ZapperZ said:
Tell him that you can show him a paper in which in just ONE single interaction, the "connection", i.e. the entanglement, can be completely lost. Tell him that he only learned about one aspect of quantum entanglement, without understanding how DIFFICULT it is to maintain such entanglement. In QM, we call such an effect as decoherence. There have been many experiments that showed that our classical world evolves out of such decoherence. When that occurs, you've essentially lost the original coherent information, such as entanglement.
I don't think this description is entirely accurate. I'm no expert on decoherence, but as I see it, it's the "coherence" of the superposition that is lost, precisely
because the system is getting more and more entangled with the environment. So decoherence seems to
support the "everything is connected part" of this guy's beliefs.
I would instead focus on the fact that entanglement can't be used to send even one bit of information, unless you send some information by classical means as well.
ZapperZ said:
There have been zero valid evidence for consciousness/thought affecting reality, and no mechanism for it has been proposed and tested.
This is also a good thing to focus on.
peteratcam said:
Well more I meant that you come to know of things by interacting with them, and in doing so entangle yourself with them. It follows that everything (literally all things which you have become aware of through interaction in someway) are correlated/connected.
I don't really know what the quantum mystic thinks from the brief description we got: "Entanglement-He interprets it as everything being "connected", whatever that means."
As I see it, the claim that "everything is connected" is essentially true, because it's very hard to isolate a system from its environment. So I wouldn't try to debunk that, and instead explain to him that entanglement can't be used to send information without also sending information by some other means. These things are however difficult to understand, so you may have a hard time learning them yourself, and an even harder time trying to get him to learn them.
If you're going to try to set him straight, you should probably focus on something else. For example, he's probably interested in entanglement because he believes it can explain telepathy and that kind of stuff. Why not just explain that if a person has a paranormal ability, then by definition of "ability", it must be possible to design a test in which a person with such an ability will perform better than people without the ability?
The best way to test an ability is to have the subject answer multiple-choice questions that have been randomized so that all answers are equally likely. You can then calculate the probability to get a certain number of correct answers. Even if the person only claims to be able to answer a certain yes/no question with 60% accuracy, you can make sure that there's a one in a million chance that he will get the required percentage of correct answers by including a large enough number of questions in the test. The number of questions should be decided in advance. The tests should also be performed double blind, i.e. in addition to not telling them the correct answers before they have given you their answers, you also make sure that no one who knows the correct answers is present when the test is done.
The fact that people who claim to have paranormal abilities always fail in tests of this type is a very good reason to believe that they don't have abilities at all. If you can get him to understand that, he should snap out of the nonsense fairly quickly. But my guess is that he will stubbornly refuse to even talk about it. That's how they preserve their beliefs.
