Never mind (Strange aspects of the Franson experiment)

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

Stephen Parrott - 12 Sep 2007 19:20 GMT

    I just realized that it is *not* true that the "local realistic"
model presented in Aerts, et al., is of the type considered by Bell.
It is subtly different.

    Therefore, there is no reason for it to
satisfy the Bell inequalities.
So, it is not surprising that the experimental results of Kwiat, et al.,
violate the Bell inequalities.

    There is no contradiction.
The Bell inequalities are irrelevant to this situation.

    The authors of the original Franson and Kwiat, et al.,
papers were clearly unaware of this. Aerts, et al., *were* aware of it
and did say so in their paper, but it didn't penetrate this thick head
even after several readings.

    I should have studied their construction more carefully.
Anyone interested in these problems should realize that that
their deceptively simple construction is actually quite remarkable.
Many papers introduce the hypotheses for the Bell inequalities
as the very *definition* of "local realism".
One of the lessons of the Aerts, et al. paper is that
this definition is probably too restrictive.
A better definition is needed, but it isn't clear to me
what it might be.

Stephen Parrott

Reply to this Message

Uncle Al - 16 Sep 2007 18:11 GMT

> I just realized that it is *not* true that the "local realistic"
> model presented in Aerts, et al., is of the type considered by Bell.
[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]
> A better definition is needed, but it isn't clear to me
> what it might be.

Theory is limited by imagination, then by what "must" be true, then by
politics. Experiment then observation simply are. Milliken's charge
of the electron slowly oozed to its current-day value, each reseacher
in turn not wishing to push an obviously heretical number into peer
review. All discovery is insubordination - ask Galileo or Harry
Coover and Fred Joyner at Eastman Company in Tennessee.

The latter wanted the refractive index of methyl cyanoacrylate in
1948. They put a drop on the bottom glass prism of an Abbe
refractometer and squeezed the top prism down. That permanently
ruined an adequately expensive piece of equipment.

What you make of observation is all important! In a proper world they
would have been discharged for cause. Eastman, lacking professional
management where it counted, made SuperGlue.

Signature

Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2

Reply to this Message

Rich L. - 16 Sep 2007 18:11 GMT

> I just realized that it is *not* true that the "local realistic"
> model presented in Aerts, et al., is of the type considered by Bell.
[quoted text clipped - 24 lines]
>
> Stephen Parrott

A variation on locality I've been thinking about is based on the
proper distance between events. This allows the emitting event to be
"simultaneous" with both of the detections at "A" and "B", in the
sense of proper distance. This is only true for photons (or other
particles traveling at light speed) however. I'm not sure this solves
many problems, however. I am still having issues with reconciling the
QM picture of particles radiating from a source (where the wave
function can only describe probabilities) and the need in a theory
like GR to account for stress-energy at all points so the geometry of
space can be calculated. Realism seems to be a bit difficult to
realize in light of QM experimental results.

Rich L.

Reply to this Message

Natural Science Forum / Physics / Research / September 2007

Never mind (Strange aspects of the Franson experiment)