No need for spooky action at a distance

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Discussion Overview

The discussion centers around the concept of "spooky action at a distance" in the context of quantum entanglement. Participants explore alternative interpretations of entanglement, questioning whether this phenomenon truly requires a non-local explanation or if it can be understood through other frameworks, such as connections to "the fabric of space." The conversation includes theoretical considerations and personal reflections on the implications of these ideas.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Debate/contested
  • Conceptual clarification

Main Points Raised

  • Some participants propose that "spooky action at a distance" may not be necessary if particles are linked to a deeper structure of space, suggesting a form of connectivity that persists regardless of distance.
  • Others argue that the term "spooky action at a distance" accurately describes the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, emphasizing that it is not in accordance with known physics.
  • A participant mentions that while significant progress has been made in understanding entanglement, incontrovertible proof remains elusive.
  • Concerns are raised about the value of seeking confirmation from others who may share potentially incorrect concepts, suggesting a preference for exploring well-supported ideas.
  • Some participants express a desire to find others who have explored similar concepts, indicating a search for insights that could help evaluate their own ideas.
  • References to various interpretations of quantum mechanics and non-locality are made, including the possibility of nonlocal correlations and the implications of reality existing in a configuration space.
  • One participant questions whether the idea of an alternate plane of existence that influences our reality is even more "spooky" than the original concept of entanglement.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants do not reach a consensus on the interpretation of quantum entanglement. Multiple competing views remain, with some advocating for a non-spooky explanation and others defending the traditional understanding of entanglement as inherently non-local.

Contextual Notes

Limitations include the lack of definitive proof for various claims regarding quantum entanglement and the dependence on interpretations that may not be universally accepted. The discussion reflects a range of assumptions and conceptual frameworks that are not fully resolved.

Suppaman
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Perhaps the term "spooky action at a distance" when referring to "quantum entanglement" is not so spooky after all if one considers the possibility that when these particles were joined they also linked to something, for want of a better name, "the fabric of space" and even if separated in our perceived universe they are always firmly connected in that other place. So when something is done to one it is instantaneously felt by the other. Therefore, no spooky action at a distance is necessary. If this has been discussed here on PF please direct me to the appropriate conversations.
 
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Suppaman said:
Perhaps the term "spooky action at a distance" when referring to "quantum entanglement" is not so spooky after all if one considers the possibility that when these particles were joined they also linked to something, for want of a better name, "the fabric of space" and even if separated in our perceived universe they are always firmly connected in that other place. So when something is done to one it is instantaneously felt by the other. Therefore, no spooky action at a distance is necessary. If this has been discussed here on PF please direct me to the appropriate conversations.

Your argument is not in accordance with known physics. It IS "spooky action at a distance".

Do a forum search for entanglement.
 
And "spooky action at a distance" is not in accordance with known physics, correct? I do believe that it has been demonstrated but not explained with proof. What I am looking for is others who may share my concept. Had to start with something here and by your suggestion I will search for entanglement. Thank you.
 
Frank Wilczek got a nobel physics prize for investigating your very question.

He did not come up with incontrovertible proof but made significant progress in the subject.

He has written several acessible books and produced some entertaining and informative video lectures, available online.
 
Suppaman said:
What I am looking for is others who may share my concept.

Don't you think it would be far more profitable, intellectually, to find others who share a CORRECT concept? What good does it do you to find others that share your concept if you are wrong? I'm not saying you ARE wrong ... I see that as beside the point as far as what I am saying here. It just seems that you are looking for confirmation of your idea, whether it is right or not. Perhaps I misinterpret you.
 
phinds said:
Don't you think it would be far more profitable, intellectually, to find others who share a CORRECT concept? What good does it do you to find others that share your concept if you are wrong? I'm not saying you ARE wrong ... I see that as beside the point as far as what I am saying here. It just seems that you are looking for confirmation of your idea, whether it is right or not. Perhaps I misinterpret you.

Every idea meets 1 of 3 ends...

1. The idea produces predictions which conflict with experiment, and is discarded or modified.

2. The idea makes no predictions which can be tested.

3. The idea is never disproved, but falls out of favor when replaced by a newer, more elegant theory, which makes the same predictions.

I think the OP is just looking for someone who has followed this idea to one of its 3 ends or is at least further along then he is. Why spend time exploring an idea someone else has already explored when you can find that person, get their map, and explore new territory.
 
Sometimes the solution to a problem is the simplest answer, remember Ockham's razor? If others share my opinion they may have developed insights that will allow evaluation of the concept. I am not one who shares the many skills necessary to prove or even evaluate my ideas but I try to search for solutions that make sense for me. If I am so far off base that my ideas are nonsense I will willingly accept such an opinion but if my ideas have merit, based on just common sense then perhaps others have traveled the same path and with much more technical skill.
 
Suppaman said:
Perhaps the term "spooky action at a distance" when referring to "quantum entanglement" is not so spooky after all if one considers the possibility that when these particles were joined they also linked to something, for want of a better name, "the fabric of space" and even if separated in our perceived universe they are always firmly connected in that other place.

I'm guessing something analogous to this model (see Figure 1) is what you're suggesting?
We explain how our interpretation was inspired by our earlier analysis of non-locality as non-spatiality and a specific interpretation of quantum potentiality, which we illustrate by means of the example of two interconnected vessels of water.

A potentiality and conceptuality interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
http://logica.ugent.be/philosophica/fulltexts/83-2.pdf

Gisin points other possibilities here:
Hence, it is time to take seriously the idea that Nature is able to produce nonlocal correlations. There are several ways of formulating this:
1. Somehow God plays dice with nonlocal die: a random event can manifest itself at several locations.
2. Nonlocal correlations merely happen, somehow from outside space-time, in the sense that no story in space-time can describe how they happen (see appendix A).
3. The communication behind the scene happens outside space-time
4. Reality happens in configuration space, what we observe is only its shadow in 3-dimensional space (this might be the closest to the description provided by standard quantum physics).
Are There Quantum Effects Coming from Outside Space-time? Nonlocality, free will and "no many-worlds"
http://lanl.arxiv.org/pdf/1011.3440.pdf
 
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bohm2 said:
I'm guessing something analogues to this model (see Figure 1) is what you're suggesting?

OP's idea may not be too far-fetched.
Thanks for the links, Bohm, but where is Figure 1?

Only a mentally blind person may think this is the only reality the universe can offer.
 
  • #10
Suppaman said:
Perhaps the term "spooky action at a distance" when referring to "quantum entanglement" is not so spooky after all if one considers the possibility that when these particles were joined they also linked to something, for want of a better name, "the fabric of space" and even if separated in our perceived universe they are always firmly connected in that other place. So when something is done to one it is instantaneously felt by the other. Therefore, no spooky action at a distance is necessary. If this has been discussed here on PF please direct me to the appropriate conversations.
Quantum Connectivity of Space-Time and Gravitationally Induced De-correlation of
Entanglement
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.1907v1.pdf
http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v79/i2/e022121Building up spacetime with quantum entanglement
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1005.3035v1.pdfbut i will like to see an afterward change of one spin to see the change of the other entangled spin again.
 
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  • #11
Suppaman said:
Perhaps the term "spooky action at a distance" when referring to "quantum entanglement" is not so spooky after all if one considers the possibility that when these particles were joined they also linked to something, for want of a better name, "the fabric of space" and even if separated in our perceived universe they are always firmly connected in that other place. So when something is done to one it is instantaneously felt by the other. Therefore, no spooky action at a distance is necessary. If this has been discussed here on PF please direct me to the appropriate conversations.
So, there's an alternate plane of existence that we can't observe but nonetheless affects our real world. That seems even spookier than spooky action at a distance.
 
  • #12
Hurkyl said:
So, there's an alternate plane of existence that we can't observe but nonetheless affects our real world. That seems even spookier than spooky action at a distance.

I have found through many years of troubleshooting both hardware and software that an effective process was to make an assumption what the "problem" was and then proceed to prove it or disprove it. Many times the assumption was not correct but in the process of trying to prove it I found other symptoms that lead me to a solution. That is what I did here, an assumed explanation for this "spooky" action. Now I think about how this explanation can be proven or disproven or even show other interesting, perhaps testable, phenomena. All this does is lead to a better understanding and chases the "spooky" critters to find some other mind in which to sow doubts.
 
  • #13
Suppaman said:
Perhaps the term "spooky action at a distance" when referring to "quantum entanglement" is not so spooky after all if one considers the possibility that when these particles were joined they also linked to something, for want of a better name, "the fabric of space" and even if separated in our perceived universe they are always firmly connected in that other place. So when something is done to one it is instantaneously felt by the other. Therefore, no spooky action at a distance is necessary. If this has been discussed here on PF please direct me to the appropriate conversations.

Additinal elements of reality(hidden variables theories) have been proposed multiple times in the past. This isn't anything ground-breaking or novel.
 
  • #14
I don't think the OP was entertaining the idea of adding hidden variables.
 
  • #15
StevieTNZ said:
I don't think the OP was entertaining the idea of adding hidden variables.

Since I don't think even the OP really knows just what he is proposing, I don't see how you can make that assertion. The OP's method, by his own statement, is "let's just make up something and see what it leads to" without being specific about WHAT he is making up.

"Frimly connected in that other place" is not even metaphysics, it's just blather.
 
  • #16
I am sorry, have I offended this forum by my posts?
 
  • #17
phinds said:
Since I don't think even the OP really knows just what he is proposing
But he was, however, quite clear on what he wants- he wants to find people who will agree with him no matter what he proposes.

I don't see how you can make that assertion. The OP's method, by his own statement, is "let's just make up something and see what it leads to" without being specific about WHAT he is making up.

"Frimly connected in that other place" is not even metaphysics, it's just blather.
 
  • #18
StevieTNZ said:
I don't think the OP was entertaining the idea of adding hidden variables.
Hidden variable theories posit that qm does not give a complete description of the system(s) and there are hidden elements of reality affecting quantum behavior, hence qm isn't complete in its descriptions. He's proposing the same and i think he might be correct that qm is incomplete but for different reasons. As somebody already said, without a testable prediction i could come up with at least 10 000 different propositions and ideas. Pure philosophy doesn't appear to have many similarities with physics.
 
  • #19
Suppaman said:
I am sorry, have I offended this forum by my posts?

The forum? I doubt it. I just personally don't like the approach of let's throw out some meaningless words and see if anybody bites.

As Hurkyl pointed out, what you are proposing, to eliminate "spooky action at a distance" is even MORE spooky and as far as I can see has no basis in physics.

But I'm just a cranky old fart, so don't mind me.
 
  • #20
HallsofIvy said:
But he was, however, quite clear on what he wants- he wants to find people who will agree with him no matter what he proposes.

Yeah, that's what I was commenting on in post #5
 
  • #21
I made the assumption that the concept of "the fabric of space", what ever that is, has been discussed many times in many different ways. So assuming something does exist I proposed that our entangled items are linked at the time of entanglement to a common point and thus they are never really separate.
 
  • #22
I made the assumption that the concept of "the fabric of space",

I don't know why I am bothering to post again since you didn't acknowledge my last one but I pointed you at an explanation of the 'fabric of space'.
 
  • #23
I thought the four possibilities in bohm2's citation in post #8 were pretty good examples of all the different flavors of "spookiness" we could be entertaining. There was also a thread on here not long ago about the differences between 3-space and configuration space, and the upshot of that is, we are still not very clear on which is the more appropriate "home" for basic physics ontology. For me, this is good evidence, along with much else, that there is no such thing as "basic" physics ontology-- ontology in physics is whatever we use it for in any given context. So the bottom line is, whatever "solution" to the spookiness that we ultimately settle on as our best treatment at any given time, is still likely to seem pretty spooky, just not as spooky as all the others. Saying that there's still some kind of hidden connection is almost inevitable-- it's just not clear if we will say that connection is mediated through some sense of sustained proximity in some other space, as the original post was implying. Note the space in which that proximity might be maintained could be some type of metric on configuration space, or on some hidden variable space, or on some "random generator space", to reprise the 3 possibilities from post #8 that refer to a type of proximity. (Example 2 was the only one that asked for no flavor of proximity at all, so that was the only one completely outside the approach in the original post.)
 
  • #24
Suppaman said:
I made the assumption that the concept of "the fabric of space", what ever that is, has been discussed many times in many different ways. So assuming something does exist I proposed that our entangled items are linked at the time of entanglement to a common point and thus they are never really separate.

It is sometimes frustrating to read some moderator or mentor's comments on PF.
We, some of us, sometimes go off the conventional tracks of physics, not to
spread or force on others our own pet theories. In fact, I myself have absolutely no
theory on anything.

We go off the track only to give other physicists ammunition, 'another way to attack the problem', to rethink another way for a solution.
Some ammunition may be hilarious, some may apparently be hilarious.

This thread is an example, OP suggested 'a connection', physical or not, between entangled particles.
Which may lead to the question, 'what the space-time is made of'?
The correct answer is 'we do not know'.
But some eager physicists may jump to the conclusion, 'It's made of nothing'.
There we go off the track.

Anyway, moderators, mentors of PF are going excellent job. Keep us straight.
 
  • #25
Suppaman said:
I made the assumption that the concept of "the fabric of space", what ever that is, has been discussed many times in many different ways. So assuming something does exist I proposed that our entangled items are linked at the time of entanglement to a common point and thus they are never really separate.
You made assumption that "spooky action at a distance" is the mechanism behind entanglement and tried to describe it.
Certainly there are people who are trying to go that way.

But I would say that you should try to model entanglement using spooky action at a distance before trying to model spooky action at a distance using something else.
 
  • #26
Suppaman said:
I made the assumption that the concept of "the fabric of space", what ever that is, has been discussed many times in many different ways. So assuming something does exist I proposed that our entangled items are linked at the time of entanglement to a common point and thus they are never really separate.

spacetime connectivity.
 
  • #27
Suppaman said:
Perhaps the term "spooky action at a distance" when referring to "quantum entanglement" is not so spooky after all if one considers the possibility that when these particles were joined they also linked to something, for want of a better name, "the fabric of space" and even if separated in our perceived universe they are always firmly connected in that other place. So when something is done to one it is instantaneously felt by the other. Therefore, no spooky action at a distance is necessary. If this has been discussed here on PF please direct me to the appropriate conversations.

There's a theory or two that the particles occupy the same higher-space coordinates, but it can be explained by looking at the simple math. If you look at the math, they are the same particle, their probabilities are the same, which distance doesn't have a part in. It's just like if time stopped, gravity would still work because the force of gravity doesn't have time in it's equation or for how it's strength works, its a correlation of something different.
 
  • #28
I actually agree that it may not be spooky action at a distance; requiring complex Fourier otpics and dynamic solutions with variables for the unknowns perhaps. Can a particle have a mirror particle in another location? Think of water. At some level water crystals look remarkably the way they should for something that on a large scale offers the same qualities, yet also, different forms as the crest of a wave is different from the trough in some real life observation that somebody had at a beach. Maybe it was a hermit crab. I don't know.
 
  • #29
Petyab said:
I actually agree that it may not be spooky action at a distance; requiring complex Fourier otpics and dynamic solutions with variables for the unknowns perhaps. Can a particle have a mirror particle in another location? Think of water. At some level water crystals look remarkably the way they should for something that on a large scale offers the same qualities, yet also, different forms as the crest of a wave is different from the trough in some real life observation that somebody had at a beach. Maybe it was a hermit crab. I don't know.

You lost me after mirror particle. Your water analogy is not clear.
But has anyone so far tried to connect quantum entanglement with Higgs Boson?
If Higgs field/boson (if it exists) is everywhere, it may have an effect on entanglement.
 
  • #30
Space exists everywhere too, why don't we connect that?
 

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