Why quantum mechanics is an “embarrassment” to science

[GDNordley]

39. That seems like a very conservative view

Greetings, mindwalker.

I seem to have stepped in it. I don't remember the conversation or the article and possibly miss spoke. There's no question in my mind that entanglement, at least in the sense of a persistent correlation of separated quantum pairs, actually happens; that's been pretty well observed. But there is controversy on whether one can actually transmit causal information "instantly" (in what frame of reference?) by "observing" distant entangled particles. Bell's inequality seems a solid enough predictor of statistical measurements, as far as I know, but there are interpretation issues (possible the subject of the article?) and a number of hoops to go through before using that to justify FTL or time-reversed communications. I would rather leave that discussion to experts in the field, like John Cramer. (I find John's "transactional" interpretation attractive from a number of respects, but I'm not sure I would call that "conservative"!)

What I AM very confident of is that FTL by any means is time travel (one only needs algebra to demonstrate that). The mathematical representation of that is the Lorentz transformation. GPS, deep space communications, and so on depend on it. The readings of "clocks" at distant locations are predicted by the transformation equations, and have proved very accurate over a very wide range of relative velocities with a wide range of relative velocities, observations and measurement techniques. This is called "Lorentz invariance" and is a hard-won empirical law of nature, not a theoretical construct. (Einstein showed one could derive the equations from the observation that the speed of light is the same when measured in any frame of reference, but the empirical equations already existed; hence it isn't called the Einstein transformation.) Lorentz invariance is logically inconsistent with an absolute time reference; i.e., the same event would have to have different time coordinates.

--Best, Gerald