latest on killing copenhagen interpretation via fluid dynamics

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⭐ ❗ 💡 😎 😮 ❤ hi all. bohr was transfixed by so-called "complementarity"; its said schroedingers cat is both alive and dead, and curiosity killed the cat. wikipedia states[n6]

In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the wave function is the most complete description that can be given of a physical system.

but wait, if that is against inquiring deeper, isnt that nearly an anti-curiosity-investigation-research position/ pov? and isnt anti-curiosity-investigation-research nearly anti-science? 😮

copenhagen interpretation is sometimes referred to as the shut up and calculate ideology by questioners/ challengers/ critics in a statement originating with one of them, Mermin, an adept popsci writer and fan of Bells work. here is a famous quote that sounds like a near restatement of the copenhagen interpretation by Feynman:

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will get “down the drain”, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

…

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

now how about a somewhat radical quote/ response from Daniel Sank, Phd working for Google QM labs?

The other day someone from the WSJ asked me to explain why quantum mechanics is weird.

I went off on a rather well-reasoned and carefully articulated rant about how it’s not weird and that people only say that to sound cool.

I even went so far as to say that Feynman’s famous statement that {anyone who thinks they understand quantum mechanics is wrong} is destructive, stupid, and should not be repeated.

whoa, strong words there! however maybe somewhat unexpectedly, both somewhat agree/ disagree! yet, alas, somehow think DS is not really intending to challenge the copenhagen interpretation with his dramatic excoriation of feynman!* DS is also on the (chat) record as averse to/ strongly rejecting “alternative interpretations”. which to me is not really scientific, where to me conceptual evolution/ scientific progress inherently entails/ involves never stopping/ ceasing questioning how can it be like that?

oh, coincidentally right around writing all this, just ran into another striking quote by John Rennie a very high ranking member of physics stack exchange on the “1st Law,” with high ranking mod ACuriousMind immediately agreeing:

no physicist shall discuss interpretations of quantum mechanics or by inaction allow interpretations of quantum mechanics to be discussed.

lol and now this seems to reach/ degenerate to the absurd levels of Epimenides paradox when one asks the simple question, are Bohr/ Heisenberg, the founders of the Copenhagen interpretation, physicists? …so is this physics or fight club? 😮 o_O 🙄

* further search jujitsu by me, managed to turn up another striking quote by DS expressly rejecting Copenhagen interpretation… more strong words!

Listen to me very closely: I am a quantum computing professional and I think the Copenhagen interpretation is not even self-consistent and therefore entirely inadmissible as a theory of Nature.

and to finish on a different note, think this captures something relevant/ accurate/ typically unspoken “between the lines” by mod ACuriousMind, a sort of “non-interpretation” approach at least )( admitted openly/ candidly/ honestly:

Of those named, Copenhagen is the most popular, but my impression is that a significant number of people actually doing quantum physics every day share my personal disdain for all the squabbles around “interpretations”.

(so then, bottom line/ in conclusion… Copenhagen and/ or interpretations as taboo, that which shall not be named? aka scientific omerta, “code of silence”) 😳 😮 🙄

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

have been collecting physics links on a diverse set of topics that are not unified yet but think will someday be unified. the general area is now sometimes known as Pilot Wave Hydrodynamics (PWH) also aka/ known as “oil drop dynamics experiments”. the Bohmian pilot wave was speculated on for many decades, and soliton theory combined with new experimental findings has given rise to a new reality, science, and growing research area/ program/ paradigm! but it exists alongside in a tension right now with “standard” quantum mechanics.

the stage has been set! its two large plates shearing against each other. when will the inevitable top/ pivotal showdown/ confrontation/ conflict/ earthquake occur? think its just a matter of time! (admittedly 1 is far much smaller than the other right now, but relatively shortly, predict that will flip-flop.) my feeling/ estimate/ prediction is there is at least 1 nobel to be won in the next 5-10 yrs in this area, and several in store over several decades!* signifying/ corresponding with an imminent genuine physics paradigm shift/ revolution in the 21st century at least on the scale of QM in the 20th.

* 😳 o_O (note, however, some fineprint/ hedging/ reality check on this superficially bold-appearing claim! nobels are clearly not comprehensive/ thorough/ totally evenhanded, eg Einstein did not win one for relativity! also, they are often awarded up to decades after the date of the actual accomplishment! therefore to thoroughly invalidate the claim might take decades!)

would like to write a comprehensive survey based on several years of juicy links but thats a herculean task. even just collecting/ writing up the latest batch is a formidable task. these are some of the big highlights for me.

there are a lot of boundary-pushing experiments in qm lately.[a]

[a1][a2] are very impressive experiments by Gilet that naturally give rise to quantum like statistics. these remind me a lot of electron cloud-like patterns in 2d. has anyone thought of trying to correlate these with electron cloud/ orbital equations/ energy levels? [a13] is a reproduction of the classic dual slit experiment. Feynman asserted this was the main mystery of quantum mechanics, but its now replicated with classical but emergent fluid mechanical behavior and is the basic experiment cited by Veritasium in his now famous viral video with hundreds of thousands of views & reactions all over cyberspace.[o5][o6] [a15] is a writeup in Nature that challenges the copenhagen interpretation based on PWH. and hey if that isnt enough, how about all the awesome seeing-is-believing videos now circulating on youtube?[m]

“We were told that such effects cannot happen classically, and here we are, showing that they do.” —Couder [a15]

there are repeated claims by different groups about “measuring the wavefunction”[a8][a9][a12] or that the “wavefunction is real”, have cited some of these in previous blogs. would like to survey this area, it seems nobody has written a definitive overview yet and theres quite a bit of different results to cite. similarly, measuring “lost information” that can be “recovered” from measurements.[a7] solitons show up in cutting edge experiments.[a18] fluid dynamics shows up in particle dynamics simulations.[a20]

it looks like we need a new interpretation of space itself.[b] maybe a new bumper sticker slogan?

SPACE IS FLUID!™

☯️ 💡 or how about this for a zen koan on the sound of one hand clapping? (or the state between alive and dead?)

the difference between SPACE and PARTICLES is only… DENSITY!

it seems quite obvious to me for years, space itself can deform/ oscillate. all the physics theories point to this, but so far physicists have not been able to unify the different povs. think a grand unification is in the air, near at hand.

there are other cracks in quantum mechanics from bell experiments.[c] (one might say, “cracks in the edifice, glimmers on the horizon.”) on one hand you hear increasingly strident/ hyperbolic claims that all remaining loopholes have been closed or that QM nonlocality has been verified with 600 light-year old starlight, to 30 or more sigmas, or odds one in a billion against.[c4][c6][c8][c9][c13] (huh! “whistling past the graveyard,” anyone? very solid/ impressive, but maybe barking up the wrong tree, “drunk” searching for keys under the lamppost, or, simply, getting carried away/ missing the point?)

because, whereas, concurrent/ interspersed on the opposite side there are claims that the bell test cannot truly measure nonlocality in theory[c1][c7][c10][c11] or even experimentally with special classical optical setups.[c2][c3][c5] kind of like yin vs yang eh? have long advocated one possible direction to explore is numerical simulations.[c12]

physics user heather is talking about doing her own Bell setup. resorted/ reorganized my links on this topic & that was some of the trigger for this post (building on links collected over many years, and some last posted early 2015). it would be really fantastic if DIY hobbyists started to play with QM and that is indeed the case, cost however is one of the main obstacles. heather found this amazing book Exploring QM through Hands On Projects by the Prutchis who also have a web site/ blog.[h]

there is a long history of undergraduate bell experiments now about 1½ decade old going back to Dehlinger/ Mitchell in the early 2000s at Reed college,[e] however even in all that time theyre still relatively rare/ scattered. wouldnt it be cool if someone came out with a kit? 💡

there were some later experiments by Galvez at colgate college.[j] Galvez is highly involved in advocating/ promoting/ spreading the experiments to other colleges.[j5] another notable book is QM: Theory and Experiment by Beck at Whitman that has complete quantum theory teaching contents along with detailed experimental setups at the end.[f][f2]

more recently Lukishova at Rochester has introduced very many undergraduates to the experiments, almost “mass scale”.[g] there are other scattered cases at Oberlin.[i] quite notably Galvez has an equipment list and his cost for a bell experiment is around $20K.[j6] it would be very interesting to see what the “cheapest” bell experiment possible is. notably Beck also has a parts list.[f1] [d3] was an attempt over 10 weeks that did not finish, showing the underlying intricacy/ challenge. google also turns up cases at Harvey Mudd[d1] and Max Plank inst.[d2]

overall for Big Changes to come, the Copenhagen interpretation must be directly challenged and overturned.[k] understatment: it is not easy to overturn a literal century of crystallized thinking bordering on dogma! but one can see some questions arising eg by authorities such Weinberg.[k4] this is mostly based on the supposed nonreconciliation between QM and GR, but it seems to be just a matter of time before top QM authorities start to take PWH more seriously.

a closely related area studied for decades are oscillons, but this is mostly moving along a different research track.[l]

the soliton/ PWH hypothesis is being pushed fwd by at least two major dedicated websites.[o1][o2]

am working on classical wave analogies and dont quite have it figured out yet but am scrounging bits and pieces together, connecting dots.[n] it doesnt help that almost nobody has worked in this area probably due to the Copenhagen interpretation being interpreted as a commandment, “Thou Shalt Not…” suspect that the product of wavefunctions for “noninteracting particles” is a special bridge theorem between quantum and classical understanding.[n7] feel like its on the tip of my tongue or the edge of my keyboard but havent nailed down the math yet. mathematically it seems to be a case of the harmonic addition thm generalized to a sum of n (same frequency) harmonic waves. also need to learn more about Koopman-von Neumann theory which comes close to a comprehensive classical pov on QM. (thx AFT!)

⭐ ❗ 💡 😮 😀 another highlight from recent months, (“cyber-“) met Jarek Duda after secret cited his paper on Bells thm and had a nice extended chat with him. he has an awesome resume (Phd physics and CS!) and is a vocal proponent of the soliton model, incl for the electron, is a big fan of Couder, and attended/ presented poster at the Emergent QM conference 2011 cited awhile back in this blog and attended a recent soliton conference.[o4]

😳 😡 👿 his reasonable question on the topic was already vaporized without trace on physics stack exchange, lol, hope he at least saved a screenshot! oh yeah doncha luv stackexchange, way to go mods, users, and management! viva la dogma groupthink conventional wisdom

but are these really radical ideas? it seems we only need to go full circle back to the founders of QM. Duda points to this 2008 paper A Search for the de Broglie Particle Internal Clock by Means of Electron Channeling by Catillon et al as evidence for the conjectured de Broglie Zitterbewegung which acc to wikipedia has never been observed in a free relativistic particle, hmmm… ❓ 🙄

oh ofc in his bell paper he refers to 4d jello… sound familiar?! ❗ 😮 😀

💡 ⭐ ❗ ❤ so why is there so much controversy, so many apparently contradictory claims? isnt physics/ science supposed to achieve consistency/ consensus through systematic theory and experiment? if you ask me, what is needed is some kind of tabletop experiment that disproves the copenhagen interpretation. hey, really, how hard can it be? 😮 😳

which reminds me of a quote from the Nature article about the “simplicity” of the Fedrizzi et al experiment to test the “reality of the wavefunction”:

“It’s really impressive that the team was able to address a profound issue, with what’s actually a very simple experiment,” says Andrea Alberti, a physicist at the University of Bonn in Germany.[a15]

a. boundary pushing
b. space
c. bell
d. setup
e. Dehlinger/ Reed
f. Beck/ Whitman
g. Lukishova/ Rochester
h. Prutchi
i. Oberlin
j. Galvez/ Colgate
k. interpretation
l. oscillon
m. videos
n. analogy
o. waves/ solitons

 

1 thought on “latest on killing copenhagen interpretation via fluid dynamics”

  1. Karma Peny

    Just because we cannot figure out how a rabbit appears in a hat, it does not mean it therefore must have materialised out of nowhere. It just means that one or more of our assumptions was wrong (we may have assumed a normal hat, a normal table etc.)

    In Bell test experiments, we create the illusion ourselves by only choosing coincidence results and by ignoring the rest. We are performing the trick and fooling ourselves at the same time!

    With Bell test experiments, it is assumed that we can ignore cases of ‘detected at one side’. This is the most obvious mistake. A fairly simple Hidden Variable Theory can predict pretty much the same results as QM but in order to do this it requires there to be some one-sided detections.

    Some people think that a detection-based HVT is the same as the fair sampling loophole, but it is nothing like it. For example, Marissa Giustina used a statistical CH-Eberhard inequality that applies to a non-maximally entangled state to prove that the probability of a fluke result is so small that its practically negligible. But a detection-based HVT does not need to rely on flukes.

    It is claimed that Bell tests using trapped ions defeats HVT by having a very high detection rate. But the truth is that the detection method used is highly dubious. Their results are a series of counts, and they attach one of three meanings to each count (‘two down’, ‘1 up, 1 down’ or ‘two up’) after collecting the results. They do this in a way to make it look like there were no cases of missed detections. They end up with a relatively small violation of Bell’s inequality that can easily be explained by HVT.

    As I explain in my new YouTube video called “Entanglement & Bell Test Experiments: A Local Hidden Variable Solution (URL=https://youtu.be/yOtsEgbg1-s), no Bell test experiment result has ever been performed that can beat local hidden variable theory.

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