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It has nothing to do with instincts or what is easy or hard to imagine, it's almost always because of special relativity and that all of our theories of the dif

It has nothing to do with instincts or what is easy or hard to imagine, it's almost always because of special relativity and that all of our theories of the different forces are all local. If entanglement is the only non-local interaction, then why? I don't think it has anything to do with the human's idea of themselves EDIT: If you meant why people accept it, well that's for the same reason that the EPR paradox was formulated in the first place: the basic formulation of quantum mechanics and the most obvious interpretation of it basically straight up says there is non-local action

ithkuil 3y ago
I poorly phrased my comment. You don't have to give up locality it you just accept that we as observers get entangled with what we observe and the wave function doesn't really collapse. This is compatible with bell inequality and with locality. See Everett or many-worls interpretation
- bowsamic 3y ago
  There are interpretations of quantum mechanics covering all possible situations, but we don't have a way of choosing between them. You are suggesting religion, not science, not even philosophy.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    I don't think that's fair. The Everett interpretation is just taking the Schrödinger equations and not adding anything else to it. The "interpretation" part is just about explaining how to make sense of what _we_ see and how to make that compatible with the Schrödinger equation. There is nothing mystic about it, quite the contrary I posit, the rejection of it requires the introduction of something anti-scientific, namely that we humans are somehow special and detached from the physical world
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      > The Everett interpretation is just taking the Schrödinger equations and not adding anything else to it. That's literally what people claim Copenhagen to be Everett's interpretation requires positing a universal wavefunction and some kind of branching mechanism It's not some basic, straightforward interpretation of QM without any additional postulates, and even if it was, that would not be evidence for it to be true over others
      - ithkuil 3y ago
        no, copenhagen interpretation is wave function + born rule. the "branching mechanism" is not part of the fundamental mechanism of the everett interpretation. The "branching" is an emergent phenomenon similar to what happens when you mix to liquids of two different colors. At "some point" the the fluids intermix in such a way that you no longer distinguish them and finding the right boundary when that exactly happen may seem a bit "fuzzy", but the physics of what's going on is perfectly clear to anybody; the two substances are still there, but just mixed up in way that is completely intractable to reverse in practice.
        bowsamic 3y ago
        It still posits that we are in one of (probably) infinite universes corresponding to each possible outcome (unless you are getting confused with the "Consistent histories" interpretation). That is a part of the fundamental mechanism of the Everett interpretation, it's literally why it's called the Many World Interpretation. Just because you can make a physical analogy for that branching doesn't mean it isn't an extra element in your ontology
        ithkuil 3y ago
        yeah, I'd argue though that it's not adding those universes. They're there all along. Branching is an epiphenomenon of there being information processing machines that are embedded in the real universe, and those machines interpret their interactions with the surrounding as if they were only part of a subset of that universe, and upon reasoning about that they call the real universe the "multi-verse"
qubex 3y ago
General Relativity admits the concepts of wormholes (Einstein-Rosen bridges) and these are a nonlocal phenomenon. So it is incorrect to assert that quantum entanglement is the only nonlocal interaction or phenomenon. Both General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory seem to manifest a need for nonlocality and each theory expresses it with its own vocabulary (in terms of information and observation in the case of QFT, and with wormholes and multiple connectedness in the case of GR). That’s the kernel of truth in the famously hermetic pronouncement that “ER=EPR”.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  Wormholes are not non-local though. They continuously connect two regions of spacetime. It's not different than saying you can go from the south to north pole by passing through Paris or by passing through Beijing. QFT is no more non-local than QM in general
  - qubex 3y ago
    Insofar as they create a shorter path for information to flow along, they are nonlocal.
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      It does not allow instantaneously affecting spacelike separated points in spacetime so it's not non-local
      - qubex 3y ago
        I’m sure there’s a vocabulary in terms of local domains and being affected beyond the constraints of the light-cone as expressed on space time absent the wormhole so the absolute definition you offer can probably be tempered.
- danbruc 3y ago
  A wormhole is not really non-local, I would argue, you just get another path between two points that might be much shorter than the regular shortest path avoiding the wormhole. But even travelling through a wormhole would not make you disappear in one place and reappear in another without following a continuous world line.
danbruc 3y ago
Entanglement is not a non-local interaction, it means that state of the system can not be separated into independent states of its constituents. That altering the state of one particle could non-locally influence the state of another particle far away is not really a mind-bending idea, pressing the power button on a remote control turning on the TV across the room is pretty much the same thing, at least to our human perception as we can not see the IR light and the speed of light is essentially infinite on a human scale. But that is not how to think about entanglement properly, that is much more mind-bending. The remote control and the TV become a unit and only this unit has a state, neither the TV nor the remote control have an independent state of their own. Note that entanglement requires superposition, without it you can separate the state. The state power button not pressed and TV on can obviously be separated into independent states for both devices, but power button not pressed and TV off or power button pressed and TV on can not. You could try to say the power button is pressed or not pressed and the TV is on or off, but that description would not account for the correlation that power button pressed implies TV off (and vice versa) and power button not pressed implies TV on (and vice versa).
- bowsamic 3y ago
  > Entanglement is not a non-local interaction, it means that state of the system can not be separated into independent states of its constituents. Yes, and then what happens when you decide to measure the state of the part of the system that lies in one region of space? > That altering the state of one particle could non-locally influence the state of another particle far away is not really a mind-bending idea, pressing the power button on a remote control turning on the TV across the room is pretty much the same thing, at least to our human perception as we can not see the IR light and the speed of light is essentially infinite on a human scale. That's irrelevant, because EM is local in physics.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    Yes, and then what happens when you decide to measure the state of the part of the system that lies in one region of space? If I had any good idea, I would go pick up my Nobel Prize. The only thing I can really say is that I do not think that the wave function instantly collapses as this would be a non-unitarity evolution of the wave function. That's irrelevant, because EM is local in physics. You missed my point, I of course did not want to say that turning on the TV is a non-local interaction, just that it looks like one to humans. So if non-local interaction was all that is going on in quantum mechanics, than it would not be that hard to make sense of it, as we have an intuition for non-local interactions, even though only from things that look like non-local interactions to us but are not actually non-local interactions.

ithkuil 3y ago

I poorly phrased my comment. You don't have to give up locality it you just accept that we as observers get entangled with what we observe and the wave function doesn't really collapse. This is compatible with bell inequality and with locality. See Everett or many-worls interpretation

bowsamic 3y ago
There are interpretations of quantum mechanics covering all possible situations, but we don't have a way of choosing between them. You are suggesting religion, not science, not even philosophy.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  I don't think that's fair. The Everett interpretation is just taking the Schrödinger equations and not adding anything else to it. The "interpretation" part is just about explaining how to make sense of what _we_ see and how to make that compatible with the Schrödinger equation. There is nothing mystic about it, quite the contrary I posit, the rejection of it requires the introduction of something anti-scientific, namely that we humans are somehow special and detached from the physical world
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    > The Everett interpretation is just taking the Schrödinger equations and not adding anything else to it. That's literally what people claim Copenhagen to be Everett's interpretation requires positing a universal wavefunction and some kind of branching mechanism It's not some basic, straightforward interpretation of QM without any additional postulates, and even if it was, that would not be evidence for it to be true over others
    - ithkuil 3y ago
      no, copenhagen interpretation is wave function + born rule. the "branching mechanism" is not part of the fundamental mechanism of the everett interpretation. The "branching" is an emergent phenomenon similar to what happens when you mix to liquids of two different colors. At "some point" the the fluids intermix in such a way that you no longer distinguish them and finding the right boundary when that exactly happen may seem a bit "fuzzy", but the physics of what's going on is perfectly clear to anybody; the two substances are still there, but just mixed up in way that is completely intractable to reverse in practice.
      - bowsamic 3y ago
        It still posits that we are in one of (probably) infinite universes corresponding to each possible outcome (unless you are getting confused with the "Consistent histories" interpretation). That is a part of the fundamental mechanism of the Everett interpretation, it's literally why it's called the Many World Interpretation. Just because you can make a physical analogy for that branching doesn't mean it isn't an extra element in your ontology
        ithkuil 3y ago
        yeah, I'd argue though that it's not adding those universes. They're there all along. Branching is an epiphenomenon of there being information processing machines that are embedded in the real universe, and those machines interpret their interactions with the surrounding as if they were only part of a subset of that universe, and upon reasoning about that they call the real universe the "multi-verse"

qubex 3y ago

General Relativity admits the concepts of wormholes (Einstein-Rosen bridges) and these are a nonlocal phenomenon. So it is incorrect to assert that quantum entanglement is the only nonlocal interaction or phenomenon. Both General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory seem to manifest a need for nonlocality and each theory expresses it with its own vocabulary (in terms of information and observation in the case of QFT, and with wormholes and multiple connectedness in the case of GR). That’s the kernel of truth in the famously hermetic pronouncement that “ER=EPR”.

bowsamic 3y ago
Wormholes are not non-local though. They continuously connect two regions of spacetime. It's not different than saying you can go from the south to north pole by passing through Paris or by passing through Beijing. QFT is no more non-local than QM in general
- qubex 3y ago
  Insofar as they create a shorter path for information to flow along, they are nonlocal.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    It does not allow instantaneously affecting spacelike separated points in spacetime so it's not non-local
    - qubex 3y ago
      I’m sure there’s a vocabulary in terms of local domains and being affected beyond the constraints of the light-cone as expressed on space time absent the wormhole so the absolute definition you offer can probably be tempered.
danbruc 3y ago
A wormhole is not really non-local, I would argue, you just get another path between two points that might be much shorter than the regular shortest path avoiding the wormhole. But even travelling through a wormhole would not make you disappear in one place and reappear in another without following a continuous world line.

danbruc 3y ago

Entanglement is not a non-local interaction, it means that state of the system can not be separated into independent states of its constituents. That altering the state of one particle could non-locally influence the state of another particle far away is not really a mind-bending idea, pressing the power button on a remote control turning on the TV across the room is pretty much the same thing, at least to our human perception as we can not see the IR light and the speed of light is essentially infinite on a human scale. But that is not how to think about entanglement properly, that is much more mind-bending. The remote control and the TV become a unit and only this unit has a state, neither the TV nor the remote control have an independent state of their own. Note that entanglement requires superposition, without it you can separate the state. The state power button not pressed and TV on can obviously be separated into independent states for both devices, but power button not pressed and TV off or power button pressed and TV on can not. You could try to say the power button is pressed or not pressed and the TV is on or off, but that description would not account for the correlation that power button pressed implies TV off (and vice versa) and power button not pressed implies TV on (and vice versa).

bowsamic 3y ago
> Entanglement is not a non-local interaction, it means that state of the system can not be separated into independent states of its constituents. Yes, and then what happens when you decide to measure the state of the part of the system that lies in one region of space? > That altering the state of one particle could non-locally influence the state of another particle far away is not really a mind-bending idea, pressing the power button on a remote control turning on the TV across the room is pretty much the same thing, at least to our human perception as we can not see the IR light and the speed of light is essentially infinite on a human scale. That's irrelevant, because EM is local in physics.
- danbruc 3y ago
  Yes, and then what happens when you decide to measure the state of the part of the system that lies in one region of space? If I had any good idea, I would go pick up my Nobel Prize. The only thing I can really say is that I do not think that the wave function instantly collapses as this would be a non-unitarity evolution of the wave function. That's irrelevant, because EM is local in physics. You missed my point, I of course did not want to say that turning on the TV is a non-local interaction, just that it looks like one to humans. So if non-local interaction was all that is going on in quantum mechanics, than it would not be that hard to make sense of it, as we have an intuition for non-local interactions, even though only from things that look like non-local interactions to us but are not actually non-local interactions.