Why does Physics attract crackpots?

[Ivan Seeking]

What he truly meant is up for debate (see Banesh Hoffman's biography of Einstein). But from the EPR paper, he clearly did not think QM was wrong, which is my original point.

I thought they obtained the opposite result expected. That is that I thought the EPR experiment was intended to show that QM was not correct.

Saying that it is incomplete means that he thought the probabilistic nature of QM has the same issue as classical probability where our ignorance of the dynamics is lumped into the probabilistic description of the system. So this is not the same as your analogy of Newton's first law.

I don't see how your first comment leads to the next. Isn't it essential to understand that quantum probability is not the same as classical probability? His belief about this always struck me as a fundamental rejection of QM at the deepest level.

 

[ZapperZ]

I thought they obtained the opposite result expected. That is that I thought the EPR experiment was intended to show that QM was not correct.

They obtained no result. It was a theoretical paper to show that QM was "non-local" and thus, can't be complete. What we know now is that this is exactly what we are measuring experimentally, that QM IS not local. So EPR in fact pointed out to one aspect of our world described by QM that we later verified. Nowhere in that paper did they claim that QM was not correct.

I don't see how your first comment leads to the next. Isn't it essential to understand that quantum probability is not the same as classical probability? His belief about this always struck me as a fundamental rejection of QM at the deepest level.

When we describe the tossing of a coin in terms of probability, are we then saying Newton's laws to be wrong? No it doesn't. It simply means that we are ignorant of the details of the dynamics to apply the Newton's laws to, so we simply lump that ignorance into a probability. That is the analogy that I used for QM that Einstein could have used (note that I'm not saying that classical proability is the same as QM). Saying that the probability in QM could easily be construed as similar to our ignorance of the "hidden variables" that we have yet to find doesn't mean that QM is wrong, just incomplete. That is what I understood Einstein's argument to be.

Again, reading the few biographies of him, I've never heard him express the idea that QM is wrong. He is as well-aware of the experimental results as any of them that are consistent with QM.

Zz.

 

[sirzerp]

I was up at 1 am the other day, and wrote a crackpot poem that I wanted to share.

It really did make complete sense at the time.

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Look how simple.
The quantum medium is a gas cloud of matter and antimatter virtual particles.
Charge is just virtual particles flowing from one charged particle to another.
It is the displacement winds of the quantum medium.
Magnetism is the circulation of virtual particles.
It is the twisting curl of the quantum medium.
Gravity is the paired annihilation of virtual particles.
It is the mortality rate of the quantum medium.
Light is the result of particle pair annihilation.
It is the birth rate of the quantum medium.
When the medium flows in a line, it is Charge.
When the medium flows in a circle, it is Magnetism.
When the medium disappears, it is Gravity.
When the medium appears, it is Light.
It is simple.
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Lots of people in physics do have a creative side.

 

[jreelawg]

You can't be so harsh on people who are only thinking, it's when they know they are that you know they are crackpots.