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I'm not saying magnetism and entanglement are related, I'm saying that when we talk about forces between things, when we get down to it we have no more an under

by dools 11y ago

I'm not saying magnetism and entanglement are related, I'm saying that when we talk about forces between things, when we get down to it we have no more an understanding of how force "works" than we do how entanglement "works". We want everything to be like little machines with cogs and wheels and pulleys. But what is force? What is the thing that repels two negative charges? There's no "mechanism", that's just what force is and what it does. We're so comfortable accepting all this other shit about how the universe operates why should entanglement be any different?

chriswarbo 11y ago
Science is more than just accepting what we (experimentally) observe, since that would lead to a collection of facts rather than a theory. By looking for mechanisms, underlying causes, etc. we can find simple rules to explain seemingly unconnected phenomena. No scientist expects those rules to be intuitive; that's the realm of pop-sci "quantum woo" journalism. However, we do expect those rules to be consistent. General relativity and quantum mechanics are notoriously incompatible, so all of our attempts to combine them so far have been inconsistent, either internally (ie. the maths doesn't work) or externally (ie. they're toy models which can't explain real experiments). Bell showed that entanglement cannot be explained by local hidden variables, which was thought to be inconsistent with special relativity, since it seemingly allowed particles to communicate faster than light. More recently, work on quantum computation and quantum teleportation have clarified our ideas in terms of information: the speed of light is only a limit for information, and entanglement doesn't transfer information. Explanations like many-worlds are also based around information.
- dools 11y ago
  The theory is the maths. Maths makes predictions, observation confirms those predictions. End of story. Local hidden variables are not required any more than a medium is required for an electro magnetic wave to propagate. And yes, it's correct that entanglement transfers no information! So there's nothing spooky about it; or more correctly it might seem spooky but there's no action at a distance.

by dools 11y ago

chriswarbo 11y ago

Science is more than just accepting what we (experimentally) observe, since that would lead to a collection of facts rather than a theory. By looking for mechanisms, underlying causes, etc. we can find simple rules to explain seemingly unconnected phenomena. No scientist expects those rules to be intuitive; that's the realm of pop-sci "quantum woo" journalism. However, we do expect those rules to be consistent. General relativity and quantum mechanics are notoriously incompatible, so all of our attempts to combine them so far have been inconsistent, either internally (ie. the maths doesn't work) or externally (ie. they're toy models which can't explain real experiments). Bell showed that entanglement cannot be explained by local hidden variables, which was thought to be inconsistent with special relativity, since it seemingly allowed particles to communicate faster than light. More recently, work on quantum computation and quantum teleportation have clarified our ideas in terms of information: the speed of light is only a limit for information, and entanglement doesn't transfer information. Explanations like many-worlds are also based around information.

dools 11y ago
The theory is the maths. Maths makes predictions, observation confirms those predictions. End of story. Local hidden variables are not required any more than a medium is required for an electro magnetic wave to propagate. And yes, it's correct that entanglement transfers no information! So there's nothing spooky about it; or more correctly it might seem spooky but there's no action at a distance.