[lit-ideas] Re: Does this list exist while Julie is away?
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:01:47 -0700
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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