[lit-ideas] Re: Does this list exist while Julie is away?


On Apr 25, 2007, at 9:58 PM, Andreas Ramos wrote:
Physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it. 

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14
I wrote to my Particle Physicist friend about this. Here's what he replied:
Well, we've lived with the violation of Bell's inequalities for a long time. My personal prejudices would be much more upset if locality were violated; "action at a distance" would be far more revolutionary. There's an enormous body of evidence for exchange processes and factorization, not to mention relativity and the role of the speed of light. The laws of quantum mechanics are also pretty well established; it just our poor little minds that have difficulty reconciling it with everyday experience, which seems to be what 
is meant by a lack of "Realism".
      We mentally identify the internal quantum number "spin" with a
gyroscope or something with a real, 3D axis of rotation, but it isn't really like that - the direction of that axis of rotation would correspond to the 
"hidden variables" that experiments repeatedly show not to exist.


Hope this helps.

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon

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