Re: Rovelli on EPR

Thus spake tttito <vecchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
In barely one-month-old [1], Rovelli argues that 'EPR-type
correlations do not entail any form of "non-locality", when viewed
in the context of a relational interpretation of quantum mechanics.'


In so far as I can see, all this is saying is what we already know, that
there is nothing we can say within the formal structure of quantum
theory which yields a contradiction.

I think that is a slightly different, and somewhat weaker, statement
than the one which I, and I think also rof, would like to see, namely an
answer to the question "what is really going on?".

The program outlined by Rovelli (1996, Relational Quantum Mechanics,
Int. J. Th. Phys., 35 1637) is this:

"The program outlined is thus to do for the formalism of quantum
mechanics what Einstein did for the Lorentz transformations: i. Find a
set of simple assertions about the world, with clear physical meaning,
that we know are experimentally true (postulates); ii. Analyze these
postulates, and show that from their conjunction it follows that certain
common assumptions about the world are incorrect; iii. Derive the full
formalism of quantum mechanics from these postulates. I expect that if
this program could be completed, we would at long last begin to agree
that we have understood quantum mechanics".

I believe that that is what I have done in gr-qc/0508077. But it only
answers the question "what is quantum mechanics saying", and I am not
convinced that it is really a huge step forward from what Von Neumann
was saying when he identified Hilbert space with a formal language, vis
quantum logic. In the context of EPR I don't think it answers the
question, "what is really going on?".

To answer that question I think we have to go much deeper. I think we
have to first use the formalism of quantum mechanics to construct
quantum electrodynamics - itself regarded as an unsolved question which
I tackle in Discrete Quantum Electrodynamics (physics/0101062). Then we
have to introduce a physical metric by reworking Einstein's development
of special relativity in terms of photon interactions as defined in qed.
This will show us that the metric is a product of particle interactions,
and not a prior physical property of space. A satisfactory treatment
will produce gtr, rather than sr, which I seek to show in gr-qc/0508077.

Such a treatment shows that spin is not a property of a particle in
isolation, but a part of a relationship between a particle and space-
time. At the time when the entangled pair is produced, as it seems to
me, the relationship which they have with spacetime is not fully
defined, and in particular their spin properties are not defined. Their
spin properties only become defined when they interact with A's or B's
measurement apparatus. Spin is conserved, so that the spin property does
become defined, it becomes defined for the past as well as the present.
Thus A's measurement determines the spin relationship between the
particles and space-time at the time of the original production of the
particles, and hence it also determines it in B's measurement.

As an explanation that does not violate locality. It does violate a
traditional notion of causality, which is one of the possibilities
mentioned by Bell. I don't have much of a problem with that. If space-
time only exists as a consequence of particle interactions, then
traditional causality is out of the window anyway. Also it ties in with
time reversibility and the Feynman-Stuckelberg interpretation that an
antiparticle is a time reversed particle. As has been discussed
elsewhere, the "arrow of time" which we perceive is a result of entropy,
a statistical effect based on many particle interactions. I see no
reason to think that the arrow of time should exist within the quantum
domain.

Regards

--
Charles Francis
substitute charles for NotI to email

.

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