Posted on 11/18/2011 5:52:08 AM PST by ShadowAce
At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.
“I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Valentini believes that this result may be the most important general theorem relating to the foundations of quantum mechanics since Bell’s theorem, the 1964 result in which Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proved that if quantum mechanics describes real entities, it has to include mysterious “action at a distance”.
Action at a distance occurs when pairs of quantum particles interact in such a way that they become entangled. But the new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, presents a theorem showing that if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other. As that seems very unlikely to be true, the researchers conclude that the wavefunction must be physically real after all.
David Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford, UK, says that the theorem is the most important result in the foundations of quantum...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Waves on an oscilloscope go from side-to-side when the display is rotated 90 degrees. It’s a matter of display and perspective. Turn your head sideways and view the same wave.
Two waves of the same frequency superimposed, one rotated 90 degrees to the other, form a circle.
Good description of poltergeist activity. Describes “miracles” also. It does validate prayer too.
Or, put another way
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters[waves?].And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
I always wondered this about waves-
If two waves are traveling in such a way that they cancel each other out, then how is energy still transferred past the point where they cancel?
Would you have a perfectly flat spot in the ocean -where all waves cancel each other- suddenly a wave appears on the opposit end?
I never get bohred by arguments about quantum interpretations.
Someone gets a paper published and grist is provided for some debate mill and more papers are published. Wonderful.
Implications? That is the one questions the writers would have a really tough time answering, I think.
The line between science and spirituality continues to thin. This is the final nail in the coffin of the 19th-century materialist world view. If the waveform represents physical reality then this directly implies that consciousness chooses how physical reality manifests itself from the infinite field of possibility. Accept this theorem and one can no longer deny the primacy of consciousness or it’s transcendency and call oneself a scientist.
Step by step (real) science continues to approach the Godhead.
that's right Higgs....my bad.
I believe the entanglement "speed" was instantaneous not merely faster than light.
My wife’s a high school Calculus teacher. When we had no kids I got to attend the various state and local math teacher association dinners and luncheons.
The lectures were all top notch.
One discovery made by one of the teachers in the group, which she subsequently wrote up in a paper that is STILL waiting for peer review is the observation that water flows in nature according to a sinusoidal function. In fact, along with water, many other substances and objects in nature tend to want to flow across or through a medium in a sinusoidal function. It’s different from a sinusoid, this sinusoidal function but the idea is this:
Take a sheet of glass and an eyedropper full of water. Hold the glass at a 45 degree angle and then slowly discharge the eyedropper. You can also see some of this on a clean glass surface in the shower. Little rivulets of water snaking down the glass.
Does it flow straight down the glass? Nope. Sinusoidal function.
You know the breakaway chains you put dog tags on? Take a stereo speaker and drape the chain across the speaker from top of speaker to bottom. Put in a white or pink noise CD and turn it on - sinusoidal function.
Pictures of rivers that have not been subject to damming or straightening taken from space? Sinusoidal functions.
She can’t describe why, but the evidence is striking.
Watch a skier coming down a slope. Do they come straight down? Their track forms a sinusoidal function.
One possible explanation of all this is that while gravity exerts a force on an object, particles flows in nature may tend to seek a state of constant velocity. acceleration causes a linear increase in velocity. Nature wants constant velocity.
Studies of outfielders fielding fly balls shows that the brain is quick enough to calculate the trajectory of a fly ball, account for wind, and then tell the outfielder WHAT SPEED he has to run in order for him/her to catch the ball.
The fielder NEVER accelerates to the place the ball will fall in the outfield. He or she always travels at a constant rate of speed, unless a gust causes the player to dive at the ball, or fair the ball back toward the athlete so that he has to slow down to keep from over running the ball.
How do you bleed off the velocity? - form a wave function.
Every oscillation attenuates the increase in velocity so that, for example, a skier’s descent down a hill occurs more or less at a constant speed, even though gravity is forever trying to increase the speed.
According to the OLD quantum theory, light travels at a constant speed of 3.0 x 10^8 m/s. It oscillates too, so maybe photons are under constant acceleration too, which makes them oscillate in order to bleed the speed off such that the rate of speed is constant. That doesn’t make any sense, of course, because these photons would essentially have to be moving through a media which would allow this bleeding off of speed, like a skier traveling through snow, accelerated by gravity.
Fact is, light keeps going without stopping. How does that work? You fire a bullet from a gun and when it encounters another force it eventually stops. Light SORT of does that, accept now they have evidence that light speeds up and slows down. Huh?
As I’m thinking about it, it may be that there is no such thing as ‘linear’ acceleration. All acceleration in nature may be angular, and when the distances are short, the acceleration appears linear, but really isn’t.
The analogy you used is:
"... no different than the proverbial tree falling in the forest ..."
Niels Bohr said "if you can't measure it...it doesn't exist"....which became known as the "Copenhagen Principle".
Thanks.....there’s nothing more interesting to me than the quest to understand the universe and we are in very exciting times in terms of that quest. I am still having difficulty getting my head around this piece of information however.
That was pretty interesting. Thanks.
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