How does QFT handle non-locality?

  • Thread starter Thread starter PFfan01
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Non-locality Qft
  • #101
atyy said:
Yes, but that is not a problem since Copenhagen acknowledges that it needs magical fairies.
Okay, if you acknowledge that you have a problem it is not a problem any more?.
atyy said:
Similarly, major proponents of MWI acknowledge that it has problems.
Wait, the acknowledgment trick is fine for collapses, but not for MWI?
atyy said:
Copenhagen is consensus in the sense that if these other interpretations work, then they must derive Copenhagen.
That is not what "consensus" means at all.

Sorry, this discussion is getting too ridiculous, I'm out.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
  • #102
mfb said:
Okay, if you acknowledge that you have a problem it is not a problem any more?.

Yes, because the problem is not a technical problem, ie. the theory makes sense if there are magical fairies. Also, the magical fairies have been observed.

mfb said:
Wait, the acknowledgment trick is fine for collapses, but not for MWI?

In MWI the problems are technical, it is not clear whether any magical fairies can save MWI.

mfb said:
That is not what "consensus" means at all.

Sorry, this discussion is getting too ridiculous, I'm out.

One again, I am only defending textbook QM. If you are right, then there is no QM at all.
 
  • #103
atyy said:
There is a consensus interpretation, and it involves collapse. This is why the textbooks have collapse. Can you give a consensus source for any interpretation without a collapse?
There is, indeed, a consensus that collapse is a useful bookkeeping tool. However, there is no consensus whether the collapse is anything more than that.
 
  • Like
Likes atyy
  • #104
Shyan said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I understand from this is that when we send two spins to Alice and Bob, Alice is left with a spin in a state described by the density matrix ## \rho_A=\frac{1}{2}(|\downarrow\rangle\langle \downarrow |+|\uparrow\rangle\langle \uparrow |) ## regardless of the fact that Bob has made any measurement or not. When a system is in such a state, we know that there is no axis that when Alice measures her spin along that axis, she gets +1 with certainty. So if we do this experiment over and over again, she'll get 50-50 distribution of ups and downs for any axis she chooses. But if collapse is correct, after Bob has measured his spin, Alice's spin will end up in one of the states ## |\uparrow \rangle ## or ## |\downarrow \rangle ##, which means if we do this experiment over and over again, Alice is able to find an axis that continues to give her the same result +1 every time she measures her spin. This seems to me an experimental way to settle the issue whether collapse is really there or not, or maybe I'm just misunderstanding something!(Or maybe its not that much easy to say whether there exists such an axis as described above or not!)
I'd formulate the first sentence slightly differently: We prepare a spin-entangled two-particle state, and A and B at (perhaps far) distant locations measure a spin component of the particles.

No matter what Alice measures, without communicating with Bob there is no way for her predicting which outcome her spin-component measurement will have, regardless of the orientation of her Stern-Gerlach apparatus. If both experimenters take an accurate record of the time of their spin measurements and if they orient their SG apparati in the same direction they will find a 100% correlation when comparing their measurement protocols. It doesn't matter in which temporal order they do their measurements (they could be even spacelike separated, i.e., not having any time order at all). For me that's a clear indication that the local measurements of the spins at A's and B's places do not affect each other but that the correlation of the outcome of spin-component measurements is inherent in the preparation of the two-particle state in the given entangled way, and it's not possible to empirically justify or disprove the claim that a state collapse has occured.

Of course, you have to perform the experiment very often, because the predictions of QT are probabilistic, and this you can test empirically only by preparing a lot of such particle pairs stochastically independently and perform the measurement on a sufficiently large ensemble to get the statistical significance you want (for discovery in the HEP community you must aim for at least ##5 \sigma## significance before you can cry "heureka").
 
Back
Top