Re: Another EPR question

From: Caroline Thompson (ch.thompson1_at_virgin.net)
Date: 11/17/04 

Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 17:13:43 +0000 (UTC)

"Bilge" <dubious@radioactivex.lebesque-al.net> wrote in message
news:slrncpgn9k.5i8.dubious@radioactivex.lebesque-al.net...

> >"Ilja Schmelzer" <Ilja.Schmelzer@FernUni-Hagen.de> wrote:

> >> Do you argue about loopholes in the experiments? (That's
> >> nothing I would like to argue about, leaving this to
> >> experimenters and future.)

Caroline Thompson responded:
> >Sorry, but if you ignore the loophole you end up with
> >self-contradictory statements ...
> > ... We *have* to take account of loopholes, otherwise
> >what's the point of the experiments? Are we simply to
> >accept something impossible because we happen
> >to believe QM to be correct?
>
> Since it's impossible to close every possible loophole in any
> theory, the correct question is ``are we to accept [quantum
> mechanics] just because it predicts the correct results and no
> one has offered another theory which agrees with the experimental
> data and explains something that [quantum mechanics] doesn't?''
>
> The answer, of course, is ``yes.''

Or rather, "No", since

(a) in view of the loopholes in the Bell tests, there is as yet no proof
that QM really does predict the correct results (see Santos' recent
conclusion:
"the validity of local realism may be either refuted by a single
loophole-free experiment or increasingly confirmed by the passage of time
without [a successful loophole-free] experiment. "
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0410193 , and

(b) those same loopholes mean that there *are* other theories that can
predict the same results. [See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_hidden_variable_theory . Similar theory
can, incidentally, explain a great many other experiments in quantum
optics.]

> Classical mechanics was accepted for a long time, based on exactly the
> same line of reasoning. If I employ your reasoning regarding loopholes,
> then for centuries, physicists, engineers, etc., were engaged in an
> elaborate fraud. Anyone with a fertile imagination and a resistance to
> logic can come up with an example of an experiment that has never
> literally been performed to test classical mechanics and declare it a
> loophole in newton's laws.

Come on now, Bilge! The two are scarcely in the same category! There are
no obvious phenomena that refute Newton's Law, whereas every day, in every
walk of ordinary life as well as every science, we take it for granted that
there are no "nonlocal" effects (in the Bell sense. Of course there are
nonlocal effects all over the place in the sense of everything being
affected by the environment.). Everything we have ever encountered in our
lives refutes the possibility of nonlocal effects.

> > A loophole-free one has yet to be performed.
>
> That is true for any theory of anything that has ever been proposed.
> Physicists just tend to accept the theories which haven't yet been
> falsified.

Hmmm ... but, as I said, nonlocality is refuted by everything else in the
world. Quantum entanglement is supposed to be the one exception. I think
we are entitled to expect extraordinary evidence.

Caroline

Caroline H Thompson

ch.thompson1@virgin.net
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/

Quantcast