Posted on 05/27/2012 9:45:37 PM PDT by Windflier
In one of the two major QM interpretations there apparently is some form of 'signal' that reaches a particle's counterpart changing its properties--instantaneously, provided the two were once 'entangled' quantum mechanically.
Well, just as I said, you are speaking of interpretations of QM. But what good are they? What basis do they have? I claim they are revanchist classicism.
Some few years ago, I was returning from an eastern sojourn, and on the home stretch into Chicagoland in the early evening hours, I was listening to Art Bell on some AM station. He was inteviewing some far out crackpot guy who advocated that UFO's in general, ( he did want to step on toes by ruling anything out ) were time machines, a la REPO MAN. He was pretty sharp, and as he was laying out his thesis, Art Bell interjected the old chestnut that, "time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening all at once." Without a hitch the guy responded, "Everything is happening all at once." whence ensued a moment of radio silence. I loved it.
I had no idea there were so many interpretations of QM, until I looked into it again just now.
********************************************
4 Summary of common interpretations of quantum mechanics
4.1 Classification adopted by Einstein
4.2 The Copenhagen interpretation
4.3 Many worlds
4.4 Consistent histories
4.5 Ensemble interpretation, or statistical interpretation
4.6 de Broglie–Bohm theory
4.7 Relational quantum mechanics
4.8 Transactional interpretation
4.9 Stochastic mechanics
4.10 Objective collapse theories
4.11 von Neumann/Wigner interpretation: consciousness causes the collapse
4.12 Many minds
4.13 Quantum logic
4.14 Quantum information theories
4.15 Modal interpretations of quantum theory
4.16 Time-symmetric theories
4.17 Branching space-time theories
4.18 Other interpretations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_quantum_mechanics
Again from Wiki, with loads of legit references at link...
The EPR paradox is an early and influential critique leveled against quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (known collectively as EPR) designed a thought experiment intended to reveal what they believed to be inadequacies of quantum mechanics. To that end they pointed to a consequence of quantum mechanics that its supporters had not noticed.
According to quantum mechanics, under some conditions a pair of quantum systems may be described by a single wave function, which encodes the probabilities of the outcomes of experiments that may be performed on the two systems, whether jointly or individually.
At the time the EPR article was written, it was known from experiments that the outcome of an experiment sometimes cannot be uniquely predicted. An example of such indeterminacy can be seen when a beam of light is incident on a half-silvered mirror. One half of the beam will reflect, the other will pass. But what happens when we keep decreasing the intensity of the beam, so that only one photon is in transit at any time? Half of the photons will pass and another half will be reflected. Even if we ‘prepare’ the photons by passing them through a polarizer, there will always be an experiment of which the result could not be predicted with certainty.
The routine explanation of this effect was, at that time, provided by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Physical quantities come in pairs which are called Conjugate quantities. Example of such a conjugate pair are position and momentum of a particle, or components of spin measured around different axes. When one quantity was measured, and became determined, the conjugated quantity became indeterminate. Heisenberg explained this as a disturbance caused by measurement.
The EPR paper, written in 1935, has shown that this explanation is inadequate. It considered two entangled particles, let’s call them A and B, and pointed out that measuring a quantity of a particle A will cause the conjugated quantity of particle B to become undetermined, even if there was no contact, no classical disturbance.
Heisenberg’s principle was an attempt to provide a classical explanation of a quantum effect sometimes called non-locality. According to EPR there were two possible explanations. Either there was some interaction between the particles, even though they were separated, or the information about the outcome of all possible measurements was already present in both particles.
The EPR authors preferred the second explanation according to which that information was encoded in some ‘hidden parameters’. The first explanation, that an effect propagated instantly, across a distance, is in conflict with the theory of relativity.
They then concluded that quantum mechanics was incomplete since, in its formalism, there was no space for such hidden parameters.
Bell’s theorem is generally understood to have demonstrated that their preferred explanation was not viable. Most physicists who have examined the matter concur that experiments, such as those of Alain Aspect and his group, have confirmed that physical probabilities, as predicted by quantum theory, do show the phenomena of Bell-inequality violations that are considered to invalidate EPR’s preferred “local hidden-variables” type of explanation for the correlations that EPR first drew attention to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox
I go with
4.0 What it is
To be fair, that’s pretty much the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is Bohr. You can’t go too far wrong with Bohr, I think.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.