Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

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

Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Joy Christian » Fri Sep 20, 2019 10:18 am

FrediFizzx wrote:
Heinera wrote:
FrediFizzx wrote: I didn't think you would be able to demonstrate how QM "violates" the inequality without all three happening at the same time.
.

Can you show us exactly where in the paper Bell (1964) he makes the assumption (explicit or implicit) that all three must happen at the same time?

I didn't think you could do it either. Instead you deflect the question. It is quite obvious that for the inequality to be physically true, all three must happen at the same time.
.

The sleight-of-hand occurs in Bell's 1964 paper in the unnumbered equation just after eq. (14). That unnumbered equation is nonsensical. Physically, there is no such probability space.

This sleight-of-hand is much easier to see in the Bell-CHSH case, as I have brought out in several of my papers. See, e.g., eq. (4) in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.02876.pdf.

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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Heinera » Fri Sep 20, 2019 11:09 am

Joy Christian wrote:The sleight-of-hand occurs in Bell's 1964 paper in the unnumbered equation just after eq. (14). That unnumbered equation is nonsensical. Physically, there is no such probability space.

And why is that unnumbered equation nonsensical? When someone claims a sleight-of-hand, one expects a detailed explanation of how this "trick" is pulled off.
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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Joy Christian » Fri Sep 20, 2019 11:21 am

Heinera wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:The sleight-of-hand occurs in Bell's 1964 paper in the unnumbered equation just after eq. (14). That unnumbered equation is nonsensical. Physically, there is no such probability space.

And why is that unnumbered equation nonsensical? When someone claims a sleight-of-hand, one expects a detailed explanation of how this "trick" is pulled off.

Read my paper I have just linked. It explains all the detail of how the trick is pulled off and why it is not acceptable.

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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Heinera » Fri Sep 20, 2019 11:49 am

Joy Christian wrote:Read my paper I have just linked. It explains all the detail of how the trick is pulled off and why it is not acceptable.

No, it doesn't. Why don't you make the argument here, in this forum, in let's say ten sentences or less?
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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Joy Christian » Fri Sep 20, 2019 12:02 pm

Heinera wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:Read my paper I have just linked. It explains all the detail of how the trick is pulled off and why it is not acceptable.

No, it doesn't. Why don't you make the argument here, in this forum, in let's say ten sentences or less?

I can't be bothered. I have presented my argument in the paper I have linked. Recognizing Bell's mistake is not rocket science.

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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby gill1109 » Sat Sep 21, 2019 12:42 am

FrediFizzx wrote:
Heinera wrote:
FrediFizzx wrote: I didn't think you would be able to demonstrate how QM "violates" the inequality without all three happening at the same time.
.

Can you show us exactly where in the paper Bell (1964) he makes the assumption (explicit or implicit) that all three must happen at the same time?

I didn't think you could do it either. Instead you deflect the question. It is quite obvious that for the inequality to be physically true, all three must happen at the same time.
.

What happens according to local realism (as formulated by Bell) is that nature picks a value of lambda in a set Lambda according to some probability distribution over Lambda, independently of experimenters' choices of settings or even, for that matter, independently of whether or not the experimenter bothered to set up detectors etc etc. lambda should be thought of as the initial configuration of all the particles or waves or whatever which make up the source, the channels to the detectors, and the detectors. A and B are just two mathematical functions of two arguments - one argument is a value of lambda in Lambda, the other is a direction from the unit sphere S^2.

Local realism says that the mean value of the product of the two outcomes at Alice's detector and Bob's detector, when she chooses the direction a and he chooses direction b, is int_Lambda A(a, lambda) B(b, lambda) rho(lambda) d lambda.

There is nowhere any talk whatsoever of three directions "happening" at the same time. The inequality relates the values of three mean values, each of which can be experimentally determined by choosing two directions at the same time.
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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby gill1109 » Sat Sep 21, 2019 12:56 am

Joy Christian wrote:
Heinera wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:Read my paper I have just linked. It explains all the detail of how the trick is pulled off and why it is not acceptable.

No, it doesn't. Why don't you make the argument here, in this forum, in let's say ten sentences or less?

I can't be bothered. I have presented my argument in the paper I have linked. Recognizing Bell's mistake is not rocket science.

Bell's argument is not rocket science. It is simple and it is pretty watertight. But a lot of people don't understand it. Joy Christian wasn't the first and won't be the last.

There are lots of people who still come up with proofs that pi is a rational number. There are quite a few people who argue that Bell's inequality is both true and false and hence that mathematics as we know it is inconsistent, or the rules of logic need revision. One can admire their originality and their pluckiness. I have the impression that the art of coming up with proofs that Bell was wrong has reached a bit of a dead-end. I haven't seen an original new proof for years. Ten years ago or so, you could still get a paper with such a proof published in a major scientific journal, and reported in the science supplements of the best newspapers. Joy Christian's RSOS paper is probably the last time this will happen, for many years.

Bell's argument is now part of the state-of-the-art theory of causality. See for instance
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05434
Classical causal models cannot faithfully explain Bell nonlocality or Kochen-Specker contextuality in arbitrary scenarios
J. C. Pearl, E. G. Cavalcanti
(Submitted on 12 Sep 2019)
Abstract: In a recent work, it was shown by one of us (EGC) that Bell-Kochen-Specker inequality violations in phenomena satisfying the no-disturbance condition (a generalisation of the no-signalling condition) cannot in general be explained with a faithful classical causal model---that is, a classical causal model that satisfies the assumption of no fine-tuning. The proof of that claim however was restricted to Bell scenarios involving 2 parties or Kochen-Specker-contextuality scenarios involving 2 measurements per context. Here we show that the result holds in the general case of arbitrary numbers of parties or measurements per context; the connection between fine-tuning and Bell-KS inequality violations is generic and not an artefact of the simplest scenarios. This result unifies, in full generality, Bell nonlocality and Kochen-Specker contextuality as violations of a fundamental principle of classical causality.
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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Joy Christian » Sat Sep 21, 2019 1:02 am

gill1109 wrote:
Joy Christian's RSOS paper is probably the last time this will happen, for many years.

When you come back from China there will be a surprise waiting for you here! :-)

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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Joy Christian » Sat Sep 21, 2019 1:07 am

gill1109 wrote:
Bell's argument is not rocket science.

Recognizing Bell's blunder is also not rocket science: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.02876.pdf.

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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby minkwe » Sat Sep 21, 2019 8:46 am

Heinera wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:The sleight-of-hand occurs in Bell's 1964 paper in the unnumbered equation just after eq. (14). That unnumbered equation is nonsensical. Physically, there is no such probability space.

And why is that unnumbered equation nonsensical? When someone claims a sleight-of-hand, one expects a detailed explanation of how this "trick" is pulled off.

Interesting that you will ask this when I just explained it to you a few days ago. The factorization that you did *inside the integral* mandates that all three values MUST occur at the same time. This is why in physics, you shouldn't just do arithmetic without thinking about the meaning of the operations. This is what Boole called "conditions of possible experience", Boole derived an inequality similar to Bell's in 1850 by showing that when you do mathematical operations with outcomes of measurements that occurred at the same time (ie, were simultaneously experienced), certain inequalities must be obeyed, and violation of those inequalities simply informs you the values were not simultaneously experienced. I've also explained this in great detail here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=181 a few years ago. See especially the first post in that thread, and my coin toss example in this post viewtopic.php?f=6&t=181#p4933
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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby minkwe » Sat Sep 21, 2019 8:54 am

Joy Christian wrote:
gill1109 wrote:
Bell's argument is not rocket science.

Recognizing Bell's blunder is also not rocket science: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.02876.pdf.

***

If only Heinera and Richard will actually read Joy's paper on the subject cited above. Or they have read it but have nothing to say about it. It will be interesting to see the response when Joy presents this at the symposium.
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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Heinera » Sat Sep 21, 2019 11:03 am

minkwe wrote:
Heinera wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:The sleight-of-hand occurs in Bell's 1964 paper in the unnumbered equation just after eq. (14). That unnumbered equation is nonsensical. Physically, there is no such probability space.

And why is that unnumbered equation nonsensical? When someone claims a sleight-of-hand, one expects a detailed explanation of how this "trick" is pulled off.

Interesting that you will ask this when I just explained it to you a few days ago. The factorization that you did *inside the integral* mandates that all three values MUST occur at the same time.

Absolutely not. This only demonstrates your own confusion regarding the proof. There is not even any time variable in Bell's derivation. The only requirement is that the factorization mandates that the value of lambda is the same in the two terms (or approximately the same, since we can assume almost everywhere continuity). For a sufficiently large number of particles we will obviously have two different particles, measured at two different times, but characterized by approximately the same lambda.

Since Bell's assumption is that lambda encodes everything about the particle that can determine the outcome, these two particles are now indistinguishable for any purposes of prediction. It is thus irrelevant if we measure one particle twice with two different settings, or each one of them separately with one setting each. You will get the same results either way.
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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby gill1109 » Sun Sep 22, 2019 7:58 am

minkwe wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:
gill1109 wrote:Bell's argument is not rocket science.

Recognizing Bell's blunder is also not rocket science: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.02876.pdf.

If only Heinera and Richard will actually read Joy's paper on the subject cited above. Or they have read it but have nothing to say about it. It will be interesting to see the response when Joy presents this at the symposium.

I'm afraid that I would expect the response to be embarassment. Or laughter. People will stop listening and wish they had never come.

I have read it and commented on it in the past and I have nothing new to say. His objection to Bell has been previously put forward by a small minority of other respectable but I think badly mistaken physicists. It has been discussed so many times in the past, by so many people. Many of them much more eloquent than me. How anyone could imagine that John Bell could be so stupid as to make such a stupid mistake, just makes my mind boggle.

Of course, it is weird that otherwise highly intelligent persons do, repeatedly, come up with something like this. I think that such people have difficulty in distinguishing the mathematical objects in mathematical theories from what we think of them as representing in the real world. It seems to me a common failure among those trained as physicists, for whom mathematics is just the language with which they talk about the real world, so they somewhat naturally confuse the *model* and the *reality*. I think that people who work more with fairly abstract mathematical structures but do need, in their work, to understand very well how to use their mathematical results in order to help others understand the real world ... people like statisticians ... are on the whole better-trained to make this distinction. And typically it is an essential part of their standard training. But physicists don't learn these simple things.
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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby Joy Christian » Sun Sep 22, 2019 8:16 am

gill1109 wrote:
I'm afraid that I would expect the response to be embarrassment. Or laughter. People will stop listening and wish they had never come.

That sounds like a response of closed-minded religious fundamentalists. If that is the kind of people you are going to invite to the symposium, then there is no point in my attending it.

gill1109 wrote:
I have read it and commented on it in the past and I have nothing new to say. His objection to Bell has been previously put forward by a small minority of other respectable but I think badly mistaken physicists. It has been discussed so many times in the past, by so many people. Many of them much more eloquent than me. How anyone could imagine that John Bell could be so stupid as to make such a stupid mistake, just makes my mind boggle.

Of course, it is weird that otherwise highly intelligent persons do, repeatedly, come up with something like this. I think that such people have difficulty in distinguishing the mathematical objects in mathematical theories from what we think of them as representing in the real world. It seems to me a common failure among those trained as physicists, for whom mathematics is just the language with which they talk about the real world, so they somewhat naturally confuse the *model* and the *reality*. I think that people who work more with fairly abstract mathematical structures but do need, in their work, to understand very well how to use their mathematical results in order to help others understand the real world ... people like statisticians ... are on the whole better-trained to make this distinction. And typically it is an essential part of their standard training. But physicists don't learn these simple things.

The above comments have no scientific contents whatsoever. Please either provide a clear scientific refutation of my argument without waffling, or accept that it refutes Bell's claim.

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Re: Between Joy Christian and Richard Gill: The middle way?

Postby minkwe » Sun Sep 22, 2019 11:17 am

Heinera wrote:Absolutely not. This only demonstrates your own confusion regarding the proof. There is not even any time variable in Bell's derivation. The only requirement is that the factorization mandates that the value of lambda is the same in the two terms (or approximately the same, since we can assume almost everywhere continuity)

Please for your own sake, read this: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=181#p4933 and the first post in that thread.
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