## Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century!

Foundations of physics and/or philosophy of physics, and in particular, posts on unresolved or controversial issues

### Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century!

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Today is the first day of the year 2016. If today someone still believes that Quantum Entanglement is a fundamental feature of our world, then, sadly, they are grossly mistaken. To be sure, quantum mechanics -- with its shortcut of quantum entanglement -- is a phenomenally successful theory, and (as far as we know) makes all the right predictions (and more) for what we observe in our experiments. But one can no more observe quantum entanglement in a laboratory than can observe phlogiston in a combustible chemical body. All one can ever observe in a laboratory are correlations between supposedly entangled quantum systems. No one has ever observed, or could ever observe, quantum entanglement directly. If we could, then all controversies over the interpretation of quantum mechanics would come to end instantly.

Fortunately quantum entanglement is not the only possible explanation for the observed correlations, as I have repeatedly shown in my recent papers and on this very forum. I have shown that the observed correlations can be explained without the notion of phlogiston ...err... entanglement. They can be explained as classical, local, realistic, and deterministic correlations among the points of a quaternionic 3-sphere, and more generally among the points of an octonionic 7-sphere. Some of you are already familiar with my work on the origins of quantum correlations, but here are some key recent papers and a sample chapter from the second edition of my book:

(1) https://www.academia.edu/19235737/Macro ... fied_Proof

(2) https://www.academia.edu/11023207/Macro ... ly_to_Gill

(3) https://www.academia.edu/7024415/Local_ ... _Spacetime

(4) https://www.academia.edu/5643872/Dispro ... tanglement

Let us hope that the day will soon come when the idea of quantum entanglement is no more in vogue than the idea of phlogiston.

HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

Good example, Joy. One must be reminded that until Lavoisier showed combustion to be nothing more than rapid oxidation, phlogiston was a placeholder for an unexplained phenomenon. Turns out it was holding a place for nothing -- it was just superfluous, and it faded away.

Entanglement is destined to fade away, not because it's 'wrong' but because it's useless, a superfluous concept. It's been more than 20 years since Shor's algorithm introduced an entanglement algorithm to quantum computing. How far has that gotten?

Happy New Year.
thray

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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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Absolutely, Tom. We are still awaiting the much hyped "perpetual computing machine" promised by Shor. A lot of people have been minting money on that promise!

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

Joy Christian wrote:***HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

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Happy New Year to you also and to all!

Besides your classical local-realistic model which explicitly explains the correlations, we have also demonstrated on this forum (and elsewhere) that the Bell fans engage in mathematical insanity to try to explain their false position of non-local behavior. May this be the year that sanity comes back to physics. The battle continues.
FrediFizzx
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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By the way, the following most general theorem, for any quantum mechanical state (no matter how complicated) has been proved on the pages 12 to 16 of this paper.

The paper is also the first, introductory chapter of the second edition of my book I have linked above.

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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Perhaps I should also link here this very succinct disproof of Bell's theorem which Fred likes: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.1879.pdf. It is undoubtedly quite charming!

But my own preference is this disproof, which is already linked above. This disproof of Bell's theorem is not so succinct, but it has a certain logical economy that I like.

Apart from the correct geometry of the physical 3-space (i.e., that of a quaternionic 3-sphere), it depends only on one assumption and one well known fact of nature:

(1) The assumption of an initial state $\lambda$ of the spin system, which I have taken to be a choice of an orientation of the 3-sphere:

And (2) the conservation of the zero spin angular momentum in which the singlet spin system emerges from a source:

That is all. From just these two physically natural ingredients the derivation of the EPR-Bohm correlation follows almost trivially:

Needless to say, both derivations of the strong correlation (the succinct and not so succinct) are equivalent. They are just two different ways of saying the same thing:

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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There is a new claim of "nonlocality" just published by Nature, Scientific Reports: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18827

I have posted the following comment in the comments section at the above link:

The claim that there is "nonlocality" in nature -- of any type -- stems from a total lack of understanding of the correct geometry and topology of the physical space in which any physical experiment must necessarily take place.

In fact a fully local and realistic understanding of ALL quantum mechanical phenomena is not only possible but already exists. This fact is not very well known because the corresponding results go against the prevalent belief in "nonlocality", and therefore are aggressively suppressed. For further information about the comprehensive framework which allows fully local and realistic understanding of the quantum phenomena, please consult the following link and references cited therein:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=237#p6160

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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I have discovered something new and powerful about my comprehensive theorem for the quantum correlations stated above: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=237#p6166

I am not ready to talk about this new understanding just yet since I am still analysing the math, but perhaps an entirely new paper may have to be written.

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

Joy Christian wrote:***
I have discovered something new and powerful about my comprehensive theorem for the quantum correlations stated above: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=237#p6166

I am not ready to talk about this new understanding just yet since I am still analysing the math, but perhaps an entirely new paper may have to be written.

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I have finally manged to put together the paper I promised above more than a year ago. See the new thread I have started for it: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=308#p7666.

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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The paper I mentioned above about a year ago is now published by the Royal Society of London in its journal Open Science: http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... eytype=ref

The paper provides a rigorous proof of the title of this thread. Needless to say, both the title of this thread and its proof provided in the above paper are scientific heresies.

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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"This is nice and neat, but this does not describe what happens in real life. Quantum phenomena do not occur in a Hilbert space; they occur in a laboratory. If you visit a real laboratory, you will never find there Hermitian operators." --- Asher Peres

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

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Happy New Year!!!

It has been exactly three years since I started this thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=237#p6160

Much has happened since then concerning my program of understanding the quantum correlations in terms of the algebra, geometry, and topology of the physical space in which we are confined to perform all our experiments. One of my comprehensive papers explaining the program has been published by the Royal Society of London: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=342#p8051

Moreover, a macroscopic experiment is published in the Physical Review Letters which lends support to the ideas presented in my RSOS paper: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=342&p=8345#p8345

Let us hope that 2019 will be the year when the Bell community finally wakes up from its dogmatic slumber!

To believe in the voodoos of nonlocality, nonreality, irreducible randomness, superdeterminism, or backward causation as the Bell community does is a great betrayal of science.

Joy Christian

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

Happy New Year 2019!

Unfortunately, I have lost hope for theoretical physics. The problem is not just with the Bell community. There are variants of it in Feynman path integrals and even in some variants of interpretations of probability theory prior to invention of quantum mechanics.

It is the "Mind Projection Fallacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy
https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prob.as.logic.pdf

ET Jaynes wrote:In studying probability theory, it was vaguely troubling to see reference to "gaussian random variables", or "stochastic processes", or "stationary time series", or "disorder", as if the property of being gaussian, random, stochastic, stationary, or disorderly is a real property, like the property of possessing mass or length, existing in Nature. Indeed, some seek to develop statistical tests to determine the presence of these properties in their data...

Once one has grasped the idea, one sees the Mind Projection Fallacy everywhere; what we have been taught as deep wisdom, is stripped of its pretensions and seen to be instead a foolish non sequitur. The error occurs in two complementary forms, which we might indicate thus: (A) (My own imagination) → (Real property of Nature), [or] (B) (My own ignorance) → (Nature is indeterminate)

ET Jaynes wrote:Form (B) arose out of quantum theory; instead of covering up our ignorance with fanciful assumptions about reality, one accepts that ignorance but attributes it to Nature. Thus in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, whatever is left undetermined in a pure state Ψ is held to be unknown not only to us, but also to Nature herself. That is, one claims that Ψ represents a physically real "propensity" to cause events in a statistical sense (a certain proportion of times on the average over many repetitions of an experiment) but denies the existence of physical causes for the individual events below the level of Ψ. Its zealots accuse those who speculate about such causes of
being "obsolete, mechanistic materialists", to borrow a favorite phrase.

Yet no experiment could possibly demonstrate that no cause exists; the most that one could ever conclude is that no cause was found. But if we ask, "Well, how hard did you try to find the cause?" we will be told: "I didn't try at all, because the theory assures us there is none." Then in what sense can one say that any experiments con rm such a theory? How can anyone feel con dent that no causes exist at the submicroscopic level when experiments give no evidence for this and experimenters do not search for them? Clearly, such a claim is pure type (B) Mind Projection Fallacy.

It is evident that this pattern of thought is also present throughout orthodox statistics, whenever someone states, or implies, that his probabilities are real causative agents en-masse for events that are not determined, individually, by anything. And we see that there can be no such thing as a statistical test for "absence of cause" or "randomness" or "disorder" for the same reason that there is no test for ugliness or foolishness; those qualities exist only in the eye of the observer.

https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmystery.pdf
ET Jaynes wrote:It is very difficult to get this point across to those who think that in doing probability calculations their equations are describing the real world. But that is claiming something that one could never know to be true; we call it the Mind Projection Fallacy. The analogy is to a movie projector, whereby things that exist only as marks on a tiny strip of film appear to be real objects moving across a large screen. Similarly, we are all under an ego-driven temptation to project our private thoughts out onto the real world, by supposing that the creations of one's own imagination are real properties of Nature, or that one's own ignorance signifies some kind of indecision on the part of Nature.

The current literature of quantum theory is saturated with the Mind Projection Fallacy. Many of us were first told, as undergraduates, about Bose and Fermi statistics by an argument like this: "You and I cannot distinguish between the particles; therefore the particles behave differently than if we could." Or the mysteries of the uncertainty principle were explained to us thus: "The momentum of the particle is unknown; therefore it has a high kinetic energy." A standard of logic that would be considered a psychiatric disorder in other fields, is the accepted norm in quantum theory. But this is really a form of arrogance, as if one were claiming to control Nature by psychokinesis.

...

This point comes across much more strongly in our next example, where belief that probabilities are real physical properties produces a major quandary for quantum theory, in the EPR paradox. It is so bad that some have concluded, with the usual consistency of quantum theory, that (1) there is no real world, after all, and (2) physical influences travel faster than light.
minkwe

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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

minkwe wrote:
Unfortunately, I have lost hope for theoretical physics. The problem is not just with the Bell community.

Very true. But Bell-believers seem to be particularly prone to manifest crackpottery and fanaticism. At least that seems to be the case in my own experiences within the physics community.

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Joy Christian
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### Re: Quantum Entanglement is a Phlogiston of the 20th Century

minkwe wrote:Happy New Year 2019!

Unfortunately, I have lost hope for theoretical physics. The problem is not just with the Bell community.

Here I return! And who should I find!! So thanks for the greeting; and the same to you, plus Fred, Joy, Gordon, etc.

However: This year I intend working hard to restore your faith in a small corner of theoretical physics. Dare I say: one in which Ed Jaynes might have made an even bigger mark had he lived longer. (Dare I say one in which you could help mightily.)

So let's see if WE all can make 2020 live up to its name. For I'm sure it will in my small corner of the world.

HNY,
Xray
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