Hi Richard
so Alice’s measurement setting is communicated by a positron travelling backwards in time from Alice’s detector to the source, where it is communicated to an electron travelling forwards in time to Bob’s detector? And of course the same thing happens, exchanging Alice and Bob?
Yes and yes. But a measurement setting cannot be communicated by a single positron to a single electron. Single particles communicate entanglement information which is important but not sufficient to give the Bell correlation. The Bell correlation is achieved by beams of particles being polarised. Aggregating all the individual entanglements enforces the electron beam to be polarised in the direction of the positron measurement setting.
(Can you do it in a way which treats Alice and Bob the same way???)
Yes. There are two incoming beams of positrons. Just re-run my explanation for Alice and Bob while switching their names. It is quite symmetrical wrt Alice and Bob. There are two sets of Malus calculations each giving a 2x1 results table. One 2x1 table for Alice's positrons and one 2x1 table for Bob's positrons. Join the two 2x1 tables together and you get a Bell 2x2 table of results.
Bell’s *theorem* does apply. You do not violate locality or realism, but you use “conspiracy”. You use time travel to communicate the future at one place to the past at another.
OK, almost, but conspiracy seems to be an inappropriate and ugly word in this context. Communication is definitely present. And communication is made in 'the present' at the time when both particle pairs are at the source. So I am not clear that the future is being communicated to the past. 'The present' is being communicated to 'the present' at the Source. It just so happens that the two particles are travelling in opposite time directions.
Sure it can be made mathematically exact and I suggest mathematically isomorphic to the maths of QM, though I fear not in a way which treats Alice and Bob identically.
Yes, I have it mathematically exact as a - cos theta correlation, and catering for all the particles in the experiment, and treating Alice and Bob equally.
I made two solutions. The first was by using only Malus's Law for the beams. So that is a classical/ statistical solution and not a local hidden variable solution. But it does give a correlation of - cos theta. So that did not involve QM at all, at least not explicitly.
My second solution was an event-by-event simulation of the experiment and I focused on replicating Malus's Law [intensity of a beam is proportional to cos^2 theta], particle at a time. (As the Malus calculations of intensity are exactly dual to the Bell correlation calculations.)
I could not, of course, make a completely sound local hidden variables solution because of the measurement problem. Even (linear) QM does not solve the (non-linear) measurement problem. The measurement problem is why counterfactual definiteness cannot be used in simulating a table of Bell results. This is like chaos theory when you run an almost identical calculation twice and get different results.
But, adding some uncertainty/statistics allowed the correct results to be obtained. Incidentally, to run this simulation I derived the form of distribution of local hidden variables in a polarised beam. This is a static statistical distribution whereas the physical hidden variables are dynamically occupying the distribution but not changing its static envelope. So I achieved the correct results based on a static distribution but I know that in reality the individual particle measurements are not knowable because of dynamism.
So you can say it is an “explanation” of the physical phenomenon we are talking about. I don’t think it is an explanation. It seems to me more like a cute (and very clever) math conjuring trick.
My distribution of local hidden variables in a polarised beam was obtained maybe using cute maths but I do not recognise 'cute math conjuring trick' as playing any other part of my work. Further, the easiest solution is a classical statistical solution based on a 200 year old physics formula which does even not use hidden variables.
Maths tricks were not on my agenda. I had been for a few years comparing Malus and Bell formulae and realising they were dual approaches using beam intensities (Malus and Bell) to form correlations (Bell only). But something was missing. The next step was Jay writing that maybe neutrinos have negative mass and could therefore form an alternative explanation of Dark Matter. I followed that up and wrote a paper suggesting that negative mass could explain Dark Matter and Dark Energy (see also Farnes). Then I suggested that antiparticles might have negative mass. That set me thinking about antiparticles maybe travelling backwards in time (just as they appear to do in a Feynman diagram). That was a short step away from visualising a Bell experiment in a Feynman diagram with the positrons travelling backwards from Alice to the source. I have no interest in Bell's Theorem other than as a stepping stone to better understand the physics. But it has been a good tool to make one realise that something in the current physics explanations are wrong.
Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2020 11:22 pm
. If you would like to discuss it please start a new topic! Two page papers are the best)