
The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought - rms
http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13226725
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DaniFong
The paper is accessible at <http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1625>

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grouchyOldGuy
But if I read the paper, won't I change its outcome?

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vinutheraj
yea this paper makes me think that quantum physics is bogus... even I could
have made this bogus claim. IF I am not looking, shit happens, so how do I
prove that I am not looking, by just peeping into it... what shit... what a
scam.. now I feel that neone can be a quantum physicist !!

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DaniFong
The mystery is how it can be so confusing, and how measurement and
entanglement can be so mysterious, while at the same time, it can be so
accurate a predictive theory. Any time you use a laser, as in an optical drive
you rely upon a quantum effect that was _derived_ before it was discovered.
The energy levels of electrons in chemicals, of the affinities between
chemicals, the reaction cross-sections of the fusion processes that power our
stars, of the voltages in the millions of transistors in your microprocessor,
you're relying on precise effects that are calculated with the quantum theory.
It's not a scam, it's a mystery.

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Hexstream
Definite proof that we live in a simulation and those who attend to it save up
some computational resources by computing only what can be seen, and also they
have a bug where they used a signed int instead of an unsigned int ;P

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koningrobot
Here's an article that says entanglement isn't all that weird:
<http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf>. Admittedly, I'm not familiar enough with
quantum mechanics to get it, but it's related and YMMV.

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anc2020
Read this and thought it made sense, but I'm not physicist. I'd really like to
know what actual physicists make of this.

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lisper
Back in the day, I submitted this paper to the American Journal of Physics. It
was rejected, not because it was incorrect, but because it didn't say anything
new. If you like I can post the review.

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scott_s
I would like to see that review.

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anc2020
Seconded

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lisper
Here it is. (Gotta love modern search tools.)

Edit: couldn't figure out how to paste in pre-formatted text, so here's a link
instead:

<http://www.flownet.com/ron/ajp_review.txt>

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scott_s
Did you feel it was a fair review? Did you take their suggestion and submit it
to the Foundations of Physics journal?

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lisper
I thought it was somewhat fair. One the one hand, it is true that the paper
says nothing new. On the other hand, it doesn't _claim_ to say anything new.
It just claims to present old results in a more accessible way, which I
believe it does. Furthermore, these results are clearly _not_ widely known
even within the physics community because even today you can find lots of
card-carrying physicists (and a few patent examiners apparently, to say
nothing of journalists) who do not understand the simple idea that measurement
and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, so clearly there is a need
for some better pedagogy in this area. AJP is ostensibly devoted to physics
_education_ , which is why I chose to submit it there. So I think it would
have been an appropriate venue, and I think it would have made a contribution.

On the other hand, the point that I do not have adequate references for a
scholarly publication is valid. So I thought the decision not to publish it
was defensible, even if I didn't agree with their reasoning.

I did not submit it to Foundations of Physics. Physics is not really my field
of expertise, so the benefit to me from having an accepted peer-reviewed
publication in this area is pretty small. This paper was the result of an
exploration driven by personal curiosity. If self-publication on the web were
not an option I might have been more motivated to polish it up and resubmit
it, but it is so I wasn't.

I'm actually between gigs right now (my partner in a startup I was trying to
get off the ground had to bow out) so I may try to update it and take another
whack at publishing. I actually have some new ideas about how entanglement can
explain the (perceived) flow of time, but the last time it took me nearly ten
years to figure it out (though it all finally came together in a wonderful
"aha" moment, which almost made it all worthwhile) and I have other fish to
fry.

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DavidSJ
Either Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was just refuted, or this is
terrible scientific reporting.

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michaelk
The Economist + Physics = excellent

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DanielBMarkham
This made my head hurt.

So by _not looking_ , scientists determined that while they were _not looking_
in some spots there was a negative number of photons. This did not mean there
exist anti-photons, just that weird things happen while we're not looking.

(scratches head)

A non-observation found unexpected results, which means that the known laws of
physics don't need to change.

I shoulda went into particle physics. It sounds like lots more fun than
technology consulting.

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Allocator2008
Really this result is consistent with the Everett - Wheeler 1958 thesis that
the wave function never collapses. This I have held to be the case personally
for a long while, and in light of that, this new result is not surprising.

When you get right down to it, it is basically saying the wave functions of
the entangled photons do not decay since they are never directly observed.
Extrapolating from this one can say that in fact Wheeler and Everett were
right, and the wave function never decays at all. Which of course leads to the
"branching universe" idea, which to me will one day be seen as no more
surprising than the "many galaxies" idea. Remember, the idea of other galaxies
before the discoveries of Hubble and so on used to be only speculation, not
universally held. Now we know there are at least 10^10 galaxies. Similarly the
fact that the wave function never collapses, as Everett and Wheeler proposed
will be held to be just as prosaic as the fact that there are other galaxies.

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eru
Don't you agree that clicking on a link should automatically cause the target
to be rendered on the best suited available device?

I.e. I had to prevent myself from reading the article online, so that I can
read it in my dead tree edition later on in the train.

