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Author Topic:   the underlying assumptions rig the debate
randman 
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Posts: 6367
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Message 95 of 246 (322955)
06-18-2006 5:04 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by PaulK
06-18-2006 4:49 PM


Re: general reply to all
Your assertion is that the past can be changed form one fixed state to another.
No, I am arguing that there is no reason at all to claim the past has a fixed state, and I have provided ample evidence both in forms of quotes from prominent scientists and hard lab experiments to demonstrate this is something both the data and respected scientists like Wheeler agree with.
You have offered incredulity.
Changing from a superposition of states to a fixed state is not that and does not support that.
What do you think it is then? Superposition (all possible paths) collapsing to one single path and then back again is not a change in your opinion?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 92 by PaulK, posted 06-18-2006 4:49 PM PaulK has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 97 by PaulK, posted 06-18-2006 5:32 PM randman has replied

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 99 of 246 (322975)
06-18-2006 6:17 PM
Reply to: Message 98 by Percy
06-18-2006 5:39 PM


Re: real problems with the board....to percy
It has already been pointed out multiple times by multiple people how you are misinterpreting the English descriptions to reach false conclusions.
A better way to describe this is a highly partisan group facing an attack on a cherished belief system has disagreed with the English descriptions here, but that I have offered numerous examples of those same English descriptions being offered by others, including noted scientists in that field, and you guys have offered absolutely no evidence outside of your own dogmatic assertions.
I suggest you reread my post and answer these basic questions:
In the delayed-choice and other experiments, does the ability to know which path a photon took coorealate to whether it travels on one path as a particle or on all possible paths as a wave?
Does this collapsing to one path occur even when the means to determine what path the photon took occurs in a delayed fashion after the photon has already taken it's path?
Just answer those 2 questions please, and substantiate your answers with references to actual experiments or quotes from someone analyzing those experiments.

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 Message 98 by Percy, posted 06-18-2006 5:39 PM Percy has not replied

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 100 of 246 (322979)
06-18-2006 6:24 PM
Reply to: Message 97 by PaulK
06-18-2006 5:32 PM


Re: general reply to all
To try to get some basis of agreement, I pose the same questions to you as I did to percy.
In the delayed-choice and other experiments, does the ability to know which path a photon took coorealate to whether it travels on one path as a particle or on all possible paths as a wave?
Does this collapsing to one path occur even when the means to determine what path the photon took occurs in a delayed fashion after the photon has already taken it's path?
Just answer those 2 questions please, and substantiate your answers with references to actual experiments or quotes from someone analyzing those experiments.
Changing from a superposition of states to a collapsed state is not the same as changing from a collapsed state to another collapsed state.
I don't think you are appreciating what these experiments show. The experiments suggest that a superposition exists until someone sets up or there is set up a means of determining one single path. As such, this depicts reality and past reality as existing either in a multitude of possible and yet real realities simultaneously, or in an unreal or undefined state as Wheeler claims, until as it were a question is asked of it. Regardless, the nature of the question coorelates to what form the past takes. That is, no matter how much you want to dismiss it, evidence that the question in the present has a determinative effect or coorelates to what the past becomes. The past becomes in part due to the present. That's what this shows, and you earlier admitted to.
Now, you can claim all you want that this never violates previous observations, but in making that statement you are ignoring a fundamental issue, and that is that asking the same set of reality a different question using a different means can yield a different result as the quantum eraser demonstrates. That shows there is some flexibility in what we think of as the past, just as I have been saying all along.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 97 by PaulK, posted 06-18-2006 5:32 PM PaulK has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 135 by PaulK, posted 06-19-2006 2:18 AM randman has replied

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 101 of 246 (322986)
06-18-2006 6:36 PM
Reply to: Message 96 by Iblis
06-18-2006 5:18 PM


you deny wave/partical duality then?
So you deny wave/partical duality then?
Are you holding to the many-worlds interpretation or are you claiming there is no reason to suggest that interpretation as you don't believe there is ever a collapse to one path in the first place?
If you don't believe the particle-liek behaviour is anything but an artifice of our own delusions in observation, then where is the interference pattern?
If the photon continues to propogate as a wave, then the interference pattern should appear in these experiments, and it does not. How do you explain that, and why do you disagree with these researchers in that regard?
In the two-slit experiments, the physicist's choice of apparatus forces the photon to choose between going through both slits like a wave or just one slit, like a particle. But what would happen,Wheeler asked, if the researcher could somehow wait until after the light bad passed the two slits before deciding how to observe it?
Five years after Wheeler outlined what he called the delayed-choice experiment, it was carried out independently by groups at the University of Maryland and the University of Munich. They aimed a laser beam not at a plate with two slits but at a beam splitter, a mirror coated with just enough silver to reflect half of the photons impinging on it and let the other half pass through. After diverging at the beam splitter the two beams were guided back together by mirrors and fed into a detector.
This initial setup provided no way for the investigators to test whether any individual photon had gone right or left at the beam splitter. Consequently, each photon went both ways splitting into two wavelets that ended up interfering with each other at the detector.
Then the workers installed a customized crystal called a Pockels Cell in the middle of one route. When an electric current was applied to the Pockels Cell, it diffracted photons to an auxiliary detector. Otherwise, photons passed through the cell unhindered. A random signal generator made it possible to turn the cell on or off after the photon had already passed the beam splitter but before it reached the detector as Wheeler had specified.
When the Pockels-cell detector was switched on, the photon would behave like a particle and travel one route or the other, triggering either the auxiliary detector or the primary detector, buy not both at once. If the Pockels-cell detector was off ,an interference pattern would appear in the detector at the end of both paths, indicating that the photon bad travelled both routes.
To underscore the weirdness of this effect, Wheeler points out that astronomers could perform a delayed-choice experiment on light from quasars, extremely bright, mysterious objects found near the edges of the universe. In place of a beam splitter and mirrors the experiment requires a gravitational lens, a galaxy or other massive object that splits the light from a quasar and refocuses it in the direction of a distant observer, creating two or more images of the quasar.
Psychic Photons
The astronomers choice of how to observe photons from the quasar here in the present apparently determines whether each photon took both paths or just one path around the gravitational lens-billions of years ago. As they approached the galactic beam splitter the photons must have had something like a premonition telling them how to behave in order to satisfy a choice to be made by unborn beings on a still nonexistent planet.
The fallacy giving rise to such speculations,Wheeler explains, is the assumption that a photon had some physical form before the astronomer observed it. Either it was a wave or a particle; either it went both ways around the quasar or only one way. Actually Wheeler says quantum phenomena are neither waves nor particles but are intrinsically undefined until the moment they are measured.
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/qphil.html#
Edited by randman, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 96 by Iblis, posted 06-18-2006 5:18 PM Iblis has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 106 by cavediver, posted 06-18-2006 7:44 PM randman has replied
 Message 107 by Rob, posted 06-18-2006 7:52 PM randman has replied

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 102 of 246 (39231)
05-07-2003 10:45 AM


for Iblis: down-converter experiments
Now comes the odd part. The signal photons and the idler photons, once emitted by the down-converters, never again cross paths; they proceed to their respective detectors independently of each other. Nevertheless, simply by blocking the path of one set of idler photons, the researchers destroy the interference pattern of the signal photons. What has changed?
The answer is that the observer's potential knowledge has changed. He can now determine which route the signal photons took to their detector by comparing their arrival times with those of the remaining, unblocked idlers. The original photon can no longer go both ways at the beam splitter, like a wave, but must either bounce off or pass through like a particle.
The comparison of arrival times need not actually be performed to destroy the interference pattern. The mere "threat" of obtaining information about which way the photon travelled, Mandel explains, forces it to travel only one route. "The quantum state reflects not only what we know about the system but what is in principle knowable," Mandel says.
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/qphil.html#
What this experiment shows that merely changing the potential to determine what path a photon takes results in the photon taking only one path. There is no interference pattern and so the wave-function in our observed universe does not take all possible paths.
Edited by randman, : No reason given.

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 108 of 246 (323028)
06-18-2006 8:07 PM
Reply to: Message 107 by Rob
06-18-2006 7:52 PM


Re: you deny wave/partical duality then?
I have thought about how light's qualities parallel truth or even perhaps God.....you know, "God is light", and it is intriguing. I will take a look at your paper.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 107 by Rob, posted 06-18-2006 7:52 PM Rob has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 116 by Rob, posted 06-18-2006 9:04 PM randman has replied

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 109 of 246 (323032)
06-18-2006 8:18 PM
Reply to: Message 106 by cavediver
06-18-2006 7:44 PM


still no substance from you here
Wave/particle duality is a vague and incomplete layman description of the possible properties of a wave-function.
So what? you assume I am not aware of that. If you read Iblis post, he does in fact deny wave/particle duality in asserting that the photon does in fact take all possible paths instead of collapsing into one path. It may be a primitive term "wave/particle" duality, but the idea that when we see the interference pattern, it travels "as a wave" and when we don't, it travelled as a particle is not something requiring more observation than that. If you want to interpret it differently fine, but I think Iblis and now you need to explain why if the photon still takes all possible paths, the interference pattern disappears in some of these experiments. Let me add that I have never stated that I think the wave-function changed or anything, but the discrete form manifested in physical reality (which is a derived function) does change. The photon takes all possible paths when there is no way to determine otherwise, and when we can know what path it takes, it takes one path. These are descriptions of the behaviour of the wave-function in discrete form, and regardless of what term you want to use, it does demonstrate wave/particle duality.
Furthermore, you still have not addressed the question of whether the wave-function spans segments of time.
As far as the rest of your claims, they are totally unsubstantiated and pure rubbish, and frankly pathetic.
Edited by randman, : No reason given.
Edited by randman, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 106 by cavediver, posted 06-18-2006 7:44 PM cavediver has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 112 by cavediver, posted 06-18-2006 8:41 PM randman has replied

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 110 of 246 (323033)
06-18-2006 8:20 PM
Reply to: Message 103 by Percy
06-18-2006 7:30 PM


Re: for Iblis: down-converter experiments
Hmmm......

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randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 111 of 246 (323034)
06-18-2006 8:21 PM
Reply to: Message 104 by Iblis
06-18-2006 7:32 PM


more bare assertions
So your argument consists of bare assertions?

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randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 113 of 246 (323040)
06-18-2006 8:50 PM
Reply to: Message 112 by cavediver
06-18-2006 8:41 PM


Re: still no substance from you here
Imo, you are still dodging. I have named several scientists, from Wheeler, Mandel and Zeilinger, that all talk of the wave-function in the same manner and consider the potential to know whether the photon in these experiments travels one route as a particle or all routes as a wave as coorelating to the actual path the particle takes.
Now, you want to bring up something else, in typical fashion, trying to suggest these observations somehow are incongruent with standard QM when in reality standard QM is demonstrated by these experiments.
The simple reality is that if we can tell which path a proton takes in the past, then that proton takes a definite path. If we cannot, then the proton takes all possible paths. You steadfastly refuse to acknowledge and deal with that fact.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 112 by cavediver, posted 06-18-2006 8:41 PM cavediver has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 114 by cavediver, posted 06-18-2006 9:01 PM randman has replied

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 115 of 246 (323044)
06-18-2006 9:04 PM


for the lurkers wanting to get a handle on this
The idea that I am merely misinterpreting the data and that no one has drawn the same or similar conclusions should be put to rest by the following:
The Copenhagen interpretation suggests that observation constructs reality. Bohr wrote of 'fundamental limitations' within atomic physics, in the 'objective existence of phenomena independent of their means of observation.' The reality envisaged by Bohr was not an objective, but a phenomenal one. It did not exist in the absence of observation. Bohr did not actually deny the existence of an objective reality 'out there'; but he thought it meaningless to ask any questions about what this reality was. In Bohr's philosophy, the facts of measurement and observation must suffice. There is no point in asking what lies beyond the observation.
Einstein could not agree with Bohr. In 1954, a year before his death, he maintained: 'Like the moon has a definite position whether or not we look at the moon, the same must also hold for the atomic objects, as there is no sharp distinction possible between these and macroscopic objects. Observation cannot CREATE an element of reality like a position, there must be something contained in the complete description of physical reality which corresponds to the possibility of observing a position, already before the observation has been actually made.'
What, at root, was the difference between Bohr and Einstein? Bohr's view has been well summarized by the Princeton physicist John Wheeler: 'no elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon'. Wheeler illustrated what he meant by recounting a dinner party he once attended which degenerated into a game of twenty questions. The aim of the game was to identify an object, selected by the other guests, through a series of 20 'yes' or 'no' answers to questions posed. Wheeler's fellow diners obviously knew him well enough not to think of anything at all, and instead decided simply to give answers consistent with those previously given. At the end of his series of questions, Wheeler believed that they had chosen 'cloud'.
Wheeler argues that 'in the game, no word is a word until that word is promoted to reality by the choice of questions asked and answers given'. This is the central point for Wheeler; but he also acknowledges the part played by the other guests. If they had responded differently, he would not have come up with 'cloud'. He believes his role in the game was the same as the role of the experimenter with electrons. Such an observer, Wheeler maintains, has a 'substantial influence on what will happen to the electron by the choice of experiments he will do on it, "questions he will put to nature".' But the experimenter also knows that 'there is a certain unpredictability about what any given one of his measurements will disclose, about what "answers nature will give".'
Wheeler believes that it is only within the confines of a particular experimental situation that reality, phenomenal reality, can be specified. Moreover, he takes this belief to its logical conclusion: 'There is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past - even in a past so remote that life did not exist, and shows even more, that observership is a prerequisite for any meaningful version of reality.' What Wheeler means is that the observer literally creates the universe by his observations.
....
Indeed, Heisenberg generalized this rejection of causality from the quantum domain to the whole world of science: 'Because all experiments are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics definitely shows the invalidity of the causal laws.'
http://www.prometheus.demon.co.uk/02/02kumar.htm
The truth is that quantum mechanics are something great scientists have struggled with since it's inceptions because of the implications of it. The notion put forward by cavediver that somehow my raising these same issues as these great scientists is merely the result of ignorance on my part is ludicrous. Heck, some of these men wrote the equations cavediver alludes to, and they certainly saw some of the exact same implications as I have raised.
As Heisenberg states:
'Because all experiments are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics definitely shows the invalidity of the causal laws.'

Replies to this message:
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randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 118 of 246 (323047)
06-18-2006 9:11 PM
Reply to: Message 114 by cavediver
06-18-2006 9:01 PM


Re: still no substance from you here
I repeat, name the scientist and provide the quote where they say that they believe the past is changed by the present.
OK, how about this?
Wheeler believes that it is only within the confines of a particular experimental situation that reality, phenomenal reality, can be specified. Moreover, he takes this belief to its logical conclusion: 'There is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past - even in a past so remote that life did not exist, and shows even more, that observership is a prerequisite for any meaningful version of reality.'
Or this?
Indeed, Heisenberg generalized this rejection of causality from the quantum domain to the whole world of science: 'Because all experiments are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics definitely shows the invalidity of the causal laws.'

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randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 119 of 246 (323048)
06-18-2006 9:14 PM
Reply to: Message 116 by Rob
06-18-2006 9:04 PM


Re: you deny wave/partical duality then?
It's a long paper. Read half of it, but may need to wait to finish it. I do think careful consideration of this area is warranted and agree with some things you are saying.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 116 by Rob, posted 06-18-2006 9:04 PM Rob has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 122 by Rob, posted 06-18-2006 9:39 PM randman has replied

  
randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 120 of 246 (323050)
06-18-2006 9:16 PM
Reply to: Message 114 by cavediver
06-18-2006 9:01 PM


Re: still no substance from you here
Why would I refuse to acknowledge the obvious?
So you are now admitting that the wave-function operates in such a manner that a later measurement can affect it's behaviour prior to that measurement (with respect to the observer's vantage point), or are you disagreeing with that?

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4930 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 123 of 246 (323061)
06-18-2006 10:46 PM
Reply to: Message 122 by Rob
06-18-2006 9:39 PM


Re: you deny wave/partical duality then?
QM does show that miracles are within the realm of physical possibilities.

This message is a reply to:
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