ALBERT IN WONDERLAND: ENTANGLEMENT!

Quantum Entanglement & the Great Bohr-Einstein Debate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tafGL02EUOA) ALBERT IN WONDERLAND: ENTANGLEMENT !

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CAN REALITY BE ABSURD AND STILL BE REAL?

IF REALITY IS ABSURD, HOW CAN IT BE REAL?

This is the world that will be presented and discussed at our upcoming meeting on Sunday, March 26, at 4:00 PM by our fellow Quantum Physics Discussion Group member, Howard Gross. Howard has a background in mathematics, but the subject of entanglement transcends mathematics, because it seems in many ways to be a frontal assault on common sense and even logic itself! But that’s exactly why it’s such a fascinating topic.

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The Mad Hatter of quantum physics wore many hats. So at different times, but mostly in the first half of the last Century, the Mad Hatter appeared variously in the guises of: Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul M. Dirac, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Arthur Compton, Albert Einstein, Max Born, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, Freeman Dyson, David Hilbert, and others.

In time, the Mad Hatters of physics turned out not to be so mad after all, even though many of them at first could hardly believe the seemingly "crazy" and revolutionary nature of what they had so carefully and brilliantly devised.

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For all these great minds of the early 20th century, one question reigned supreme: Is there a hidden physical reality that underlies the strange behavior of the quantum world? Or is that reality only an illusion in the eyes of the observer? The weird phenomenon of quantum entanglement gives us startling clues about the answer to that question! And at the bottom of all this persists the most profound mystery and the biggest battle in all of physics, no . . . in all of science.

Maybe the heart of the answer lies not in science, but in the way we humans are wired. One case in point: Infants may not be very good at math, but actually they are surprisingly good at quantum mechanics! . . . or at least one fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics!

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The peekaboo game is often so hilarious to babies because babies lack “object permanence.”

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Hide your face behind your hands, and a baby won’t automatically assume that you still exist. But when you reveal your face again, it is as though you popped into existence from nothing — which is, of course, a hilarious thing to do!

Kids get over this pretty quickly as they learn that things don’t pop into and out of existence for no good reason. By the time they grow up and go to college to study physics, the notion of “object permanence” is so deeply embedded that we don’t even bother teaching it in physics 101.

And yet the idea that the Universe keeps existing when we’re not looking at it is a fundamentally implied assumption behind all of classical physics.

Just one very personal and odd experience from my childhood — one which probably reveals some deeper paranoia in me. Anyway, when things felt tense at home, for whatever reason, at about the age of four or five I found that sometimes when I was in a room I’d suddenly spread open the blinds and glance out the window to the outdoors, or quickly step into the open doorway of the adjoining room, just to make sure that the outside world or the other room was still there, and that the world wasn’t trying to fool me by “creating” worlds only wherever it thought I happened to be looking at the moment — worlds that might not be there otherwise.

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The point being that the lack of a sense of “object permanence” can persist in people as they are growing up, in some cases well beyond the time when they were infants.

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In fact most of science takes it for granted that the universe is real, whether or not we’re looking at it. The notion that the universe exists independent of the mind of the observer is called REALISM. But quantum mechanics is so bizarre that it still has scientists wondering if we need to reject even this basic premise! This was the source of one of the most heated debates at the advent of quantum mechanics.

On the one hand Niels Bohr insisted that it was meaningless to assign reality to the universe in the absence of observation. In the intervals between measurements, quantum systems truly exist as a fuzzy mixture of all possible properties — what we call a “superposition” of states. In between observations, the wave function describing this superposition is a complete description of reality. And our experience of a well-defined material universe only has meaning at the moment of measurement. This peekaboo universe is at the heart of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

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Schrödinger's cat was a thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 to illustrate what he saw as a fundamental problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Schrödinger stated that if you place a cat in a sealed box along with a device that could kill the cat (poison released by a Geiger counter, triggered by a radioactive atom), you would not know if the cat was dead or alive until you opened the box — so that until the box was opened, the cat was impossibly both "dead and alive.”

The fact that Schrodinger’s thought experiment resulted in such an implausible paradox, provided strong support for Einstein’s growing doubts about the validity of the Copenhagen understanding of quantum Mechanics.

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Albert Einstein, as did Schrodinger, insisted on an objective reality, a reality independent of our observation of it. He insisted that the wave function, and by extension quantum mechanics, is incomplete, i.e. there must exist what we call hidden variables that reflect a more physical underlying reality.

Also in 1935 in an effort to demonstrate the silliness of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Einstein, along with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, proposed a quantum scenario that showed that in order to abandon the assumption of realism, you pretty much had to abandon a concept almost as sacred — i.e. the concept of locality.

Locality is the idea that each bit of the universe only acts on its immediate surroundings. This is fundamental to Einstein’s Relativity, which tells us that the chain of cause and effect can’t propagate any faster than the speed of light.

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The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, or EPR paradox introduces one of the most mysterious ideas in all of quantum mechanics, namely quantum entanglement.

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Einstein famously called the notion of entanglement, "spooky." But the more you try to understand quantum entanglement, and reconcile it with what we think we understand about Relativity and the finite speed of light, the more you realize that Einstein's term "spooky" is probably an extreme understatement — even though quantum mechanics itself, as a tool of physics, has proven for nearly 100 years to be invaluable and unfailing.

And so this will be the subject of what promises to be a truly fascinating presentation by Howard Gross on Sunday, March 26 at 4:00 PM at our regular meeting place, at the Colorado Community Center Meeting Room in Santa Monica. (New members, please check out the exact location of our meeting room at 2500 Broadway in Santa Monica, which is clarified at the top of this page.)

LINKS, LINKS, LINKS . . .

Below are links to four videos, one or more of which we may screen and discuss as part of Howard’s presentation on the last Sunday in March.

A LINK TO A NEW VIDEO

We have just added a remarkable new video to the first three that were initially listed below. This fourth video "Quantum Entanglement & the Great Bohr-Einstein Debate" is both clear and concise, however for most viewers it may take a few repeated viewings, either in part or in whole, to understand and appreciate it in full. But I think you will find its rewards well worth your viewing effort. You can stop the video after 11 minutes and 15 seconds since that is the end of the entanglement topic. (This video was in part appropriated for portions of the preceding text.)

1. "Einstein's Brilliant Mistake: Entangled States" by Chad Orzil (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbbWx2COU0E&t=13s)
2. "Quantum entanglement, Bell Inequality, EPR paradox" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v657Ylwh-_k)
3. "Entanglement and Complexity: Gravity and Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9crggox5rbc)"
4. "Quantum Entanglement & the Great Bohr-Einstein Debate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tafGL02EUOA)"

I look forward to personally welcoming all of you to our upcoming meeting at the end of March.

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Julian Krainin

Organizer, Quantum Physics Discussion Group

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“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” — Albert Einstein