic. This is implicit in the term "coherent," and in the Law of Spin and Statistics for bosons which are occupying the same quantum state. The addition in probabilities under this law that makes bosons more likely to occupy the same quantum state is (if I understand stimulated emission correctly) the factor that causes the electron to be more likely to emit a photon if it will be in phase with the incoming photon. How exactly did you expect that laser light got monophasic?

What you are talking about is the "phase" of the mixing angles of the eigenvalues in two eigenstates (or at least that is how I have understood this use of phase when speaking of superpositions). What I am talking about is the actual, real, physical phase angle between the wave of the electron and the wave of the photon; and since neither position can have an actual value unless they interact, and therefore they cannot have an actual, real, physical phase, I had thought that you would understand that the Born rule must be applied at that point in order that their phase can be definite and have the observed physical consequence of stimulated emission if it is zero.

 

[vanesch]

Phase means the relationship of two waves to one another. "In phase" means that the phase angle of the waves in time is zero; "out of phase" means it is not. "Opposite phase" means that the phase angle is 180 degrees (or if you prefer, pi radians), and the waves cancel.
[...]

You are mixing up semiclassical and quantum descriptions, which do not allow to show when Born's rule can be applied. But I came to realize that the issue is much more complicated than I thought of.
I quickly tried to work it out, and then I realized that there is only one way to make sense to the "coherent emission of a photon by stimulated emission", and that is by throwing the full machinery of QED on it, and see how an incoming coherent state (that's the only way to make a link between the classical phase of an EM wave and the photon description) interacts with an excited model atom (a 2-level system please, not a real atom!)
You feel in your bones that it will be full of superpositions , but I got stuck trying to work it out, and I'm now reading up on it in Mandel and Wolf.
I'll come back to the issue when I cleared it out myself.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[JesseM]

An electron and photon that are not interacting cannot have an actual phase, because they do not have actual positions, which means that the times of the peaks and troughs of their waves cannot be determined; this is the meaning of the energy/time uncertainty conjugation.

Are you sure about this? I had thought the peaks and troughs were attributes of the wavefunction, not actual observable quantities like position and momentum, so there wouldn't be any uncertainty in the positions of maximum and minimum amplitude. But that's just how it works in nonrelativistic QM, it's possible things could work differently in quantum field theory. But if you think they do, are you basing this on any source or is it just your own inference?