Quantum weirdness: entanglement study wins Nobel (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 25, 2022, 23:18 (760 days ago) @ David Turell

Just this year Bell's inequality proven:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-beauty-at-the-heart-of-a-spooky-mystery/...

"For decades, the debate over entanglement was seen as purely philosophical, that is, experimentally unresolvable. Then in 1964, John Bell presented a mathematical argument that turned philosophy into physics. If your model of entanglement is based on locality and realism, Bell showed, it will produce results that differ, statistically, from those of quantum mechanics. This difference is called Bell’s inequality.

"John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger put Bell’s theorem to the test, performing experiments on entangled photons and other particles. Their research has confirmed that the predictions of quantum mechanics hold up. The experiments dash the hopes of Einstein and others that causes and effects propagate in an orderly fashion, and that things have specific properties when we don’t look at them.

"John Bell died in 1990, too early to see his ideas fully vindicated—or to share the Nobel Prize, which is not given posthumously. But he left behind a collection of influential papers, collected under the title Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. Ironically, quantum theorists cite Bell’s utterances like scripture, even though his own views seem fluid, unsettled, riddled with self-doubt. He even disses his own inequality theorem, suggesting that “what is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.” Bell’s theorem is an impossibility proof.

***

"Bell once said that quantum mechanics “carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction.” He, like Einstein, seemed to hope that quantum mechanics would yield to a more sensible theory, ideally one that restores locality, realism and certainty to physics. My guess is that if we find such a theory, it will eventually turn out to be mysterious in its own way. The mystery might be unlike our quantum mystery, but it will still be a mystery, which cuts through our habituation and forces us to pay attention to the weird, weird world."

Comment: I agree. I think the weirdness is real and here to stay.