Re: Surprise! Dr. John Bell Liked the Ether!
From: Bill Hobba (bhobba_at_rubbish.net.au)
Date: 06/29/04
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Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 23:30:04 GMT
"Sam Wormley" <swormley1@mchsi.com> wrote in message
news:40E1BA97.EE9965F@mchsi.com...
> John Bell liking aether doesn't make it so....
> Einstein liking actualities doesn't make them so...
>
> Quoting John Wheeler from "STEPHEN HAWKING'S A BRIEF HISTORY OF
> TIME, A READER'S COMPANION", "I had worked with the other great man
> in the quantum debate, Niels Bohr, in Copenhagen. And I know no
> greater debate in the last hundreds of years than the debate between
> Bohr and Einstein, no greater debate between two greater men, or one
> that extended over a longer period of time--twenty-eight years--at a
> higher level of colleagueship. To put it in brief: Does the world
> exist out there independent of us, as Einstein thought; or, as Bohr
> thought, is there some sense in which we, through our choice of
> observing equipment, have something to do with what comes about..."
>
> Einstein refused to believe in a reality that precluded cause and
> effect. "God does not play dice with the universe." he declared. He
> especially objected to the theory's insistence that particles,
> forces, and events seemed to come into existence only when a
> measurement or observation was made.
>
> For more than half a century physicists and philosophers debated
> whether the quantum theory really was a complete and accurate
> description of reality. Then in 1964, physicist John Bell proposed a
> brilliant method to resolve the issue. "Bell's Theorem," says the
> eminent physicist Henry Stapps, "is the most profound discovery of
> science." By the early 1980's a number of elegant experiments
> applying Bell's Theorem have proved that quantum theory, which
> speaks in terms of probabilities rather than actualities, is indeed
> a complete explanation of reality... God DOES play dice with the
> universe!
>
> Empirical results of observation and experiment... that's what makes
> something so!
>
> More--
>
> Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics
> Amir D Aczel
> 2002 John Wiley & Sons/Four Walls Eight
> Windows 302pp 16.99/$28.00hb
>
> There are two kinds of books about quantum
> mechanics. There are those in which we learn
> about abstract concepts such as Hilbert spaces,
> state vectors and density matrixes, but where the
> author never addresses - or only pays lip-service
> to - the question of what quantum mechanics
> actually means. This is the approach often taken in
> textbooks. The other, quite opposite, approach
> focuses on the interpretative question - drawing all
> kinds of conclusions and analogies, talking about
> telepathy and other mysteries, and perhaps even
> claiming that quantum mechanics transcends
> Western philosophy.
>
> Neither approach is very helpful when one wants
> to understand what quantum mechanics really
> means in a deep philosophical sense. Amir Aczel's
> new book on entanglement - falling as it does into
> neither category - avoids such pitfalls.
>
> Anton Zeilinger from the Institute of Experimental
> Physics at the University of Vienna reviews the
> book in the May issue of Physics World; email
> anton.zeilinger@univie.ac.at
Thank you Sam for a very interesting and informative post. There is no
doubt the great Einstein-Bohr debate was just that - great. And, while
Einstein lost slight luster in my mind by never accepting QM fully (he was
always scientist enough to acknowledge it as a valid theory - just an
intermediate one in his view) his debates with Bohr only enhances his
already great reputation and strengthened QM. This is just one of the many
great services Einstein did for physics.
As an aside I have recently changed my view of QM, I now hold to Ian
Percivals view that realty out there is real, exists in an objective sense,
the wave collapse is real. He suggests it is caused by fluctuations in the
state at about the plank time scale and this results in an almost
instantaneous wave function collapse by means of a Quantum State Diffusion
process - see http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-7.pdf. So
Bohrs view is not the only one consistent wit the facts. However science
demands that we accept Bohrs view as valid until experiment can decide
otherwise - for that is all that counts in science.
Thanks
Bill
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