
Quantum Nonlocality, and the End of Classical Spacetime [pdf] - mpweiher
http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06022
======
kordless
Build a virtual reality world on blockchain technologies from the ground up.
Make it procedural, in spots, so the storage costs of pretty things aren't
crazy high. Take changes enabled by the observer's causality and write them
out as updates where there is consensus available. At the end of "time", you
have a stored reality you can replay and enjoy, or even create sidechains of
favorite events and share them with others.

~~~
tetrep
That is more or less how video game replays work, as well as netcode in
multiplayer games. They store the series of events that lead to a given state;
you don't need to waste resources on a block-chain.

There's no technological reason as to why you couldn't arbitrarily interrupt a
replay and take control from that point forward, effectively forking the
replay, but I don't know if any games allow you to do that.

Multiplayer servers essentially keeps forks of reality for short durations to
do lag compensation as it reconciles the actions that clients send it to
create one timeline that is pushed to all clients.

~~~
SimonPStevens
Many modern racing games (Forza for example) have a rewind feature which is
essentially a replay of the last 30 or so seconds where you can take over at
some point and continue driving as if you hadn't just slammed into the tyre
wall.

------
mh-cx
Is it possible to translate this to layman terms?

~~~
nabla9
This is my understanding of how the problem is framed:

Causality is local even in quantum physics. The "Spooky action at a distance"
is just correlation

This leaves the "acausal action at a distance" aka nonlocal correlation. There
is no controversy here. There is no superluminal messaging and there are no
need for hidden variables and things like that. Entangled quantum _state_ of
two distant entangled electrons has no coordinates in space. Quantum states
are treated as ghosts.

For the authors there exist discord between instant correlation and special
relativity. I have no idea what comes next. Somebody else should explain how
Trace Dynamics works.

~~~
philip142au
How can things be correlated? what is correlation if there is no causation, I
feel confused about that ... as your The "Spooky action at a distance" is just
correlation.

~~~
iheartmemcache
Non-newtonian physics is by far the weakest of the hard sciences but as I
understand it "[spooky] action at a distance" has a formal meaning[1] in
particle physics that has to do with quantum entanglement. Here's the NIST
article on the substantial findings that lends credence spooky action
specifically[2]. (I'd imagine the physics stackexchange will have a great
discussion on this, and the AskScience on Reddit will have a thread
approachable for people who aren't Leonard Susskind or his coterie of
brilliant post-docs.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_a_distance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_a_distance)

[2]
[http://www.nist.gov/pml/div686/20151105loophole.cfm](http://www.nist.gov/pml/div686/20151105loophole.cfm)

~~~
wyager
> Non-newtonian physics is by far the weakest of the hard sciences

This assertion is ridiculous. The only fields "harder" (in the scientific
sense) than modern physics are pure math fields. High-level physics is almost
pure math anyway; much of it is abstract algebra and topology. That's not to
say it's divorced from reality; reality seems to like using these principles
under the hood.

The "soft" stuff you are talking about isn't modern physics; it's people
taking (mostly uninformed) potshot guesses at how to interpret the hard
results that modern physics offers. Within the physics community, these
discussions are much more muted, because it's clear that the answers to
physics questions won't come out of philosophical pontificating.

Physicists figure out which interpretations are compatible with experimentally
verified theory, and then look for additional consequences of these
interpretations that can be tested. Right now there are a number of plausible
explanations of the observations of quantum mechanics, each with their own
(often psychologically uncomfortable) way of dealing with its conclusions.
It's rare to come across a physicist that is strongly convinced of one
interpretation.

------
tacos
Real paper -> Pop reporting of real paper -> Derivative crap on arxiv.org in
essay form -> HN homepage.

We've got it down to about two weeks now. It's a game of telephone with
massive information loss at each step.

~~~
evanb
The Gravity Research Foundation's essay contest is one of the most well-known
and prestigious essay contests in physics, in which authors are encouraged to
synthesize and simplify their technical work into a short, approachable-for-
physicists-but-nonexperts work with few equations. A quick perusing of the
previous winners
[http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org/winners_year.html](http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org/winners_year.html)
shows 't Hooft, Krauss, Smoot, Steinhardt, Wald, Bekenstein, Brout, Englert,
Penrose, Hawking, DeWitt. It's taken very seriously.

So the chain was really (a bunch of real papers) --> (those authors
summarizing what they did, and putting it on the arXiv) --> HN. Calling it
derivative crap is totally wrong, and suggesting that the arXiv somehow makes
the papers less "real" is wrong too.

Full disclosure: I wrote
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03055](http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03055) for the
contest [honarable mention].

