Relativity without the aether: pseudoscience?

[RandallB]

I am sceptical of two things:
our ability to produce a single isolated photon;
our ability to detect a single photon.

Don't be

A lab problem -- that I think they have more than demonstrated the ability to DIM the energy in a light beam evenly to the point where the Q Packets of energy must be separated by a measurably significant amount of time and distance in order to account for the fixed amount of energy in each photon “Q Packet”.

Same deal with measuring.
Plus the fact they have been able to duplicate the same results with a discrete “real particle” an electron, to get the same kind of results for both Bell & Two Slit tests. I think this is more than enough to show the labs know what they are doing on this point, and that they are measuring individual photons ok.

 

[CarlB]

I think this is more than enough to show the labs know what they are doing on this point, and that they are measuring individual photons ok.

Yes. And physics is very tightly woven together. If one denies this effect, the consequences are that huge other parts of physics have to be changed as well.

 

[gonegahgah]

Hi Carl

Yes I agree. But that is not for discussion here.

Hi Randall

It certainly would be a challenging work. Good luck to them if that is what they have achieved. Be interesting to see where it all ends up.

 

[JesseM]

A folding of spacetime back onto itself is required for wormhole effects.

It's often represented that way in embedding diagrams like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Worm3.jpg [Broken] of mine from a little while back for some references. Conceptually, I think the idea is that if I make a measurement on one member of an entangled pair over here, and you make a measurement on the other member over there, each of us splits into multiple versions who observe different outcomes, and the universe doesn't have to decide which versions of me are part of the same "world" as which versions of you until there has been time for a signal moving at the speed of light or slower to pass between us. Here's a little toy example I came up with a while ago to illustrate this idea:

say Bob and Alice are each receiving one of an entangled pair of photons, and their decisions about which spin axis to measure are totally deterministic, so the only "splitting" necessary is in the different possible results of their measurements. Label the three spin axes a, b, and c. If they always find opposite spins when they both measure their photons along the same axis, a local hidden-variables theory would say that if they choose different axes, the probability they get opposite spins must be at least 1/3 (a hidden variables theory would say that if the three axes of one photon were in preexisting hidden spin states a+, b+, c+, the three axes of the other photon must be in states a-, b-, c-, giving a 100% chance the experimenters find opposite spins when they measure different axes; on the other hand, if one photon is in a heterogeneous state like a+, b-, c-, the other photon must be in the opposite state a-, b+, c+, and if you randomly pick two different axes from the two photons in this case, there is a 1/3 probability you'll get opposite spins and a 2/3 probability you'll get identical spins). The actual Bell-inequality-violating probability predicted by QM will depend on the details of what the three axes are, but all that's important is that it's less than 1/3, so for the sake of the argument let's say it's 1/4.

So suppose Bob's decision will be to measure along axis a, and Alice's decision will be to measure along axis c. When they do this, suppose each splits into 8 parallel versions, 4 measuring spin + and 4 measuring spin -. Label the 8 Bobs like this:

Bob 1: a+
Bob 2: a+
Bob 3: a+
Bob 4: a+
Bob 5: a-
Bob 6: a-
Bob 7: a-
Bob 8: a-

Similarly, label the 6 Alices like this:

Alice 1: c+
Alice 2: c+
Alice 3: c+
Alice 4: c+
Alice 5: c-
Alice 6: c-
Alice 7: c-
Alice 8: c-

Note that the decision of how they split is based only on the assumption that each has a 50% chance of getting + and a 50% chance of getting - on whatever axis they choose, no knowledge about what the other one was doing was needed. And again, only when a signal traveling at the speed of light or slower passes from one to the other does the universe need to decide which Alice shares the same world with which Bob...when that happens, they can be matched up like this:

Alice 1 (c+) <--> Bob 1 (a+)
Alice 2 (c+) <--> Bob 2 (a+)
Alice 3 (c+) <--> Bob 3 (a+)
Alice 4 (c+) <--> Bob 5 (a-)
Alice 5 (c-) <--> Bob 4 (a+)
Alice 6 (c-) <--> Bob 6 (a-)
Alice 7 (c-) <--> Bob 7 (a-)
Alice 8 (c-) <--> Bob 8 (a-)

This insures that each one has a 3/4 chance of finding out the other got the same spin, and a 1/4 chance that the other got the opposite spin. If Bob and Alice were two A.I.'s running on classical computers in realtime, you could simulate Bob on one computer and Alice on another, make copies of each according to purely local rules whenever each measured a quantum particle, and then use this type of matching rule to decide which of the signals from the various copies of Alice will be passed on to which copy of Bob, and you wouldn't have to make that decision until the information from the computer simulating Alice was actually transmitted to the computer simulating Bob. So using purely local rules you could insure that, after many trials like this, a randomly-selected copy of A.I. Bob or A.I. Alice would record the same type of statistics that's seen in the Aspect experiment, including the violation of Bell's inequality.

Note that you wouldn't have to simulate any hidden variables in this case--you only have to decide what the spin was along the axes each one measured, you never have to decide what the spin along the other 2 unmeasured axes of each photon was.

It seems rather compelling that a connection exists between entanged particles independent of 4d spacetime, and string theory does has 7 hidden spatial dimensions to allow space for string oscillations/vibrations.

Yes, but these are assumed to be small curled-up dimensions, and it seems to me that if you're thinking in terms of embedding 3D space in a higher dimension, you need large dimensions to curve the space around and create a link between distant points on the surface as in the embedding diagram I linked to earlier. There are "braneworld" scenarios that suggest a single large dimension, but there are ways space can be connected by wormholes that probably couldn't be explained in terms of embedding it in a single higher dimension, like if you had a large collection of wormholes that each had one of their mouths in a common area next to the mouths of all the other wormholes, but the other mouths of each wormhole opened up in all sorts of different locations far from one another. In general, it was mentioned on this thread that you need a gigantic 90-dimensional embedding spacetime consisting of 87 spacelike dimensions and 3 timelike dimensions in order to embed an arbitrarily curved 4D spacetime of the kind allowed by GR into a flat embedding spacetime without curvature of its own.

 

[pess5]

The Many Worlds Interpretation assumes multiple time-lines, does it not? That there are an infinite number of choices you might make in some instant, and you make all them, but each of your subsequent selves have no knowledge of the other timelines which resulted. Is this true?

pess