my_wan said:
)Just noticed this--apparently the guy wants to disprove relativistic time dilation as well! You can see him making some ridiculous arguments against time dilation experiments (which have established 'asymmetric aging' beyond any reasonable doubt) in publication 4, "analysis of and remedy for asymmetric aging (twin paradox)", on this page of his site.
RUTA said:
ThomasT said:
DevilsAvocado said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Fallacy -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy
http://theflatEarth'society.org/DevilsAvocado said:Please! Don’t tell me! I don’t think I can take it anymore... :yuck:
(What’s next? A Bayesian 'cranky theory' "proving" that the Earth is flat and in the center of the Solar system and the Universe!
JesseM said:
DrChinese said:
billschnieder said:
my_wan said:
Are you being intentionally dishonest about this? All anyone has to do is go to the guy's website and click on the links to see that what you're saying wrt the number of papers he's published (since 1999) in peer reviewed journals is false. There's at least 8 by my count, maybe more. A couple were published in the same journals that Stuckey (RUTA) has published in.DevilsAvocado said:
Where did I say that I support his ideas? I did say that some of his stuff looked like it might be interesting, and that he seemed to have a clear writing style.DevilsAvocado said:
I couldn't care less if nonlocality or ftl exist or not. In fact, it would be very exciting if they did. But the evidence just doesn't support that conclusion.DevilsAvocado said:
DevilsAvocado said:
Well, he's saying that physical science should be an exemplar of rationality. Nothing crazy about that. Now, I will say that my superficial impression of his ideas on asymmetric or differential aging seems to be contrary to the way I've learned to think about it. That is, I believe that differential aging is pretty much a demonstrated fact of nature. But, I haven't read his paper(s) on this yet. So, I don't know exactly what he's saying about this, or his arguments. By themselves, the above quotes don't seem crazy. Even if they're grossly wrong, that doesn't imply that the guy is crazy. And if he has an agenda, even a personal one, that influences his approach and reasoning, well, I don't think that's at all unusual, and certainly not an indicator of 'mental illness'. Maybe in your imagination there are scientists whose work isn't influenced by 'nonscientific' factors.
I think the title was intended to get attention -- so that people would actually read the paper. Nothing crazy about that. Despite the fact that he might be, strictly speaking, using the term 'schizophrenia' incorrectly, I don't have an opinion wrt the merits of the content of the paper, not having read it yet. Have you read it?
When I first read this, I thought that maybe the guy really is crazy -- like maybe another abortion nut or whatever. But since the paper was only one page, I read it. He seems to be making a very reasonable social commentary.
Right. It's not science. Nor, I think, is it meant to be taken as such. It's an essay that presents some interesting and reasonable observations by a scientist with an active social conscience. Keep in mind that the US is full of Christian fanatics who would twist any scientific finding or paradigm to support their religious agendas. Kracklauer's program, it seems to me so far, is to oppose that sort of thing and also to oppose what some might see as an increasing tendency toward metaphysical constructions and 'mysticism' in 'mainstream' physics.DevilsAvocado said:
It isn't 'my' optical explanation. It's optics. There's two polarizers, a and b. They can both be on side A, or both be on side B, or one on each side. There's a randomly varying optical vector extending between the two polarizers. The resultant, measured, joint intensity of the light (the coincident photon flux) will vary as cos^2 (a-b). Of course the exact calculation will depend on the setup, but the point is that whenever crossed polarizers are jointly analyzing light from a random source, then this optical law applies.JesseM said:
I don't think the distinction matters. No matter how it's parsed, or how one chooses to express probability analogs for Bell's (2), the bottom line is that the joint probability is being modeled as the product of the separate probabilities. So, no matter what was intended, the form of Bell's (2) effectively models the two resultant data sets as independent. This was Bell's explicit expression of locality. The problem is that its intended function as an expression of locality is superceded by its effective function as an expression of statistical independence between the data sets.JesseM said:
I was referring to casual conversations over the course of 8 or 9 years. So, no, you wouldn't have heard of 'it'. I would describe an optical Bell test setup, recount the results, and ask them if they thought the results indicated that any sort of 'nonlocal' or ftl 'communication' was necessary to understand them, and they would say no. I don't know exactly how many physicists I engaged in these conversations, but the impression I got was that none of them thought that anything mysterious (beyond the mystery of light itself) was going on in the experiments we discussed. The consensus was that it's just optics as usual -- ie., the correlations are due to the joint analysis of random polarizations by crossed polarizers.DrChinese said:
Well, Malus Law is an empirically well established optical law. And since we know from experiments that, assuming that nature is evolving in accordance with the principle of local action, Bell's (2) is false, then what should we conclude? That there is some nonlocal or ftl 'mechanism' at work in entanglement situations, or that Bell's (2) simply misrepresents the experimental situation? What's being suggested is that the latter alternative is the more reasonable hypothesis, and that this hypothesis has yet to be definitively dismissed.DrChinese said:
Your claim here is completely ill-defined. What is "joint intensity" supposed to mean in the context of optics? It appears to be completely meaningless in the context of classical optics, where there are no probabilities and thus no joint probabilities. Now, it's true that if the polarization of a light beam is v and the angle of the polarizer is a, then in classical optics the reduction in intensity as the light goes through the polarizer will be cos^2(a-v), that's just Malus' law. In quantum physics intensity is proportional to photon number, so are you suggesting that for a beam with polarization v passing through a polarizer at angle a, each photon has a probability of cos^2(a-v) of passing through the polarizer? And then the "joint intensity" would be based on imagining photons are sent to the different detectors in pairs, so the probability both photons make it through the detectors would be cos^2(a-v)*cos^2(b-v)? If so, this would not give a probability of cos^2(a-b) that both photons make it through (I showed this in my third-to-last paragraph of this post, a section you never responded to even when I reposted that paragraph in a later post).ThomasT said:
Huh? The joint probability P(AB) is not being modeled as the product of P(A)*P(B) by Bell's equation. Do you disagree?ThomasT said:
ThomasT said:
JesseM said:
"One to one quantitative correspondence" between what and what? the cos^2 in Malus' law is for the difference between the angle of a polarizer and the polarization angle of a beam hitting it at the same location, the cos^2 in entanglement experiments is for the difference in angles between two polarizers at completely different locations making measurements on different particles. There's no way to use the first cos^2 law to derive the second one, whatever ThomasT may think.my_wan said:
Why a "greater range of presumptions"? Standard optics can be derived from Maxwell's laws, which is a perfect example of a local realist theory of physics, so Bell's theorem definitely applies to anything in optics (and it's impossible to use classical optics to get a violation of Bell inequalities).my_wan said:
Malus' law is only based on the difference in angle between the beam and the polarizer, so it doesn't get violated depending on how your coordinate system defines the angle of the beam. Are you suggesting otherwise?my_wan said:
Ok, so you don't think that a randomly varying polarization vector being jointly analyzed by crossed polarizers is a good way to think about it? Then how about when you put both polarizers on the same side? How would you think about that situation?DrChinese said:
1) Well, these are optics experiments, so why wouldn't optics be the ruling issue?DrChinese said:
I'm somewhat noted for that.JesseM said:
We're talking about optical Bell tests, right? I think I phrased it as the 'coincidental photon flux'.JesseM said:
My thinking has been that it reduces to that. Just a stripped down shorthand for expressing Bell's separability requirement. If you don't think that's ok, then how would you characterize the separability of the joint state (ie., the expression of locality) per Bell's (2)?JesseM said:
Bell's theorem doesn't depend on the fact that "single photons are being detected", but it does require that each measurement setting can yield one of two binary outcomes akin to "spin-up" and "spin-down". You are free to design your detectors in a classical optics experiment so that they can only yield two outcomes rather than a continuous range of intensities--for example, you design it so that if the intensity of the light that made it through the polarizer was above a certain threshold a red light would go off, and if the intensity was at or below that threshold a green light would go off. Likewise you might design the detector so the probability or a red light going off vs. a green light going off would depend on the reduction in intensity as the light went through the polarizer--say if the intensity was reduced by 70%, there'd be a 70% chance the red light would go off and a 30% chance the green light would go off.ThomasT said:
I'm just trying to understand the correlation between the angular difference in the polarizer settings and coincidental detection. It doesn't 'seem' mysterious. That is, the optics principle that applies to the observed coincidence count when both polarizers are on one side, would seem to be applicable when there's one polarizer on each side.JesseM said:
The cos^2 in Malus Law is the functional relationship between the angular difference of two polarizer settings and the measured intensity of the light transmitted by the analyzing polarizer.JesseM said:
I don't understand what you're saying here.my_wan said:
my_wan said:
ThomasT said:
Please review the context of this exchange. I said "Well, can you present your local optical explanation in detail, either here or on a new thread?" and you replied "It isn't 'my' optical explanation. It's optics." Naturally I took this to imply you thought there could be a local optical explanation for the cos^2(a-b) statistics seen in entanglement experiments, perhaps one involving Malus' law (which can indeed be derived from classical electromagnetism, a completely local theory). Did I misunderstand? Are you not claiming that the statistics can be explained in terms of local properties that travel along with the two beams (or the individual photons) that were assigned to them by the source?ThomasT said:
It does require that if we adopt a "realist" view of the type I discussed in post #101 of the Understanding Bell's Logic thread, and if we assume each measurement has a single unique outcome (so many-worlds type explanations are out), and if the experiment meets various observable requirements like sufficiently high detector efficiency and a spacelike separation between measurements.ThomasT said:
JesseM said:
Yes, of course I disagree, you're just totally misunderstanding the most basic logic of the proof which is assuming a perfect correlation between A and B whenever both experimenters choose the same detector setting. It's really rather galling that you make all these confident-sounding claims about Bell's proof being flawed when you fail to understand something so elementary about it! Could you maybe display a tiny bit of intellectual humility and consider the possibility that it might not be that the proof itself is flawed and that you've spotted a flaw that so many thousands of smart physicists over the years have missed, that it might instead be you are misunderstanding some aspects of the proof?ThomasT said:
If you like I could also show you how something similar would be true in my scratch lotto example, which is even more directly analogous to the situation being considered in Aspect-type experiments.
I would characterize it in terms of A and B being statistically independent only when conditioned on the value of the hidden variable λ. They are clearly not statistically independent otherwise, and Bell makes it explicit that he assumes there is a perfect correlation between their values when both experimenters choose the same detector setting. For example, in the introduction to the original paper he says:ThomasT said:
Likewise in http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/142461/files/198009299.pdfpapers Bell writes on p. 11:
If the value of measurement A "immediately foretells" the value of measurement B when the settings on both sides are the same, that means there's a perfect correlation between the value of A and the value of B when conditioned only on the fact that both sides used the same setting (and not conditioned on any hidden variables)--do you disagree?
Well, you are going to have to do some precise reasoning rather than just relying on feelings about how things "seem" if you want to understand Bell's arguments.ThomasT said:
If you are doing an experiment which matches the condition of the Bell inequalities that says each measurement must yield one of two binary results (rather than a continuous range of intensities), then even if "both polarizers are on one side" it would be impossible to reproduce the cos^2 relationship between the angles of the two polarizers in classical optics, despite the fact that Malus' law applies in classical optics. Do you disagree? In post #896 I outlined some ways you might design a detector to yield one of two binary outcomes in an experiment based on classical optics:ThomasT said:
But no matter how you design your classical detector to give one of two binary outcomes based on how much light passes through it, you can never get a violation of the Bell inequalities in classical optics.
Of course the polarizer at the same location in the classic optics case, with no path references for individual photons. That's one of the reasons EPR correlations are sensitive to certain realism claims that standard optics is not. The quantitative correspondence results when you apply the same same location rules to the photon polarizers interactions plus standard conservation requiring photon pairs be anticorrelated, if you insist on rotational invariance at every level. These two conditions lead to an apparent contradiction between the statics we invariable measure and the statistics and the statistics we apparently would have gotten using any other choice of settings besides what we actually measured, if the path through the polarizer was a real property of the photon.JesseM said:
The "greater range of presumptions" allowed is because the standards optics case alone does not have a reference case to question (in principle) how this set of photons would have been detected had we chosen detector settings differently. Maxwell's equations also described fields, leaving the particle behavior more or less out. How would you define the set of all individual variables such a field can define?JesseM said:
EXACTLY! Malus law is dependent only on the angle difference. Now note: A randomly polarized emitter physically must, irrespective of and underlying or lack of mechanism, be rotational invariant. So as long as 3 rules always apply, Malus law, rotational invariance, and conservation law, then BI violations must occur. If, statistically, rotational invariance applies, as it physically must for a randomly polarized beam, it does not mean the individual events defined by individual detections must also be rotational invariant, any more than Malus law.JesseM said:
Again, "quantitative correspondence" between what and what? Are you claiming that if we "apply the same same location rules to the photon polarizers interactions plus standard conservation requiring photon pairs be anticorrelated", that uniquely leads us to the statistics seen in QM? If so, what "same location rules" are you talking about, given that Malus' law deals with continuous decreases in intensity rather than the binary fact about whether a photon passes through a polarizer?my_wan said:
Well, see above, it's not clear to me what you mean by "Malus law" in the context of detecting individual photons rather than looking at how the intensity of an electromagnetic wave changes when it passes through a polarizer.my_wan said:
I'm only looking at how a photon responds to the polarizer it comes in contact with irrespective of what a distant correlated photon does, which requires Malus law in all cases. This also entails that a detector offset from the default photon polarization has some likelihood of passing that photon 'as if' it possessed that polarization. These odds defined by Malus law. Now to add an assumption: these photons have properties that predetermine how they will respond to any polarizer setting, such that an identical twin photon would have responded to a polarizer with the same arbitrary setting the same way. Opposite for anti-twins. Now, as long as the properties of the photons in the beam is, as a group, randomized such that rotational invariance must be maintained, and Malus law (with relative offsets) is required for all cases, the predeterminism assumption leads to BI violations, irrespective of any other consideration.JesseM said:
my_wan said:
DrChinese said:
How does Malus' law apply to individual photons, though? The classical version of Malus' law requires uniformly polarized light with a known polarization angle, are you talking about a photon that's known to be in a polarization eigenstate for a polarizer at some particular angle? In that case, whatever the angle v of the eigenstate, I think the probability the photon would pass through another angle at angle a would be cos^2(v-a). But when entangled photons are generated, would they be in such a known polarization eigenstate? If not it seems like you wouldn't be able to talk about Malus' law applying to individual members of the pair.my_wan said:
But with electromagnetic waves in Maxwell's equations there's no probabilities involved, Malus' law just represents a deterministic decrease in intensity. So there's no case where two detectors at different angles a and b have a probability cos^2(a-b) of opposite results, including the fact that they give opposite results with probability 1 with the detectors at the same angle. This is true even if you design the detectors to give one of two possible outputs depending on the decrease in intensity, as I suggested in post #896 to ThomasT. So no violations of BI and no reason Maxwell's laws can't be understood as a local realist theory, so I'm not sure why you have a problem with the reality of classical fields.my_wan said:
my_wan said: