This week's Youtube from Sabine Hossenfelder finally deals with a quantum interpretation that has has always appealed to me, but attracted little attention - John Cramer's transaction interpretation. (You can search his name in my sidebar search and find past posts about it).
One thing I'm not sure about, though: Sabine's attitude to it seems to be "well, no harm in imagining that this is what happens, if that makes you happy, but I'm just sticking to the simpler Copenhagen interpretation." I thought the problem with the Copenhagen interpretation was it was more like a refusal to speculate on what is "really" happening with the wave function. In that sense, Cramer's idea seems to at least offer something to fill in a gap.
One other thing I have been meaning to note. I didn't realise until she did a video on it that the "quantum eraser" experiments were the subject of debate as to what they really show. Sabine's debunking video seemed pretty convincing that they were not showing retrocausation in any sense.
However, while browsing arXiv last week, I noticed a paper that proposed a different version of the experiment which raises more of a "mystery" than the former versions:
Considering the delayed-choice quantum eraser using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a nonsymmetric beam splitter, we explicitly demonstrate that it shares exactly the same formal structure with the EPR-Bohm experiment. Therefore, the effect of quantum erasure can be understood in terms of the standard EPR correlation. Nevertheless, the quantum eraser still raises a conceptual issue beyond the standard EPR paradox, if counterfactual reasoning is taken into account. Furthermore, the quantum eraser experiments can be classified into two major categories: the entanglement quantum eraser and the Scully-Drühl-type quantum eraser. These two types are formally equivalent to each other, but conceptually the latter presents a "mystery" more prominent than the former. In the Scully-Drühl-type quantum eraser, the statement that the which-way information can be influenced by the delayed-choice measurement is not purely a consequence of counterfactual reasoning but bears some factual significance. Accordingly, it makes good sense to say that the "record" of the which-way information is "erased" if the potentiality to yield a conclusive outcome that discriminates the record is eliminated by the delayed-choice measurement. We also reconsider the quantum eraser in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), making clear the conceptual merits and demerits of the MWI.The author acknowledges the debate over the correct interpretation of the previous experiment:
Ever since the idea of quantum erasure was proposed, its interpretation and implication have been a subject of fierce controversy that continues to today [6–13] with divided opinions ranging from “a magnificat affront to our conventional notions of space and time” [14] to “an experiment that has caused no end of confusion” [15]. Particularly, by analogy to the the EPR–Bohm experiment [16, 17], Kastner argued that the quantum eraser neither erases nor delays any information, and does not present any mystery beyond the standard EPR correlation [12]. Later on, by considering a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which conveys the core idea of the quantum eraser more elegantly than a double-slit experiment, Qureshi further elaborated on the analogy between the quantum eraser and the EPR-Bohm experiment and claimed that there is no retrocausal effect whatsoever [13].
So, I take it from this that Sabine H is correct that you don't have to interpret it as retrocausation, but I would like her to comment on the different set up which this author claims does re-introduce "mystery".
4 comments:
All complete science fraud. We need to replace all this nonsense with the structured atom model.
Some consider the Copenhagen interpretation as a cop out, a refusal to address the deeper challenges. Yet they are still arguing over the ontological status of the wave function, entanglement remains a mystery, and the dual slit still mystifies. While I'm not happy with the Copenhagen interpretation, at least it is honest about the limitations of our knowledge.
The Copenhagen model is just a bunch of frauds getting as far away as possible from everyone else so they can get their story straight. So they shoot straight through to Copenhagen so they can nail down their bullshit story outside of the ears of mixed company. The whole thing needs to be scrapped in favour of the scientific method.
Under the structured atom model you can have a lot of magnets representing protons and electrons. The neutron is just a proton and electron held together. What you find is that this collection of spheres can be built up in stable increments, usually involving what would amount to an additional building block of deuterium. When you do this everything conforms to what is found empirically and without all this nonsense about electron shells, orbiting electrons, uncertainty principles or any of this other stupidity.
Also the Structured atom model confirms what is found empirically. Which is that fusion is normal, easy and even happens in nature. They have to call it "transmutation" so that the science mafia doesn't go after them. But its really just fusion. Fusion is so easy that chickens do it. There is no inherent separation between chemistry and nuclear physics, once you have a sane scientific model.
"Yet they are still arguing over the ontological status of the wave function, entanglement remains a mystery, and the dual slit still mystifies."
None of this is any mystery at all. It only became a mystery because of the campaign of aether-denial. Get rid of the aether denial and all their other bullshit and these alleged mysteries disappear.
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