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thinkinginpictures
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17 Dec 2021, 12:16 pm

Is it possible to explain the Entanglement phenomenon in Quantum Physics in more "classical" terms?

If we consider the possibility of a multiverse and superdeterminism there is no "spooky action at a distance".

You might then ask how our universe came to be so fined tuned for the outcomes and correlations scientists observe of entangled particles.

But if we consider the possibility of a many-worlds-universe where other outcomes are equally real, and that all these "other worlds" exists all around us as part of the same universal wave function (evolving according to the Schrödinger equation), then entanglement needs no "spooky actions" at all.

The entanglement states just happens to be correlated in our world.

Correlation does not imply causation.
Or, at the very least, the correlation could happen for other causal reasons.

Imagine the trunk of a tree.

It has branches. Would you say the branches on the left side of the tree which are correlated with having apples on them, just like the ones on the right side of the tree, have those apples BECAUSE the branches on the right side have apples?

No.

Obviously, there's a causal link, but not between the branches. It's causal relationship is way back in time, back to the trunk. The branches on the right and left side never needs to "communicate" with each other. They evolve according to the genetics of the tree trunk.

Could Quantum Entanglement be understood in some similar way?



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17 Dec 2021, 12:32 pm

There are more things in heaven and earth, Than are dreamt of in quantum physics. Isn't this the knda stuff that kept Stephen Hawking awake at night?


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Fnord
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17 Dec 2021, 2:00 pm

A single demonstration trumps a thousand speculations.  While quantum entanglement has been shown to be real, macro-entanglement has not.  Anything other than observable reality is pure speculation.



thinkinginpictures
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17 Dec 2021, 4:00 pm

Fnord wrote:
A single demonstration trumps a thousand speculations.  While quantum entanglement has been shown to be real, macro-entanglement has not.  Anything other than observable reality is pure speculation.


You're right, though I believe I've read something about molecular entanglement as well as crystals...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2257-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2011.9532



HighLlama
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17 Dec 2021, 4:43 pm

theprisoner wrote:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Than are dreamt of in quantum physics. Isn't this the knda stuff that kept Stephen Hawking awake at night?


Ha! Nice reference.



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17 Dec 2021, 4:52 pm

thinkinginpictures wrote:
Fnord wrote:
A single demonstration trumps a thousand speculations.  While quantum entanglement has been shown to be real, macro-entanglement has not.  Anything other than observable reality is pure speculation.
You're right, though I believe I've read something about molecular entanglement as well as crystals...
 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2257-1 
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2011.9532
The second one makes the most sense to me, although the effect lasts for only a few cycles in the terahertz range.



magz
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18 Dec 2021, 8:00 am

I'm a bit burned out, but, without all the "other worlds", etc., the question of "entanglement" being some pre-determined state of both the particles has been raised as EPR paradox.
It further developed into Bell's thourem than has been many times tested experimentally and the solid result is: Entanglement is real and fundamentally undeterministic.

Generally,
Image


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thinkinginpictures
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18 Dec 2021, 11:34 am

magz wrote:
I'm a bit burned out, but, without all the "other worlds", etc., the question of "entanglement" being some pre-determined state of both the particles has been raised as EPR paradox.
It further developed into Bell's thourem than has been many times tested experimentally and the solid result is: Entanglement is real and fundamentally undeterministic.

Generally,
Image


According to the theory of Superdeterminism, it is a loophole in Bell's theorem to explain Entanglement with determinism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism



magz
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18 Dec 2021, 11:56 am

thinkinginpictures wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

That everything has been predestinated since the Big Bang so measurements can't be really independent?
It's just a philosophical attempt at saving the intuition of determinism, without any actual value as physics - no equations that would predict any new experimental results.
If someone feels better about introducing a massive philosophical layer just to avoid accepting lack of determinism, it's their choice. Science is about falsifiability but philosophy does not have to.

Philosophically: if we want everything predetermined since the Big Bang, then what determined the Big Bang and the whole Universe following it?


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18 Dec 2021, 12:57 pm

My hypothesis on quantum entanglement of particles involves multiple dimensionality. When electromagnetic energy undergoes E => mc^2 to form particles, the dimensions involved may be greater than 4-D. Light energy is bent in this process from it’s typical coil into more complex shapes. Using String Theory, particle formation can lead to a connecting thread (think vectors) between two or more particles that we cannot see in our dimensionality. When one particle is acted upon, the other particle will react via that connection. The distance between particles can be huge in our dimension, but very small in a much higher one. In fact, there might not be a distance difference at all.

I have an example that can show this behavior. Take a piece of paper and fold it in half. Next, thread a needle with a piece of string and pierce the paper throughout both sides. The holes in the paper represent particle being formed. Tie a knot at both sides of the string after removing the needle first. Unfold the paper and you will see that the holes are apart on the surface of the paper. This surface represents our 4-D dimensionality (space time). Lay the paper flat and then tug at one end of the string. Both holes would be affected by the movement of the string. We cannot see the connecting string if we are only positioned on the flat plain of the paper. To us, the movement of both holes would look spooky as they both act at the same time. That is the effect of quantum entanglement upon particles.



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18 Dec 2021, 3:31 pm

QuantumChemist wrote:
My hypothesis on quantum entanglement of particles involves multiple dimensionality. When electromagnetic energy undergoes E => mc^2 to form particles, the dimensions involved may be greater than 4-D. Light energy is bent in this process from it’s typical coil into more complex shapes. Using String Theory, particle formation can lead to a connecting thread (think vectors) between two or more particles that we cannot see in our dimensionality. When one particle is acted upon, the other particle will react via that connection. The distance between particles can be huge in our dimension, but very small in a much higher one. In fact, there might not be a distance difference at all.

I have an example that can show this behavior. Take a piece of paper and fold it in half. Next, thread a needle with a piece of string and pierce the paper throughout both sides. The holes in the paper represent particle being formed. Tie a knot at both sides of the string after removing the needle first. Unfold the paper and you will see that the holes are apart on the surface of the paper. This surface represents our 4-D dimensionality (space time). Lay the paper flat and then tug at one end of the string. Both holes would be affected by the movement of the string. We cannot see the connecting string if we are only positioned on the flat plain of the paper. To us, the movement of both holes would look spooky as they both act at the same time. That is the effect of quantum entanglement upon particles.


It's not new, it is known as String Theory and it is close to be be proved false (if it haven't already).

The thing is there is no evidence for string theory to be right. And even if it is right, there are multiple models of string theories - hundreds of thousands of them many of which theoretical physicists haven't discovered yet. This means that if string theory is correct, nobody knows which string theory/model is the correct one.

It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Just that it is a very tiny needle in a cosmologically big haystack.



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18 Dec 2021, 3:36 pm

magz wrote:
thinkinginpictures wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

That everything has been predestinated since the Big Bang so measurements can't be really independent?
It's just a philosophical attempt at saving the intuition of determinism, without any actual value as physics - no equations that would predict any new experimental results.
If someone feels better about introducing a massive philosophical layer just to avoid accepting lack of determinism, it's their choice. Science is about falsifiability but philosophy does not have to.

Philosophically: if we want everything predetermined since the Big Bang, then what determined the Big Bang and the whole Universe following it?


I get your point, but I have trouble understanding how this randomness works if it is not an illusion.

How can something be genuinly statistical in nature?
What drives "randomness"?

I mean, if you have a random number generator, it isn't really random. It's just an advanced equation/algorithm that seems like it is making numbers in a random order.

If our universe is random you got to explain how this randomness (50-50 chance) works in nature and so far nobody has adequately explained this behavior.

It is as philosophically vague as it can get - and even worse, no mathematical description exists for explaining how randomness works. It's just an axiom. Something we're told to assume is to be true but without explaining its true origin.

The ONLY explanation which comes close to it is the Everettian Many-Worlds theory.

But then you'll have to explain how we end up in one branch of the universal wave function and not in another.

The only way to make sense of this is to say that every branch of the tree of the universal wave function is predetermined and everlasting in a block universe, and that there really is not evolution of it and the evolution in the wave functions is just an illusion as well.

Think of it this way:
We live in one branch of this universal wave function, and what we perceive as randomness and statistics of quantum behavior might be nothing else than pre-determined values that are not caused by the history of that branch, but rather by the TOTALITY of the wave function, which is predetermined for all branches of all possible worlds and holds all possible outcomes.

The universal wave function should not be treated with respect to "time". It should be a static function, a tree which exists in its own right and has never been created and will never be destroyed. It just exists.

And if we take all these values and add them together we get the value of 0. Empty space. Total vacuum.



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18 Dec 2021, 4:06 pm

Actually, there is a lot of Mathematics describing various aspects of randomness. If you want to ask "why randomness at all?", then the best answer would be: "we don't know but if we assume it's that way, we get perfect fit with observations and experiments."

Advanced physics is just it: a lot of Math astonishingly precisely fitting and predicting experimental results.


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18 Dec 2021, 4:46 pm

magz wrote:
Actually, there is a lot of Mathematics describing various aspects of randomness. If you want to ask "why randomness at all?", then the best answer would be: "we don't know but if we assume it's that way, we get perfect fit with observations and experiments."

Advanced physics is just it: a lot of Math astonishingly precisely fitting and predicting experimental results.


My reply is to the highlighted part.

What you're essentially saying is "Ignoramus et ignorabimus" (we don't know and we won't know) - I believe that is a logical fallacy.

If you can't answer how randomness works, the only thing you're doing with randomness is to say "we throw in some randomness and make a lot of mathematical predictions". But then you haven't fully answered the question of the origins of the universe, quantum physics etc. because you still need to explain randomness.

I can make a lot of mathematical predictions using apples. But that is not going to explain what apples are made of.

Or to put it in another way:

Cognoscimus et cognoscemus (we can know and we will know).

I know Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem prevents us from fully knowing everything, but I don't think he meant we can't ever know what randomness is and how it works.

I was merely offering a solution to that problem and I want to know what you think of that solution.



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19 Dec 2021, 5:30 am

I'm not sure how accurate is your landscape of what we (as Humanity) know and what we don't know. We know really a lot about randomness from mathematical point of view. The whole branches of probability theory and statistics are our deep understanding on how randomness works - regardless of the source of randomness in a given phenomenon. We may or may not know where randomness comes from in a given system but we know how it will behave.

Acknowledging limitations of your method is not a logical fallacy. Science works but its domain are phenomena that are 1. objective; 2. measurable; 3. independent on the experimentator. There is a lot of knowledge outside of this domain but it's not science (e.g. psychology is an important branch of human knowledge that is not science).

Understanding limits of your methods and results is something crucial in physics but undervalued in popular culture. We never know everything perfectly but we can know Something plus minus Errorbars. We can expand the Something and we can reduce the Errorbars, that's what the scientific work is all about, but it will never be Everything Exactly.

A well-known philosophical question that scientific method simply cannot tackle is - why is there something rather than nothing?
Science answers "once there is radomness, what to expect?" and "once there is determinity, what to expect?" and "once there is some determinity and some randomness, what to expect?" but not "why is there randomness at all?" nor "why is there determinity at all?". It's philosophy not science.


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19 Dec 2021, 6:15 am

magz wrote:
Science answers "once there is radomness, what to expect?" and "once there is determinity, what to expect?" and "once there is some determinity and some randomness, what to expect?" but not "why is there randomness at all?" nor "why is there determinity at all?". It's philosophy not science.


I think science should do better than that.

Limiting science to only know the behavior of something rather than to understand what it is made of and why* (or rather how) it exists in the first place is a failure.

* Please understand the "why"-question in the right context.

If you ask "why this and not that" - "why" implies "conscious meaning" and can as such be interpreted in a spiritual/religious understanding of that word, which I don't think is beneficial to this discussion.

This is why I think the "Why"-question should instead be written as "How" to avoid confusion.

What I'm asking for is How Randomness is Composed. What makes something random?
Which mechanics governs the randomness itself?

Science MUST answer this question.

It CAN answer it. To avoid answering the randomness question and only focusing on its behavior is the same as giving up.