From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@cox.net)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 12:45:01 MDT
This is a very attractive asshole on third read.
And believe me, I'm hetero and knock at the front doorS.
Walter
Walter Watts wrote:
> I STILL say not only does he play dice, but he's a compulsive gambler!!!
>
> Walter
> Enjoy......
> ----------------------------------------
> God Doesn't Play Dice
>
> Marcus Chown
> NewScientist
> 6.29.2002
>
> Core reality.
> ---------------
> Just suppose the quantum world is built on more solid foundations. It
> could explain a lot of weird stuff, says Marcus Chown
> ---------------
> FOR a theory that has the world's finest physicists baffled, quantum
> mechanics is fantastically successful. It has made possible computers,
> lasers and nuclear reactors and explained how the Sun shines and why the
> ground beneath our feet is solid. But it is also strange, frustrating
> and incomprehensible. It insists that the microscopic world is a shadowy
> realm where nothing is certain-where an electron can be in two places at
> once and photons at opposite extremes of the Universe can communicate by
> some kind of weird telepathy.
>
> But some physicists are beginning to suspect that there's another level
> of reality beneath the quantum world. Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft
> believes that underpinning quantum weirdness is an old-fashioned
> deterministic theory-one inwhich there's a simple relationship between
> cause and effect. Antony Valentini of Imperial College in London has now
> gone even further. He thinks that quantum mechanics may not always have
> applied, and that in the early Universe matter danced to a different
> tune. What's more, some non-quantum stuff may even have survived to this
> day, tantalising us with the possibilityof eavesdropping on secure
> cryptographic channels, constructing computers which outperform even the
> fastest quantum computers and, most remarkable of all, sending signals
> faster than the speed of light.
>
> The reason for believing in a deeper level is that quantum theory merely
> predicts the probable outcomes of measurements, not certainties. To
> Valentini, it's abit like an actuary predicting the probability that a
> man will die at a particular age. "This does not preclude a deeper level
> of cause and effect, which could be used to predict precisely when a
> given man dies," says Valentini. "It might depend on the detailed
> condition of his heart and arteries."
>
> Indeed, everywhere in physics where a theory predicts probabilities,
> physicists believe there is a deeper level of certainty. Everywhere,
> that is, except quantum physics. Why not there too? Most physicists
> would say that this deeper level of explanation - a lower stratum or
> "hidden variable theory" - is unnecessary because quantum mechanics
> already fits all known experimental results. "They're saying quantum
> theory works now -why look farther?" says Valentini.
>
> Nevertheless, a few people have tried. One attempt is the "pilot-wave"
> theory, proposed by French physicist Louis de Brogue in the 1920s and
> developed by American physicist David Bohm during the early 1950s
> Whereas in quantum mechanics the wave function is nothing more than a
> mathematical convenience for calculating the probability that a particle
> will be found at a particular point in space, in pilot-wave theory the
> wave is real. It's an invisible but physical wave that guides particles
> along, and has a current that drives the precise motion of the particle,
> just as an ocean current drives a piece of flotsam. This theory
> reproduces all the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. "Most
> physicists are quite sceptical about this interpretation-including
> myself," says Lucien Hardy of the University of Oxford. "But it is
> important because it establishes the possibility of giving quantum
> theory a a so-called hidden-variable interpretation."
>
> However, most physicists are put off this interpretation by a property
> called non-locality- physical influences that travel faster than light.
> Of course, even conventional quantum mechanics assumes non-local
> effects. Between measurements, the spin of an electron can be loosely
> thought of as in a state of high anxiety. flitting randomly from
> spinning in one direction, dubbed "up", to spinning the opposite way,
> dubbed "down". This has a remarkable consequence if two "entangled"
> electrons have a total spin of zero between them - that is, the spin of
> one is up and the other down. Nature forbids the total spin from ever
> changing. So if the electrons are separated and a measurement on one
> finds it spinning "up", the far-away electron must at the very same
> instant plump for spinning "down". And vice versa.
>
> "It doesn't matter if one electron is ma steel box buried under the sea
> floor and the other is on the other side of the Galaxy," says Valentini.
> "Each will respond instantaneously to the other's state, in total
> violation of Einstein's cosmic speed limit, the velocity of light."
>
> Yet while it's possible to think of non-locality as a quirk of quantum
> mechanics - something that's peripheral to the meat of the theory-the
> same can't be said for pilot-wave theory. Non- locality lies at its very
> core. Take those two electrons again. Pilot- wave theory says that the
> pair of particles we see moving about in three- dimensional space is
> actually the projection of a single system that exists in
> six-dimensional "configuration space". "The two particles are connected
> because they are really a single, higher-dimensional system," says
> Valentini.
>
> Most physicists remain uneasy about non- locality because in our
> everyday experience things do not seem to be inextricably linked. Any
> theory that places this at its centre seems suspect. 't Hooft, of the
> University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, is dead against the idea of
> non- locality. Yet he thinks that a novel kind of hidden- variable
> theory might offer a way around it.
>
> His idea, formulated in the late 1990s, is that some kind of
> deterministic theory can be applied at the very smallest scales of space
> and time. If you could zoom in and observe events that last just 10 -43
> seconds, in an area no more than 10 -35 metres across, you would find a
> classically predictable theory with no need for probabilities and
> uncertainty. 't Hooft describes it as being like a game of chess played
> on a board with microscopic squares. Quantum mechanics is then a kind of
> statistical theory that tallies all the smallest-scale events to give a
> fuzzy average description of what's going on.
>
> He has several reasons for believing quantum theory is built on deeper
> foundations. One is our inability, despite 80 years of effort, to
> reconcile gravity with the quantum world. Superstring theory makes many
> claims, he says, but it's far too vague to be even remotely acceptable.
> Another reason is more deep-seated. "lust like Albert Einstein, lam
> unhappy about the fundamental statistical nature of the predictions of
> quantum mechanics," he says.
>
> 't Hooft is still developing his ideas, but even if he's right, there'd
> be no way of telling. By his reckoning we may never see the
> deterministic layer underneath quantum mechanics, or even be able to
> prove that it exists.
>
> Which is why Valentini's latest ideas are so appealing. He thinks we
> should find hard evidence that these solid foundations really exist.
>
> Valentini believes that instead of rejecting non-locality, we should
> embrace it. He points out that in conventional quantum mechanics, a
> "suspicious coincidence" obscures non-locality. For example, you might
> think that by using pairs of linked electrons like the pair described
> above, you could create an instantaneous communication system that
> defied the rule against anything travelling faster than light. But,
> frustratingly, that's impossible, because you can never know before a
> measurement which way an electron is spinning. So if one direction of
> spin codes for a "1" and the other a "0" and you want to send a "1" you
> can only be 50 per cent sure of sending a "1"- a level of uncertainty,
> or noise that scrambles any message. "Although non- locality is a
> fundamental feature of quantum theory, nature provides precisely the
> amount of quantum noise necessary to make it unusable," says Valentini.
> "Is that simply a coincidence? I don't think so."
>
> He uses a thermal analogy. If the whole Universe was in a state of
> thermal equilibrium - that is, characterised by a single temperature -
> heat could not do any work. It couldn't move a piston, for example. "It
> isn't that heat intrinsically can't do work," he says. "It's just that
> temperature differences are needed to do work." In this imaginary state
> of universal thermal equilibrium, random temperature fluctuations in any
> machinery would be of precisely the right size to make any small random
> temperature differences unusable.
>
> Valentini suspects that quantum theory may merely describe a particular
> state of the Universe in which quantum noise acts like these random
> temperature fluctuations, making non-locality unusable and effectively
> preventing messages being sent faster than light. According to
> Valentini, in this special state we are unable to observe non-local
> signals because they "cancel out" at the statistical level. This could
> apply to any hidden-variable theory, but Valentini has done most of his
> work on a type of pilot-wave theory.
>
> His ideas are certainly controversial. "These conclusions depend on a
> particular interpretation of pilot-wave theory which, whilst being
> perfectly respectable, has the support of only a small number of
> physicists," says Hardy.
>
> But on the whole, physicists - including Hardy-do not dismiss it.
> "Valentini is a serious physicist and a very deep thinker," says Hardy.
> "I am a big fan of Antony Valentini," says Lee Smolin of the Perimeter
> Institute forTheoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "I think his ideas
> are the most interesting and potentially true ideas concerning the
> foundations of quantum theory that I have heard for some time."
>
> If Valentini is right, the implications are profound. lust after the big
> bang, the Universe may have existed in a state in which non-locality was
> not cloaked by random noise, he says. Interactions between particles in
> this early Universe then rapidly caused it to relax into the special
> "equilibrium state" we find today. These interactions, Valentini
> suggests, imply that the pilot-wave currents driving particles along
> were so convoluted that they scrambled the particles' probability
> distributions. This can be likened to interactions between hot gas
> particles - which on average transfer energy from fast-moving to
> slow-moving particles - causing the gas to relax into a state of thermal
> equilibrium.
>
> In our world, the probable location of a particle is related to the
> square of the amplitude of its wave function. But in this early
> Universe, before quantum noise set in, probability distributions might
> have been more sharply defined than the square of the wave function.
> With less quantum noise to blur things, it would have been possible to
> locate particles with greater certainty. And since non-locality wasn't
> blurred out, this means that at this time, signals could travel faster
> than light. For example, there would be less uncertainty about the spin
> state of an entangled pair of electrons, so a message could be encoded
> in electrons on one side of the Universe and sent to the other
> instantaneously.
>
> Valentini has reason to believe this was the case. According to him, a
> split second after the Universe's birth there were two competing
> processes going on. One was the interaction between particles -
> analogous to the interaction between molecules in a gas - which drove
> the Universe towards a noisy equilibrium. But this approach to
> equilibrium was countered by the tremendous expansion of the Universe
> which was pulling matter apart. Only when the expansion had slowed could
> particle interactions dominate, says Valentini, allowing matter to slip
> into the blurry, uncertain form we see today. This point was probably
> reached when the Universe was about 10 -43 seconds old, he suggests.
>
> With the transition occurring so quickly, you might think there could be
> no significant consequences. Not so, says Valentini. This transition
> could solve the puzzle of why far-flung parts of the Universe are at the
> same temperature and have the same matter density. How could they have
> influenced each other if there wasn't even time for light to have
> travelled from one to the other? The standard solution to this conundrum
> is inflation, a hypothetical super-fast expansion of the Universe
> inwhich it arose from a volume so small that very early on all parts
> knew about each other. But if there was no speed limit, there is no
> puzzle.
>
> There would be consequences for inflation too, if it really occurred.
> Quantum fluctuations in the fields that physicists believe drove
> inflation should be imprinted on the cosmic microwave background as
> small variations in temperature. "Those variations may therefore reflect
> quantum fluctuations in the early Universe," says Valentini. "If the
> actual fluctuations don't obey the rules of quantum mechanics, we ought
> to be able to see the fossil imprint in the microwave background today."
> Data from NASA's satellite observatory MAP could provide the answer next
> year, he says.
>
> What makes Valentini's theory even more surprising is that some
> non-quantum matter might have survived to the present day. Since the key
> to the transition to the equilibrium state is the interaction between
> particles, any particles that ceased to interact around the cut-off
> point about 10 -43 seconds after the big bang could get left behind. In
> particular, Valentini suggests that some gravitons - the hypothetical
> carriers of the gravitational force - could have become isolated at
> about the time of the transition. In other words, gravitons left over
> from this time might still be in a non-quantum state today.
>
> According to Valentini, there may be hitherto unknown non-quantum
> particles too. "It's conceivable they may even make up the invisible
> dark matter which dominates the Universe," he says. "Matter following
> familiar quantum theory could be a minor component of the Universe."
> Particles of non-quantum matterwould look like normal particles, they'd
> simply not obey the statistics of familiar particles. The location of a
> particle trapped in a box, for example, would not be dependent on the
> square of its wave function: its position could be pinned down more
> precisely.
>
> How could we test such an outlandish idea? Identifying gravitons that
> survive from the instant after the big bang seems unlikely, and even
> getting hold of dark matter might be difficult, to say the least. But it
> is conceivable that dark matter particles could decay into photons that
> preserve the non-quantum behaviour of their parents. If you could detect
> such photons- by pointing a telescope at a small region of dark
> matter-they would behave differently from quantum photons. Pass ordinary
> photons through a pair of slits, for example, and they produce distinct
> dark and light bands of interference. The bands produced by non-quantum
> photons, on the other hand, would be blurred.
>
> There's even some possibility that non-quantum matter is being created
> in today's Universe. Valentini's guess is that gravity could shift
> matter that obeys quantum theory back to its primordial non-
> equilibrium state. This would probably take the ferocious gravity of a
> singularity in a black hole, though.
>
> If we could somehow get hold of non- quantum matter, it would be magical
> stuff. For one thing we could violate Heisenberg's uncertainty
> principle, which puts a limit on how accurately we can measure things
> such as the location of a particle. To locate a particle, it has to
> interact with something else, for example when a photon bounces off it
> in a detector. The problem is that there is an uncertainty even in the
> position of the photon. "However, if we had photons obeying a
> probability distribution sharper than that of standard photons, we could
> locate things with greater certainty," says Valentini.
>
> This also means we could use the stuff to eavesdrop on secure
> cryptographic channels, says Valentini. Quantum cryptography is 100 per
> cent secure because any attempt at eavesdropping would be noticed. The
> simple act of reading the secret key transmitted as a string of quantum
> 1s and 0s introduces disturbances
> (New Scientist, 2 October1999, p 28). But if eavesdroppers possess
> non-quantum matter, they could beat the uncertainty principle and
> distinguish the state of the bits without disturbing them. This is
> because non-quantum particles contain less noise. Just a very weak
> interaction between them and the quantum bits - an interaction too weak
> to disturb the bits - is enough to leave a discernable signature in the
> non-quantum particles that could be used to decrypt the message.
>
> And there's more. Non-quantum matter would enable us to build a
> computer which massively outperforms "conventional" quantum computers.
> These hypothetical machines would exploit the fact that a particle such
> as an atom can be in many states at once - a so-called superposition-to
> do large numbers of calculations simultaneously (New Scientist, 8 June,
> p 24). The problem is that you need a carefully crafted quantum program
> that concentrates the answer in a single branch of the superposition,
> from where it can be read.
>
> So far such algorithms have been found for only a few specialised
> problems. But using non- quantum matter you could in theory access all
> the myriad parallel calculations of a quantum computer. It could be used
> to observe the computer's quantum state without collapsing the wave
> function, enabling us to read the results of all the parallel
> computations.
>
> But far more remarkable than all this would be faster-than-light
> communication. You could exploit non-locality without quantum noise
> getting in the way, using it to control robotic probes on planets at the
> other end of the Solar System in realtime, for example. Troublesome time
> lags while instructions "crawl" at the speed of light across space would
> become a thing of the past. Why send humans on long, dangerous missions
> to Mars when robots, controlled from a comfortable lab on Earth, could
> do the job perfectly well?
>
> And this sort of communication would force us to revise relativity
> theory, says Valentini. Contrary to what is suggested by Einstein's
> theory, there would have to be an underlying preferred time - a sort of
> Universe-wide GMT.
>
> Valentini will have a hard time convincing sceptics. But it could be
> worth it. "It would mean that physics was finally making progress, on a
> problem on which we have been stuck for many decades," says Smolin.
> "Right now we're staring into a sort of quantum fog," says Valentini.
> "If we admit that an unexplored level might lie behind it, a whole new
> world comes into focus."@ Further reading: The Quantum Theory of Motion
> by Peter Holland (Cambridge University Press, 1993) "Subquantum
> information and computation" by Antonyvalentini (www.arxiv.orglabslquant
> "Hidden variables, statistical mechanics and the early universe"
> byAntonyValentini
> (www.arxiv.orglabslquant-ph10104067) "Signal-locality and subquantum
> information in deterministic hidden-variable theories" by
> AnlonyValentini
> (www.arxiv.orglabslquant-phl0112151) "How does God play dice?
> Pre-determinism at the Planck scale" by Gerard 'I Hooft
> (www.arxiv.orglabslhep-th10104219)
>
> 341 NewScientist I29lune 2002 www. newscientist. cam
>
> --
>
> Walter Watts
> Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
>
> "No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!"
-- Walter Watts Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc. "No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!"
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