“Today, the non-local nature of quantum mechanics is widely accepted, though physicists still debate its implications for our understanding of reality.” — Google’s A.I. summary
“There are actually no precisely defined ‘elements of reality’ belonging to the electron.”
— David Bohm (1989, p. 620)
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Social Attitudes
I’ve been studying physics since high school. I had a few good role models, did some original work, as well as some work that went nowhere. I didn’t like the field’s lack of personal reflection or social purpose that prevailed when I considered entering the job market, so I went into computer software instead.
My first physics orientation came from Albert Einstein’s good friend Eugene Wigner. I was still in high school and didn’t know the scope of the field, but I felt encouraged by Eugene’s enthusiasm and the respect he showed me. He molded my resolve to continue in the field.
I met a similarly encouraging professor in college and a third before entering graduate school. But there were hundreds of depressed and discouraging professors and students that made it clear that my attitude, and that of the three people whom I found encouraging, were exceptions.
Since then I’ve been able to watch the field of physics change and it should be no surprise that it has changed little. People rarely change at all. It was Max Plank, a physicist, who gave us the phrase, “science progresses one funeral at a time.”
Eugene Wigner’s encouragement was a reflection of his personality and his generation. I have been lucky to work with five generations of physicists, beginning with Wigner who worked in the 1930s, and later with Charlie Townes who worked in the 50s and 60s.
I became acquainted with leaders in the field during my student years of the 70s and 80s: DeWitt, Prigogine, Weinberg, Wheeler, and others. I would try to talk them about physics and society though I was never given a real audience. I look at the work of my student colleagues, now at the end of their careers and the work of younger physicists, such as Chris Ferrie who I interviewed here. (https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/2024/02/07/physics-creativity-culture-and-the-future-podcast/)
We don’t hear about changes in fundamental scientific attitudes. We hear about physics’ effects on weapons, power, and space travel. Physics is not taught in high school and few pursue it in college so most people know nothing about it. You may have taken a course in high school called physics, but it was not physics, it was practical mechanics.
The public has little insight into the inventions that have had a great effect on culture, such as transistors, lasers, and nanotechnology. These all revolve around quantum mechanics and have enabled just about everything we now take for granted, including pharmaceuticals, computation, and the internet.
When I showed interest in the social dimension of physics as a student I was both stigmatized and told to shut up. No other students spoke up and, to this day, few scientists criticize the culture of science. If this reminds you of religion, it should.
The more a field pretends to be separate from culture, the more it’s vulnerable to being marginalized and manipulated. A person who denies that culture affects the way they think become oblivious to culture’s effects. If they continue to ignore what’s affecting them, they lose control over their own thoughts. Such has happened in the technology fields.
Leading scientists I spoke with 20 years ago were already talking about how basic research was no longer being supported. They said funding had been drying up for decades, and it has only dried up further. In 2005 my mentor Charlie Townes said that today he would not be given the support to develop the laser. America’s progressive failing at funding basic research is what China has now recognized and is exploiting. Scientists who deny that cultural attitudes affect their work become pawns of cultural attitudes.
Kinds of Work
I’ve worked in a half dozen fields and each field has its own culture. In Eugene Wigner’s time physics entertained philosophical questions, but questions of financial importance now dominate the field. Physicists who insist the questions of nuclear fusion, quantum computation, and micro chemistry are fundamental to science do not understand why they are being funded. It’s not because the work is fundamental. It’s because it’s profitable and important in the current cultural context.
Answering philosophical questions doesn’t make money, and most of these questions don’t even have answers. In addition to teaching students what questions to ask, physics training focuses on teaching the tools that address those questions practitioners are paid to answer. As a result, questions once considered fundamental are no longer asked, their history is no longer studied, and the tools applied to them are no longer used.
What are touted as today’s most important questions are not the questions that will be most important in the future. Rather, they’re the questions for which there has been the largest investments. Fundamental research always holds the greatest promise, it’s just that one never knows when those promises will come to fruit.
Energy is a case in point. Huge investments have been made in legacy technology, like mining and nuclear, while the energy sources of the future involve chemistry and physics advances that are given minor funding. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are perfect examples of what happens to technology when a scientific moron and a dissembling salesman take control.
The philosophical questions I was originally interested in were much appreciated by Wigner and his contemporaries, but his generation was the last to grapple with them. The next generation was typified by Richard Feynman who said, “Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” And the attitude of the generation after him was typified by David Mermin who famously said, “Shut up and calculate.”
I had the romantic idea that fundamental questions were more pure. I was not interested in the questions of observation or application. My thinking has turned around because some of the deepest questions are better approached when they can be cast in practical terms.
Philosophical questions can lead nowhere while technical questions, which seem uninspired, can lead to insights. For example, Townes started by asking how molecules behave when they’re super hot. This led him to look for molecules in deep space where it’s super cold. And that led him to play an essential role in discovering the Big Bang, the purported birth of the universe.
The deep questions of physics are interesting, but given how little hope there is of answering them, it would be hard to justify training many people to explore them. Given the small market for asking unanswerable questions you can understand why most professionals are not interested in them.
Questions such as, “What is matter really made of?” or “Does quantum mechanics describe reality, or is it just a way of keeping track of things?” are held in disdain. Physicists once discussed philosophical questions but those few who still do are considered quaint and grandfatherly. Roger Penrose, the English mathematician, is often trotted out as one of these old school scientists.
I’m not a professional physicist, so I don’t have to follow professional trends. I don’t need a job in physics so I don’t have a professional attitude. I remain interested in the philosophical questions and my isolation is an asset. I can pursue my interests with no excuses. I can be irrelevant and I don’t have to apologize.
On the one hand, I’m free to study what I want. On the other hand, nobody knows or cares what I do. Some of the questions I ask might interest you, but the work quickly gets technical. Interesting progress has been made, but it’s slow, marginal, and poorly appreciated. There are numerous unconventional approaches, which means the work that’s done is often hard to follow, sometimes has technical errors, and often comes to conclusions that are wrong.
Big Questions
One of the big questions that people have been talking about since 1935 is whether quantum mechanics predicts effects that are not local. Nonlocal actions are those that affect distant systems with no connection. This was first asked in a paper titled, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”
This paper was published on May 15, 1935, and was written by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathen Rosen. It introduced what’s come to be known as “the EPR paradox.” Wayne C. Myrvold (2015) provides historical context for this paper in a blog post titled “EPR, 80 Years On.” You can also read about the EPR paper on Wikipedia.
Up until now there have been no certain answers to the questions raised in the EPR paper. In 1957, twenty years after the paper was published, a paper by David Bohm and Yakir Aharanov extended the questions EPR asked to focus on a quantum concept called entanglement. This refocused people’s interest so that these questions are now referred to as the EPR-B paradox. You can read about it in a 2015 blog post by Marco Cerezo titled, “EPR’s Paradox Exemplified: Bohm’s Spin Experiment.”
The paradox is simple. It asks you to consider the decay of a two-particle system in which the two particles, while bound together, have opposite orientations. One is said to be “up” while the other “down.” Once separated, the two particles head off in opposite directions and there is nothing, so far as we know, that links them together.
You then measure the orientation of each of the particles. You can turn your measuring machine in any direction you want: up, down, sideways, or at any angle. You also measure the orientation of the other particle, which has potentially traveled far away. You will find that whatever orientation you find for one of the particles, you will find the opposite orientation for the other.
This is exactly as you expect if each particle carries its own orientation. The paradox arises because quantum mechanics says that the particles do not carry their orientation but, instead, are equally likely to be found to be oriented up or down according to whatever position you adjust your measuring machine. But if both are equally likely to be “up” or “down,” then how can they be absolutely correlated?
Somehow, whichever direction one particle displays, the other particle “knows” and displays the other. The possibilities are said to be “entangled.” This should seem ridiculous, yet that’s what the formalism predicts and no one knows how to explain it.
The accepted knowledge is that quantum mechanics is nonlocal. This means it allows for effects that have no mechanical cause; effects transmitted instantaneously over any distance. However, no one is too sure.
What People Say
H. M. Wiseman (2006) says,
“(Einstein) thought that a theory with a realistic description of the microscopic world would eventually be found and would eradicate the blight of nonlocality. This was the dream toward which he failed to make progress…”
In Bertrand Wong’s paper “On Quantum Entanglement” (2019) he says,
“Could two subatomic particles on opposite sides of the universe be really instantaneously connected?… The behaviour of entangled particles is apparently inexplicable, incomprehensible and like magic at work.”
R. Griffiths says (2019, p.1 & 20):
“One system cannot influence another system with which it does not interact. Claims to the contrary… are shown to be incorrect… Doing something to one system has no effect, instantaneous or otherwise, upon the other system.”
And finally, Art Hobson says (2017 p.166):
“… instantaneous actions at a distance are not only predicted by quantum physics, but they are now experimentally verified features of the natural world, predicted by quantum physics but known to exist even if quantum physics were someday found to be incorrect. As you know, such actions are called nonlocal.”
Given that the subject here is the fundamental way objects in the universe interact with one another, these diametrically opposite assertions are disconcerting. You would think physicists would care but, lacking any resolution, they avoid the topic.
The Anticlimactic Solution
Few people are interested in this question. Most think the question has been answered, that it never existed, or that it makes no difference. But I’ve found an answer, with the help of various other people whose efforts are generally ignored.
It’s somewhat of a transcendental joke, like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes in which the boy who hadn’t been taught otherwise points out that the Emperor is actually naked. Except in this story, the properly educated audience still can’t see the Emperor is naked. This is a demonstration of how people experience what their prejudice has led them to believe.
Naturally, the solution is not obvious. On the other hand, the problem is not as it initially appeared. I can’t give you all the details but I will try to bring out the important ones. There are three stages.
First, the two particles are not entangled. Once they have separated they are independent. After that, each carries all the information that’s needed to generate the behavior we observe.
This disentanglement is called “decoherence,” and decoherence was only first defined by H. Dieter Zeh in 1970 and is still not widely appreciated. As a result, each particle is not equally likely to be either up or down. It is equally likely that the two particles will be either “up and down” or “down and up,” but that’s completely different. They do carry all the information that defines their behavior, just as you would expect.
Second, no extra information needs to be added beyond what we already know. Each particle has an orientation, and each particle’s orientation is opposite to that of the other. However, this “orientation” is not what people expect. In particular, it’s not a direction in a world of three spatial dimensions. It’s a direction in a world of two spatial dimensions and this, more than anything, is what threw people off.
You think of a direction as being defined by an arrow, but an arrow is a 3-dimensional thing. Most people think of two dimensions as something flat, like a piece of paper, but a flat thing is a 3-dimensional object that is flat in one dimension. Flat things behave differently from things which have no 3rd dimension.
Consider a piece of paper. You can turn it sideways so it appears invisible, or reverse it so that what’s written on it appears backwards when you look through it. This is only possible because you can rotate the paper in the 3rd dimension. These things cannot be done with 2-dimensional objects. Real 2-dimensional things don’t behave so simply.
Are there 2-dimensional things in reality? Yes, and this is one of the fundamental insights that come from resolving this problem. Our world is largely dictated by the behavior of electrons. Electrons determine the structure of the periodic table, chemical reactions, biology, and life.
We’ve known since 1925 that electrons have some 2-dimensional aspects since this was shown to explain their behavior in the shells of atoms. But this behavior has been treated incorrectly in the EPR-B paradox.
Not only are there 2-dimensional things in reality, but much of reality is 2-dimensional. It is not entirely 2-dimensional, but the interaction between 2 and 3 dimensions is subtle and poorly understood. When this inter-dimensional oddness is treated correctly, the EPR-B paradox disappears.
This is an anticlimax on one hand but, on the other hand, it may help us understand other paradoxes in quantum mechanics.
2-Dimensional Things
A 2-dimensional thing is not flat and is not an arrow. You can understand it as a sphere with two sides that you then “collapse,” “digest,” or “swallow up” so that all you’re left with is the effect of the sphere’s two sides on your 3-dimensional experience.
Mathematically, this is called integration: you integrate the sphere away and distill the effects of its two sides onto things you can observe in 3 dimensions. Metaphorically, this is like the Cheshire Cat who has a smile but nothing else.
As I mentioned, each particle has upness and downness, but that’s all they have. They have no direction. And it’s not that you cannot see or measure other aspects, it’s that they don’t exist.
The directions of upness and downness are not defined according to the orientation of the particles because they don’t have directions. You define these directions according to what you measure. The particles are like little people who can only answer “up” or “down” to whatever question you ask them. They can say nothing else because that’s all they can know!
Yet, if you ask this question to one of the particles according to your definition of up and down, then how does the other particle know how to answer the question according to a different definition of up and down while still remaining correlated with the first? Despite the logical confusion, the particles always deliver correctly correlated answers.
This is exactly the EPR-B paradox, and you can see that it develops not from mysterious, nonlocal effects, but from the odd translation of 2-dimensional properties onto our 3-dimensional experience.
You can think of the up and down property of the two particles as carried by two oppositely oriented spheres, as pictured below. We create this fiction in our minds.
These two spheres each have direction and size, but their directions are always opposite and their sizes are the same. In a sense, they only have one direction and size: if you know the size and direction of one, you know the size and direction of the other.
The size is not a problem because we do measure an amount of upness and downness. We always measure the same amount no matter what direction we measure, which is why we can picture these properties as carried by perfectly rounded spheres.
In this picture, upness and downness corresponds to the tops and bottoms of the spheres, and this requires a direction which is the axis that points in the direction of the sphere’s dark side. But the direction is not a real thing. It does not exist and cannot be measured. If there was any direction, then it would generate contradictions with known properties of these particles. This direction, such as we envision here, is a complete fiction.
Because these fictional spheres carry direction, we can define (though never measure) an angle for each particle. This is the angle between the axis of the sphere and whatever line we choose when making our observation of up and downness. These two directions of observations are labeled A and B, and the angle between A and the first particle is labeled α (alpha), while the angle between B and the second particle is labeled β (beta).
These angles allow us to create a mathematical expression whose result will indicate whether we measure the first particle to be in the up or the down state, and similarly for the second. This expression boils down to whether the direction A, when superimposed on the sphere at the first location, points somewhere in the up-half or the down-half of the sphere: if A punctures the upper half of the sphere, then the particle at the first location is found in the up state. If A punctures the bottom half, then the particle at A is measured in the down state.
At the second location there is a different measurement angle, which is labeled B. The same rules apply here. Since we can pick A and B to be whatever we like, orienting our two measurements differently, we can measure any combination of up and down at the two locations. But if we coordinate A and B to be either in the same or opposite directions, then we will be sure to measure upness and downness of the two particles to be opposite or the same with respect to our choices of A and B.
In reality, we cannot and can never see these spheres or angles. All we see is a particle with an up or down property at A, and an up or down property at B. Their upness or downness varies as we vary the angle between A and B. What’s shown below is all we can ever see:
What About Reality?
There remains the fundamental problem of the unreality of these spheres. We cannot have any physical observation that depends on the angles alpha or beta because, as mentioned, these don’t exist. Instead, we must add up, or average over, all possible values of these two angles. Once we do that, then the angles are gone from our expressions. This is what the operation of integration accomplishes.
It boggles my mind that we can add up things that do not exist to predict something that does. Once we do this we get answers that are correct.
This is what results from moving through a 2-dimensional space to a 3-dimensional space. One starts to wonder what it means to exist at all. And if you’re observant when doing physics, then you’ll find you often do things like this.
In structural engineering the variables you integrate exist. Gravity exerts a force over the length of a cantilevered beam. When you add all these forces you get the torque on the beam.
But in physics we add up many things that cannot be said to exist. We might call these virtual particles, vacuum fluctuations, or phase angles, none of which are observable even in theory. The directions associated with the binary quantities of upness and downness are one of these things.
I have not seen anyone add up this particular unreal quantity, but in a paper called “Collapse of Bell’s Theorem” Guangye Chen (2019) did exactly this calculation for exactly this experiment except he referred to the direction as a real quantity known as a hidden variable.
The reason Chen’s argument works is due to his use of a directional parameter that has never be observed. He doesn’t say it’s real or unreal as that isn’t his point. All I’ve added is the observation that this “unreal” parameter is exactly what the 2-dimensional system provides to us. That is, by properly understanding the nature of the particle, the nonlocality paradox is resolved. We’re still left to wonder about the effects 2-dimensional objects have on 3-dimensional observations. The necessity of introducing this fictitious directional quantity seems unavoidable.
The final result is that upness and downness are entirely local quantities that we can never predict with certainty because they emerge from the process of 2-dimensional objects appearing 3-dimensionally. The EPR-B situation is no longer a paradox.
Who Gets Credit For This?
This is an interesting question. Credit is something given by members of a community to community members with whom they agree. There are few physicists interested in these questions as almost everyone feels the question is answered, unanswerable, or irrelevant. If anything, the community of physics is aligned in rejecting any further discussion, and everyone who believes one thing objects to anyone who believes otherwise.
Most physicists think the question of quantum locality is a matter of interpretation, which it is not. And anyway, no matter how you define it, I am not a member of the physics community.
I may get some credit if I get the work published, but many people have contributed to this solution even within the small group of those people who take it seriously: Guangye Chen has made an important contribution in my opinion. But Chen didn’t claim the generality of his solution as I have, he only offered it as a hypothetical counter-example to Bell’s Theorem.
And while Bell’s theorem has been called the most important theorem of the century—specifically because it substantiated implausible claims of nonlocality—no one has paid Guangye Chen’s work any attention, as far as I can tell. When I look him up on the internet I find that, like me, he is unrecognized and has little standing.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of this and everything I’ve said is nonsense. If that’s the case then the universe may be nonlocal, causality undefined, and the EPR-B paradox continues to undermine the scientific assertion that all things have causes. In that case, we’re back to religion, miracles, and the Divine Right of Kings. This might make some people happy. I don’t think it’s the case.
References
Bohm, D. (1989). Quantum Theory. Dover, N.Y.
Cerezo, M. (2015). “EPR’s Paradox Exemplified: Bohm’s Spin Experiment.” https://entangledphysics.com/2015/05/10/eprs-paradox-exemplified-bohms-spin-experiment/
Chen, G. (2019). “Collapse of Bell’s Theorem.” J. Mod. Phys. 10:1157-65. https://doi.org/10.4236/jmp.2019.1010076
Griffiths, R. (2019 Jan 21). “Quantum Nonlocality: Myth or Reality” http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07050v1
Griffiths, R. (2020 Feb 28). “Nonlocality Claims Are Inconsistent with Hilbert-Space Quantum Mechanics.” Phys. Ref. A 101: 022117. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.101.022117
Hobson, A. (2017). Tales of the Quantum: Understanding Physics’ Most Fundamental Theory. Oxford.
Myrvold, W. C. (2015 May 15.) “The EPR Paradox.” https://www.rotman.uwo.ca/epr-80-years-on/
Wiseman, H.M. (2006). “From Einstein’s Theorem to Bells’ Theorem: A History of Quantum Nonlocality.” Contemporary Physics 47 (2):79-88. http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0509061v3
Wong, B. (2019). “On Quantum Entanglement.” Int. J. of Automatic Control System 5(2).
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