RUTA
Science Advisor
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You guys post much faster than I can keep up with, but let me jump in here and use this post to make my point again. The mystery is, as DrChinese states, the existence of spacelike separated correlations that violate Bell’s inequality to 8 sigma (that’s the largest I’ve seen anyway) as predicted by QFT. Bell stated famously that ”correlations cry out for explanation.” While QFT predicts these Bell-inequality-violating correlations, QFT is just a mathematical formalism. So, unless you accept QFT’s mathematical description of the correlations as “explanatory,” QFT doesn’t solve the mystery, it only predicts it. Here is a nice quote from Fuchs in 2016:DrChinese said:I didn't bring up "acausal"; you did in your post #91. So I can't really respond to this. All I said was:
There MUST be some channel of some kind of communication, influence, selection or otherwise between Alice's setting or particle, and Bob's setting or particle. That being the mystery "channel" we seek to solve.
I have no idea what that is or looks like, and don't pretend I do (like some people). But how you can read that as me asserting anything more than the obvious, as embodied by the words of Weinberg (or Zeilinger or a hundred others who can state the mystery better than I) - I don't follow your reasoning. The combination of perfect correlations and violation of Bell Inequalities in hundreds of experiments point to the same mystery: quantum nonlocality exists and remains unexplained*.*Beyond the predictions of QM themselves. I am unaware of any predictions QFT makes on entanglement that go beyond QM, but that probably is a reflection of my ignorance on QFT... which is why I am participating here.
And Smolin in 2020:Compare [quantum mechanics] to one of our other great physical theories, special relativity. One could make the statement of it in terms of some very crisp and clear physical principles: The speed of light is constant in all inertial frames, and the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames. And it struck me that if we couldn't take the structure of quantum theory and change it from this very overt mathematical speak -- something that didn't look to have much physical content at all, in a way that anyone could identify with some kind of physical principle -- if we couldn't turn that into something like this, then the debate would go on forever and ever. And it seemed like a worthwhile exercise to try to reduce the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics to some crisp physical statements.
Both of these quotes evidence the frustration of the foundations community with a debate that shows no sign of ever ending.So, my conclusion is that we need to back off from our models, postpone conjectures about constituents, and begin again by talking about principles.