Long, Quantum trickery

Thu Jan 5 23:50:02 PST 2006

Hi Paul and Brian,

Thanks for this article Paul, I enjoyed it.  If you haven’t seen the film
“what the bleep” yet, do try and find it, I think you will enjoy it. 

Brian, when you asked, “Does our focused attention create a reality from the
raw material of the universe? If we could bring a strong enough focus or
consciousness to bare on these raw materials would we be in effect creating
something new because of the attention we place on it. In effect creating
something from nothing,as a result of our intention for it to exist which is
what we imply when we try to analyze or understand it. Could the
intersection of many entanglements provide that focused consciousness
necessary to bring something into reality?

I want to say yes, and add impishly, that if Dr. Susan Blackmore’s latest
musings about the nature of consciousness are accurate, (that it is a
backwardly assembled narrative) there is no way we would ever be able to
know if this has happened or not, because our brains assemble a cogent
narrative to encompass apparent reality at the speed of consciousness
ah
yes
inhaling a deep breath at the Puckishness of it all

And then again
maybe that’s how it all works out!

Mystery within mystery, 

Cheers, 

Wendy

  _____  

From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Brian
Dalzell
Sent: December 28, 2005 11:30 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: Long, Quantum trickery

Hi Paul:

Really appreciated the article. Is it possible that matter and energy are
both responding to and as a result malleable to thought and choice. Does our
focused attention create a reality from the raw material of the universe? If
we could bring a strong enough focus or consciousness to bare on these raw
materials would we be in effect creating something new because of the
attention we place on it. In effect creating something from nothing,as a
result of our intention for it to exist which is what we imply when we try
to analyze or understand it. Could the intersection of many entanglements
provide that focused consciousness necessary to bring something into
reality?

Just musing about if OS is “irreducibly random”.  Is it random or a conduit
to create an intersection of entanglements for infinite possibilities?

Best of the season, Brian

  _____  

From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of
EVERETT813 at aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2005 2:54 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: OT: Long, Quantum trickery

Dear OS'rs

I thought the below article related in some strange way to OS.  We don't
know exactly how it works, or why, either, but it doesn't care, OS just goes
on working.  Probably relates to Chaos and Complexity Theory, too.  The
future is indeed unknowable.  OS may be "irreducibly random".

May your new year be filled with surprises and may you be sufficiently
flexible to cope, indeed, thrive!!

Paul Everett

December 27, 2005

Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Einstein said there would be days like this.

This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium
atoms into a "cat state."

No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat
state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at
once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same
time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was
they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize,
like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he
looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to
spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were
across a test tube or across the galaxy.

The idea that measuring the properties of one particle could instantaneously
change the properties of another one (or a whole bunch) far away is strange
to say the least - almost as strange as the notion of particles spinning in
two directions at once. The team that pulled off the beryllium feat, led by
Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in
Boulder, Colo., hailed it as another step toward computers that would use
quantum magic to perform calculations.

But it also served as another demonstration of how weird the world really is
according to the rules, known as quantum mechanics.

The joke is on Albert Einstein, who, back in 1935, dreamed up this trick of
synchronized atoms - "spooky action at a distance," as he called it - as an
example of the absurdity of quantum mechanics.

"No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this," he,
Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen wrote in a paper in 1935.

Today that paper, written when Einstein was a relatively ancient 56 years
old, is the most cited of Einstein's papers. But far from demolishing
quantum theory, that paper wound up as the cornerstone for the new field of
quantum information.

Nary a week goes by that does not bring news of another feat of quantum
trickery once only dreamed of in thought experiments: particles (or at least
all their properties) being teleported across the room in a microscopic
version of Star Trek beaming; electrical "cat" currents that circle a loop
in opposite directions at the same time; more and more particles farther and
farther apart bound together in Einstein's spooky embrace now known as
"entanglement." At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers
are planning an experiment in which a small mirror will be in two places at
once.

Niels Bohr, the Danish philosopher king of quantum theory, dismissed any
attempts to lift the quantum veil as meaningless, saying that science was
about the results of experiments, not ultimate reality. But now that quantum
weirdness is not confined to thought experiments, physicists have begun
arguing again about what this weirdness means, whether the theory needs
changing, and whether in fact there is any problem.

This fall two Nobel laureates, Anthony Leggett of the University of Illinois
and Norman Ramsay of Harvard argued in front of several hundred scientists
at a conference in Berkeley about whether, in effect, physicists were
justified in trying to change quantum theory, the most successful theory in
the history of science. Dr. Leggett said yes; Dr. Ramsay said no.

It has been, as Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, noted, "a 75-year war." It is typical in reporting on this
subject to bounce from one expert to another, each one shaking his or her
head about how the other one just doesn't get it. "It's a kind of funny
situation," N. David Mermin of Cornell, who has called Einstein's spooky
action "the closest thing we have to magic," said, referring to the recent
results. "These are extremely difficult experiments that confirm elementary
features of quantum mechanics." It would be more spectacular news, he said,
if they had come out wrong.

Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna said that he thought, "The world
is not as real as we think.

"My personal opinion is that the world is even weirder than what quantum
physics tells us," he added.

The discussion is bringing renewed attention to Einstein's role as a founder
and critic of quantum theory, an "underground history," that has largely
been overlooked amid the celebrations of relativity in the past Einstein
year, according to David Z. Albert, a professor of philosophy and physics at
Columbia. Regarding the 1935 paper, Dr. Albert said, "We know something
about Einstein's genius we didn't know before."

The Silly Theory
>From the day 100 years ago that he breathed life into quantum theory by
deducing that light behaved like a particle as well as like a wave, Einstein
never stopped warning that it was dangerous to the age-old dream of an
orderly universe.

If light was a particle, how did it know which way to go when it was issued
from an atom?
"The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it seems," Einstein
once wrote to friend.

The full extent of its silliness came in the 1920's when quantum theory
became quantum mechanics.

In this new view of the world, as encapsulated in a famous equation by the
Austrian Erwin Schrödinger, objects are represented by waves that extend
throughout space, containing all the possible outcomes of an observation -
here, there, up or down, dead or alive. The amplitude of this wave is a
measure of the probability that the object will actually be found to be in
one state or another, a suggestion that led Einstein to grumble famously
that God doesn't throw dice.

Worst of all from Einstein's point of view was the uncertainty principle,
enunciated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927.

Certain types of knowledge, of a particle's position and velocity, for
example, are incompatible: the more precisely you measure one property, the
blurrier and more uncertain the other becomes.

In the 1935 paper, Einstein and his colleagues, usually referred to as
E.P.R., argued that the uncertainty principle could not be the final word
about nature. There must be a deeper theory that looked behind the quantum
veil.

Imagine that a pair of electrons are shot out from the disintegration of
some other particle, like fragments from an explosion. By law certain
properties of these two fragments should be correlated. If one goes left,
the other goes right; if one spins clockwise, the other spins
counterclockwise.

That means, Einstein said, that by measuring the velocity of, say, the left
hand electron, we would know the velocity of the right hand electron without
ever touching it.

Conversely, by measuring the position of the left electron, we would know
the position of the right hand one.

Since neither of these operations would have involved touching or disturbing
the right hand electron in any way, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued that
the right hand electron must have had those properties of both velocity and
position all along. That left only two possibilities, they concluded. Either
quantum mechanics was "incomplete," or measuring the left hand particle
somehow disturbed the right hand one.

But the latter alternative violated common sense. Such an influence, or
disturbance, would have to travel faster than the speed of light. "My
physical instincts bristle at that suggestion," Einstein later wrote.

Bohr responded with a six-page essay in Physical Review that contained but
one simple equation, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation. In essence, he said,
it all depends on what you mean by "reality."

Enjoy the Magic
Most physicists agreed with Bohr, and they went off to use quantum mechanics
to build atomic bombs and reinvent the world.

The consensus was that Einstein was a stubborn old man who "didn't get"
quantum physics. All this began to change in 1964 when John S. Bell, a
particle physicist at the European Center for Nuclear Research near Geneva,
who had his own doubts about quantum theory, took up the 1935 E.P.R.
argument. Somewhat to his dismay, Bell, who died in 1990, wound up proving
that no deeper theory could reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics.
Bell went on to outline a simple set of experiments that could settle the
argument and decide who was right, Einstein or Bohr.

When the experiments were finally performed in 1982, by Alain Aspect and his
colleagues at the University of Orsay in France, they agreed with quantum
mechanics and not reality as Einstein had always presumed it should be.
Apparently a particle in one place could be affected by what you do
somewhere else.

"That's really weird," Dr. Albert said, calling it "a profoundly deep
violation of an intuition that we've been walking with since caveman days."

Physicists and philosophers are still fighting about what this means. Many
of those who care to think about these issues (and many prefer not to),
concluded that Einstein's presumption of locality - the idea that physically
separated objects are really separate - is wrong.

Dr. Albert said, "The experiments show locality is false, end of story." But
for others, it is the notion of realism, that things exist independent of
being perceived, that must be scuttled. In fact, physicists don't even seem
to agree on the definitions of things like "locality" and "realism."

"I would say we have to be careful saying what's real," Dr. Mermin said.
"Properties cannot be said to be there until they are revealed by an actual
experiment."

What everybody does seem to agree on is that the use of this effect is
limited. You can't use it to send a message, for example.

Leonard Susskind, a Stanford theoretical physicist, who called these
entanglement experiments "beautiful and surprising," said the term "spooky
action at a distance," was misleading because it implied the instantaneous
sending of signals. "No competent physicist thinks that entanglement allows
this kind of nonlocality."

Indeed the effects of spooky action, or "entanglement," as Schrödinger
called it, only show up in retrospect when the two participants in a
Bell-type experiment compare notes. Beforehand, neither has seen any
violation of business as usual; each sees the results of his measurements
of, say, whether a spinning particle is pointing up or down, as random.

In short, as Brian Greene, the Columbia theorist wrote in "The Fabric of the
Cosmos," Einstein's special relativity, which sets the speed of light as the
cosmic speed limit, "survives by the skin of its teeth."

In an essay in 1985, Dr. Mermin said that "if there is spooky action at a
distance, then, like other spooks, it is absolutely useless except for its
effect, benign or otherwise, on our state of mind."

He added, "The E.P.R. experiment is as close to magic as any physical
phenomenon I know of, and magic should be enjoyed." In a recent interview,
he said he still stood by the latter part of that statement. But while
spooky action remained useless for sending a direct message, it had turned
out to have potential uses, he admitted, in cryptography and quantum
computing.

Nine Ways of Killing a Cat
Another debate, closely related to the issues of entanglement and reality,
concerns what happens at the magic moment when a particle is measured or
observed.

Before a measurement is made, so the traditional story goes, the electron
exists in a superposition of all possible answers, which can combine, adding
and interfering with one another.

Then, upon measurement, the wave function "collapses" to one particular
value. Schrödinger himself thought this was so absurd that he dreamed up a
counterexample. What is true for electrons, he said, should be true as well
for cats.

In his famous thought experiment, a cat is locked in a box where the decay
of a radioactive particle will cause the release of poison that will kill
it. If the particle has a 50-50 chance of decaying, then according to
quantum mechanics the cat is both alive and dead before we look in the box,
something the cat itself, not to mention cat lovers, might take issue with.

But cats are always dead or alive, as Dr. Leggett of Illinois said in his
Berkeley talk. "The problem with quantum mechanics," he said in an
interview, "is how it explains definite outcomes to experiments."

If quantum mechanics is only about information and a way of predicting the
results of measurements, these questions don't matter, most quantum
physicists say.

"But," Dr. Leggett said, "if you take the view that the formalism is
reflecting something out there in real world, it matters immensely." As a
result, theorists have come up with a menu of alternative interpretations
and explanations. According to one popular notion, known as decoherence,
quantum waves are very fragile and collapse from bumping into the
environment. Another theory, by the late David Bohm, restores determinism by
postulating a "pilot wave" that acts behind the scenes to guide particles.

In yet another theory, called "many worlds," the universe continually
branches so that every possibility is realized: the Red Sox win and lose and
it rains; Schrödinger's cat lives, dies, has kittens and scratches her
master when he tries to put her into the box.

Recently, as Dr. Leggett pointed out, some physicists have tinkered with
Schrödinger's equation, the source of much of the misery, itself.

A modification proposed by the Italian physicists Giancarlo Ghirardi and
Tullio Weber, both of the University of Trieste, and Alberto Rimini of the
University of Pavia, makes the wave function unstable so that it will
collapse in a time depending on how big a system it represents.

In his standoff with Dr. Ramsay of Harvard last fall, Dr. Leggett suggested
that his colleagues should consider the merits of the latter theory. "Why
should we think of an electron as being in two states at once but not a cat,
when the theory is ostensibly the same in both cases?" Dr. Leggett asked.

Dr. Ramsay said that Dr. Leggett had missed the point. How the wave function
mutates is not what you calculate. "What you calculate is the prediction of
a measurement," he said.

"If it's a cat, I can guarantee you will get that it's alive or dead," Dr.
Ramsay said.

David Gross, a recent Nobel winner and director of the Kavli Institute for
Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, leapt into the free-for-all, saying
that 80 years had not been enough time for the new concepts to sink in.
"We're just too young. We should wait until 2200 when quantum mechanics is
taught in kindergarten."

The Joy of Randomness
One of the most extreme points of view belongs to Dr. Zeilinger of Vienna, a
bearded, avuncular physicist whose laboratory regularly hosts every sort of
quantum weirdness.

In an essay recently in Nature, Dr. Zeilinger sought to find meaning in the
very randomness that plagued Einstein.

"The discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably one
of the most significant findings of the 20th century," Dr. Zeilinger wrote.

Dr. Zeilinger suggested that reality and information are, in a deep sense,
indistinguishable, a concept that Dr. Wheeler, the Princeton physicist,
called "it from bit."

In information, the basic unit is the bit, but one bit, he says, is not
enough to specify both the spin and the trajectory of a particle. So one
quality remains unknown, irreducibly random.

As a result of the finiteness of information, he explained, the universe is
fundamentally unpredictable.

"I suggest that this randomness of the individual event is the strongest
indication we have of a reality 'out there' existing independently of us,"
Dr. Zeilinger wrote in Nature.

He added, "Maybe Einstein would have liked this idea after all."

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