Well, it would be if it was at all accurate...
If it had been my intent to be absolutely perfectly technically accurate, no one without deep physics knowledge would understand it, in particular the person it was written for, and it would take weeks if not years to write. So basically, what you are doing is applying the standard of absolute technical accuracy to a document that was never intended to be absolutely technically accurate, so that you can say "wrong" twelve-some-odd times.
There is a name for this behavior: harassment. That is what is happening here, and if the post I reply to here were not sufficient proof, the one that follows it certainly is; and the capper is on the next page. There is no question as to your intent, you have stated it aloud; there is no question of that intent's appropriateness (or, more to the point, lack thereof) in this thread, or for the user who asked the question that made this thread appear, or, in my opinion, on this site.
You have been conclusively demonstrated to be wrong twice now, by me, and it is apparent that you are out for revenge, and it is your intent to harass. It is inappropriate here, and you are about to be proven conclusively wrong yet again.
Actually, that article says precisely what I said: Maxwell showed that energy must be
emitted in packets (quanta), but never showed that it was also
absorbed the same way. But the first is essentially the quantum theory; Einstein merely substantiated it, named it, and completed it. Planck
discovered it. Note as well that Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1919 (link in the next response), and it is specifically stated on the Nobel Committee's web site that this was for the discovery of quanta.
Wrong. Einstein was the first to propose quanta and particularly with regard to the photoelectric effect.
Tell it to the Nobel Committee. Look
here. Please note the following prominently displayed phrase: "in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his
discovery of energy quanta." (Bold mine.) That is the official statement of the Nobel Committee regarding the reason for the award. If you disagree, you are free to do so; but it is clearly nothing but your opinion, as opposed to that of the Nobel Committee.
Furthermore, what Planck
believed at the time is immaterial; by creating the formula that utilized his constant, he had implicitly proposed quanta. Whether he realized that implication or not, that is what he had done. That is what the Nobel Committee decided, as they indicated in plain words.
Wrong. Schrodinger's work came 20 years later.
Schroedinger proposed his wave equation in 1925, though it was not published in Physical Review Letters and Annalen der Physik until 1926; de Broglie proposed quantization of matter in 1923 in his PhD thesis, but this remained obscure until around the same time (1925) when Einstein began to talk about it, and unproven until 1927 when Davisson and Germer proved the hypothesis with their electron scattering experiment in a nickel crystal. That doesn't sound like twenty years to me. It sounds like two.
And Schrodinger's work was based on De Broglie's.
This, at least, is correct.
Wrong. There are no elementary particles called "quanta" - quantization is a process in which we find that dynamic systems change according to discrete states rather than continuously.
So, then photons, being elementary particles, must not be
quanta of the electromagnetic field. (For reference, please note that each of the previous is a separate link to a different source; NASA, medical science, Princeton etymological, and Wikipedia definitions are given of the photon, each of which states that it is a quantum, each of which states that it is a particle, and three of which state that it is an elementary particle.) And Planck must not have discovered them, even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize for doing so in 1919.
This is nonsense. A quantum mechanics is a system of mechanics in which certain "properties" of the system appear to be quantized into discrete states. There are no magical entities known as "quanta".
See above. It appears from this statement that you do not believe in photons.
Wrong. Heisenberg proposed that certain qualities or properties of matter could not be simultaneously measured with absolute precision, there was an inherent uncertainty in all measurements which was related to the quantum of action.
For reference:
OK, so Heisenberg proposed that there were certain parameters of quanta that could not be simultaneously measured. At first, he was a proponent of the idea that this was because the measurement of one quantity would disturb the measurement of another, but soon the math told him and others that in fact, those other values simply didn't exist. It had to be that way.
This was intended to be a relatively non-technical discussion. If you want to (from the viewpoint of a relatively non-technical reader) quibble about the quantum of action, you are welcome to do so; but please do it somewhere else. The majority of readers here will not be interested in the action principle in the first place, nor are they interested in plowing through the derivation of the Hamiltonian to understand its application to quantum mechanics and why action is quantized. If you'd like to discuss the action principle, at least have the courtesy to start your own thread, or at least explain what you are talking about so that non-technical readers can understand.
I argue that my description is close enough for the non-technical to grasp the underlying idea; should I have felt that more detail was needed to get to Afshar, then I would have provided it. To state that this is "wrong" merely because I avoided a concept that a) is not necessary to understand what is happening, and b) is highly abstruse, is not a correction for accuracy's sake, but simple harassment.
He was also always a proponent of the idea that measurement of one quantity would disturb the measurement of another, but his argument also went beyond that.
You have implied that I said that measurement of one such quantity
could not disturb the measurement of another; that is not what I said. What I said is, that is not what the uncertainty principle means. Nor is it what Heisenberg thought it meant; the gamma-ray microscope is a pedagogical tool, and Heisenberg himself said so. The following site contradicts you, in Heisenberg's own words, and it is the official historical site of the American Institute of Physics for the history of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. See
this page at the bottom: "So far the experiments all confirm
Heisenberg's conviction that there is no 'real' microscopic classical collision at the bottom."
Furthermore, Heisenberg developed matrix mechanics; Schroedinger later showed that the wave equation was equivalent, but Heisenberg's view of things didn't originally include the wave equation, but matrices and the concept of the "quantum jump;" to state that Heisenberg believed that measurement of one quantity would disturb the value of another in the face of quantum jumps and matrices is patently ludicrous.
Now, I have brought matrices into the conversation; let me explain for the non-technical what is involved. Heisenberg deliberately avoided discussing any sort of description of the "orbit" of an electron around an atom. Max Born read his paper, and realized immediately that Heisenberg's formulation could be expressed mathematically using a technique called "matrices." He wrote a paper showing how, and Heisenberg and he (and Pascual Jordan, a student of Born's who had assisted Born on his paper and shared credit) then released another paper jointly on it the next year.
Matrix mechanics was not immediately accepted; matrices were not well-known in physics, and had not been widely studied. The technique was seen as very abstruse mathematics, whereas Schroedinger's wave equations were seen as much more concrete representations. Furthermore, matrix mechanics went far beyond stating that the position and momentum of a particle were conjugate under uncertainty; its most obvious feature, the
quantum jump, implied that the position of an electron could vary discontinuously; that is, that an electron could be found at point A at one time, and point B at a later time, without having traversed the space between. It was not until Schroedinger showed that matrix mechanics and his wave equation were equivalent mathematically that matrices were widely accepted.
Whether his idea "went beyond that" or not, you have both imputed something false about what I said, and made a false statement about what Heisenberg believed according not merely to his own words, but to the very technical basis of his (and Born's) theory. Again, this is harassment, not valid criticism.
The math never "told him and others that in fact, those other values simply didn't exist", that it is simply one interpretation that might explain what is actually observed.
On this page, Heisenberg is quoted as follows: "In the sharp formulation of the law of causality-- 'if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future'-it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise." The implication is that we cannot know the present exactly- that at least some of the values of parameters
literally do not exist. Further, the clear implication of the quantum jump is that intermediate positions between the starting and finishing positions
do not exist. And that is precisely what I said. You do not know the difference between matrix mechanics and wave mechanics.
Wrong. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen set out to show that the wavefunction could not describe physical reality, they proposed an argument based on measurements of the position and momentum of a pair of unspecified particles. They did not mention photons or spin.
I preceded this with, "here is a generalized and simplified explanation." If you don't like it, I suggest you start your own thread. I chose photons; you chose harassment. It is more important that your opponent be "wrong" than that you bother to write something informative to those who may have less understanding than you. It is this that I find "wrong" with you.
The reason this is easier to explain with spin is because spin is discrete. The arguments also apply to continuous variables, but are much more difficult to understand. Note that understanding it there requires the action principle and the quantization of action; I have already covered why I did not believe that that level of detail was needed. This is a consistent pedagogical approach that avoids matters that are unnecessary to understand Aspect, Afshar, and the DCQE. I or someone else may later choose to add the action principle in another discussion; you may do so yourself, if you choose. But again, this is not a correction; it is harassment, plain and simple. Your intent is not to inform; if it were, you would have explained the action principle, and its quantization. That you did not do so proves conclusively that your intent was only to be able to write "wrong" twelve times, not to inform others. And that is harassment plain and simple, no question about it.
Wrong. Bohr's argument is complex and is based on unavoidable disturbances between the systems under measurement. Some parts of the later, refined argument do imply the non-simultaneous existence of the quantities but it was not explicit in the original argument. Bohr also did not ignore the idea of non-locality, he was explicitly opposed to it.
Again,
simplified and generalized. "Wrong" here is again harassment, which is your entire goal.
To go into Bohr's argument here is another waste of time, another side-track that will do nothing but confuse the reader. That argument is based on an interpretation of quantum mechanics that most physicists no longer believe is consistent with the facts; specifically, the original unvarnished Copenhagen Interpretation. Even proponents of CI say that it doesn't make sense without decoherence; and decoherence was not to be developed for decades at the time of this argument. I have presented a version of the modern argument; it is easier to understand, does not involve either matrices or bra-ket Dirac notation, and gets to the heart of the matter.
Wrong. The debate began before EPR, EPR did not lead to the debate.
While true, it is (again) a
simplified and generalized description. Every point you have made while technically true cannot help the layman understand the situation; in fact, all you have done is succeeded in derailing the thread and making it one (to judge from the comments that follow) that is incomprehensible to the individual who asked the question in the first place. You have not only harassed me, you have rendered the discussion of the subject useless to the person who it was intended for. This behavior is unjustifiable; it is harassment, and personal attack, nothing else but. You have no place here if your only motivation is attack; it is against the rules of this site. By engaging in it, you have not only broken the rules, but rendered a discussion that you did not understand the need for incomprehensible to the person for whom it was intended, as that individual has clearly indicated in as many words:
Well, this is just great. Everyone's managed to offend each other, but no one's bothered to discuss my question, so I'll offer it again...
Or, do I just have no idea of what I'm talking about (a genuine possibility)?
Good job, Pragmatist. I'm sure that an exhaustive discussion of the details of the action principle is precisely what kjkent wanted. S/he seems to have found it very useful and have full understanding. If you were pursuing an agenda of sharing knowledge, this would not have happened; but your agenda can be judged by your actions, and it has nothing to do with sharing, nor with politeness, nor even with correct understanding on the part of the layman. Your agenda is to harass.
And this is not the "measurement problem" - which is concerned with the resolution of superposition of states as well as the effect of disturbances on the system.
And here we have yet another side-track, to go with the action principle and the quantization of action: superposition. It is unnecessary to a layman's understanding of Afshar and the DCQE.
Superposition is a concept that I have explained elsewhere; its applicability to wave mechanics is that it is a mathematical method of describing waves by decomposition into simpler waves. The Schroedinger wave equation that describes a propagating (i.e., moving) particle can be decomposed into simpler components that are called "states."
The implication of wave mechanics is that particles ordinarily exist as a combination, that is, a superposition, of these states, when it is propagating in free space; but when the particle is detected, the superposition collapses into a single state, and that state interacts with the state of the detecting particle. This is the collapse of the wave function, which is also the quantum jump of matrix mechanics. The notation, invented by Paul Dirac, used to describe this is also called "bra-ket" notation.
Decoherence proposes that after this interaction, the descriptions of the two particles decohere back into their separate (or combined, if they happen to stick together and form a system) wave equations, which are again superpositions of states, and remain so until the next detection/interaction.
This is harassment, plain and simple, nothing else but. You prove it every time you say "wrong." Feel free to explain it so that people who don't want to have to understand every last detail can comprehend it. That is the intent of this thread. You have failed miserably; kjkent has no description that s/he can take away as to what is going on. All you have succeeded at is harassment.
This is nonsense. Bell's argument had nothing to do with mutual dependence of spin states on different axes.
OK, then feel free to explain it in terms that the original inquirer can understand. I have already done so; all you have done is confuse with a bunch of unnecessary detail and technical quibbles in pursuit of a personal attack agenda. I'll show precisely why in my next response.
Wrong. Bell set out the inequalities in his original paper and argued them through to a complete conclusion. Bell presented his paper as a complete proof in itself against EPR.
He did; however, to explain and describe his conclusion, which is based upon pure mathematics, to a layman is a daunting task. It is considerably eased by folding CHSH and the use of spin singlet states as CHSH, and then Aspect, did to physically show the inequality's underlying idea by a comprehensible (not to mention unambiguously experimentally testable) example.
I could, I suppose, have plagiarized Greene's Mulder and Scully magic box idea; but I am guessing anyone interested enough to ask in the first place will eventually wind up reading that, or may have already done so, so I prefer to provide another way to think about it so that Greene's explanation will hopefully prove more revealing when it is encountered. Of course, this explanation must also stand on its own; and it must be brief enough to fit in a post, yet descriptive enough for the idea to be relatively clear.
What you have succeeded in here is not to illuminate; it is to obfuscate. And harass, your original intent. You have basically made the conversation incomprehensible to all but an elite few. You have illuminated nothing, but you have succeeded in harassing.
Wrong. Aspect proved nothing beyond reasonable doubt.
Current repetitions of Aspect or more accurately of experiments based on Aspect's idea give beyond six sigma certainty; this is technically speaking the equivalent of "beyond a reasonable doubt." See Charles Weiss' arguments
here. I am surprised that you would maintain this position when I have every reason to believe that you have already been exposed to this information when we were discussing "framing" and science in skeptigirl's
recent thread.
Aspect is pretty much a done deal. There are a few people still arguing against it, but by and large the majority of the physics community accepts those results as definitively disproving either local realism or locality (and there are, I believe, still a majority who reject locality violations on the same grounds Hawking make the Chronology Protection Conjecture on; this is my position on the matter as well). Six sigma, for those not familiar with statistics, is a level of certainty of 99.9964%. I have seen it stated that recent instantiations have put this beyond nine sigma, but I cannot provide a reference; on the other hand, originally in January of 2003, and most recently updated May 24 2006, Richard Gill provides data in his second appendix to his paper, "Time, Finite Statistics, and Bell's Fifth Position" that show six-sigma results,
here, and Weihs' results are available
here, and finally you can look
here where 242-sigma (no, that is not a typo- two hundred and forty-two standard deviations) results are presented. I have chosen preprints so that the arguments are available for inspection by those who do not have access to
Physics,
Nature, and other expensive literature of the physics profession.
So much for "Aspect proved nothing beyond a reasonable doubt." I have shown a rigorous definition of the level of scientific experimental certainty consistent with "beyond a reasonable doubt," and shown that Aspect experiments have raised the certainty beyond that level. If you are merely saying that Aspect's
original experiment didn't put it at that level, I'm not sure
that's even true; but even if it is, the long explanation involved in explaining it is not worthwhile in a post of reasonable length on a non-physics board.
And finally, if that's the only quibble you have, it certainly isn't worth a "wrong," unless you're looking to harass someone.
The experiment has been contested many times and repeated many times with increasing accuracy, although it's probable the results are valid, there are still outstanding and unanswered objections to it. And the argument about the reality of the values is a different one to the non-locality argument.
There is a great deal of proof in the three papers above; there is also a refutation of several loopholes in Gill's paper.
Now, I will not state that the majority of
qualified physicists still questioning this are woos; in fact, very much the opposite. It is their task to attempt to find defects in the theory. If they succeed, they will make an inestimable contribution to the progress of physics. They will also be famous, and will likely win money, neither of which is to be sneezed at, but in most cases neither of which is a primary motivation. Still, it does add some spice to the pie. Furthermore, collectively, they will make that inestimable contribution
even if they fail, because the more folks try and fail to disprove it, the more sure we can be that it is a useful theory.
On the other hand, anyone who is
not a qualified physicist, who expresses an opinion in contradiction of the mainstream, and who engages in pre-emptive harassment of perceived opponents, IS a woo. No question about it, we can all go look at an Evilution thread on this very site to see numerous examples.
So I have to ask you straight out, Pragmatist, what is your position on proof by Aspect of counter-factual local realism as opposed to counter-factual locality? And do you know the difference between local realism and locality? Can you state it? Because this, you see, is absolutely the core of the discussion of Aspect, EPR, the DCQE, and Afshar. And if you don't know the difference, then you do not have sufficient knowledge to discuss this subject technically.
You may well be looking to prove locality violations; and whereas Aspect can be interpreted as either a breakdown of locality or a breakdown of local realism, the DCQE has no such alternative explanation that does not involve explicit violation of the Chronology Protection Conjecture. Where Aspect only violates locality (if it does; i.e., if you interpret it that way) in that it shows "spooky action at a distance," and this merely
implies a causality violation, if the DCQE is violating locality, it is a directly perceivable causality violation, i.e. a violation of the time ordering of cause and effect. Of course, either can be explained by a breakdown of local realism, and this requires neither the implicit nor the explicit causality violation, but woos generally like locality violations rather than the more prosaic explanation that there are no local hidden variables. And that's why I ask. I want to know where you stand, and whether this is all just an exercise prompted by defense of belief in "nonlocal phenomena." This last has unfortunately become a faux justification for all sorts of mummery including psychic phenomena, ghosts, and other tripe.
In the immortal words of Pauli - so bad it's, "Not even wrong".
I think this merely adds grist to the mill of speculation; the fact that you went on and tried (and, by the way, completely failed) to anticipate my counter-arguments shows a pattern of behavior: the pre-emptive strike. The post where you did this is
here.
Why is it necessary to attempt to pre-emptively discredit an opponent, Pragmatist? What is the point? Do you even care that what you have done has not helped anyone understand anything? Is it of any importance to you? If it is, why have you done this? What is your motivation? I will not even ask whether you have a justification, since it has to be obvious to any observer that nothing can justify rendering this subject incomprehensible to the person the thread was started for, and that that person is in fact not helped is beyond question. I'll leave judgement of the ethical implications of this to the reader.
.
but it's still no magic bullet 
, due to QM consistancy and new empirical content issue. IMO the wave nature of QM is real, the collapse of the wavefunction is an artifact of the ensemble not just representing the actual state but representing all possible states and the particle representation of measurements. You can see an analogy of the 
. This is neither the time nor the place and not fully defensible without some unique emperical backing 