The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought | Hacker News Reader

The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought

economist.com

55 pointsrms21 comments

The paper is accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1625

But if I read the paper, won't I change its outcome?

Only if the paper is a quantum state

yea this paper makes me think that quantum physics is bogus... even I could have made this bogus claim. IF I am not looking, shit happens, so how do I prove that I am not looking, by just peeping into it... what shit... what a scam.. now I feel that neone can be a quantum physicist !!

The mystery is how it can be so confusing, and how measurement and entanglement can be so mysterious, while at the same time, it can be so accurate a predictive theory. Any time you use a laser, as in an optical drive you rely upon a quantum effect that was derived before it was discovered. The energy levels of electrons in chemicals, of the affinities between chemicals, the reaction cross-sections of the fusion processes that power our stars, of the voltages in the millions of transistors in your microprocessor, you're relying on precise effects that are calculated with the quantum theory. It's not a scam, it's a mystery.

Definite proof that we live in a simulation and those who attend to it save up some computational resources by computing only what can be seen, and also they have a bug where they used a signed int instead of an unsigned int ;P

Here's an article that says entanglement isn't all that weird: http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf. Admittedly, I'm not familiar enough with quantum mechanics to get it, but it's related and YMMV.

I read (most of) that and, to my own surprise, actually understood the principle behind it. I recommend it as well.

Read this and thought it made sense, but I'm not physicist. I'd really like to know what actual physicists make of this.

Back in the day, I submitted this paper to the American Journal of Physics. It was rejected, not because it was incorrect, but because it didn't say anything new. If you like I can post the review.

I would like to see that review.

Seconded

Here it is. (Gotta love modern search tools.)

Edit: couldn't figure out how to paste in pre-formatted text, so here's a link instead:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/ajp_review.txt

Oh, you might find this amusing too:

http://www.wikipatents.com/7126691.html

Did you feel it was a fair review? Did you take their suggestion and submit it to the Foundations of Physics journal?

I thought it was somewhat fair. One the one hand, it is true that the paper says nothing new. On the other hand, it doesn't claim to say anything new. It just claims to present old results in a more accessible way, which I believe it does. Furthermore, these results are clearly not widely known even within the physics community because even today you can find lots of card-carrying physicists (and a few patent examiners apparently, to say nothing of journalists) who do not understand the simple idea that measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, so clearly there is a need for some better pedagogy in this area. AJP is ostensibly devoted to physics education, which is why I chose to submit it there. So I think it would have been an appropriate venue, and I think it would have made a contribution.

On the other hand, the point that I do not have adequate references for a scholarly publication is valid. So I thought the decision not to publish it was defensible, even if I didn't agree with their reasoning.

I did not submit it to Foundations of Physics. Physics is not really my field of expertise, so the benefit to me from having an accepted peer-reviewed publication in this area is pretty small. This paper was the result of an exploration driven by personal curiosity. If self-publication on the web were not an option I might have been more motivated to polish it up and resubmit it, but it is so I wasn't.

I'm actually between gigs right now (my partner in a startup I was trying to get off the ground had to bow out) so I may try to update it and take another whack at publishing. I actually have some new ideas about how entanglement can explain the (perceived) flow of time, but the last time it took me nearly ten years to figure it out (though it all finally came together in a wonderful "aha" moment, which almost made it all worthwhile) and I have other fish to fry.

Either Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was just refuted, or this is terrible scientific reporting.

The Economist + Physics = excellent

This made my head hurt.

So by not looking, scientists determined that while they were not looking in some spots there was a negative number of photons. This did not mean there exist anti-photons, just that weird things happen while we're not looking.

(scratches head)

A non-observation found unexpected results, which means that the known laws of physics don't need to change.

I shoulda went into particle physics. It sounds like lots more fun than technology consulting.

Really this result is consistent with the Everett - Wheeler 1958 thesis that the wave function never collapses. This I have held to be the case personally for a long while, and in light of that, this new result is not surprising.

When you get right down to it, it is basically saying the wave functions of the entangled photons do not decay since they are never directly observed. Extrapolating from this one can say that in fact Wheeler and Everett were right, and the wave function never decays at all. Which of course leads to the "branching universe" idea, which to me will one day be seen as no more surprising than the "many galaxies" idea. Remember, the idea of other galaxies before the discoveries of Hubble and so on used to be only speculation, not universally held. Now we know there are at least 10^10 galaxies. Similarly the fact that the wave function never collapses, as Everett and Wheeler proposed will be held to be just as prosaic as the fact that there are other galaxies.

Don't you agree that clicking on a link should automatically cause the target to be rendered on the best suited available device?

I.e. I had to prevent myself from reading the article online, so that I can read it in my dead tree edition later on in the train.

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