Polarization is weird, definitely

John K Clark (johnkc@well.com)
Mon, 28 Apr 1997 22:17:18 -0700 (PDT)


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Damien Broderick <damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au> Wrote:

>`And always has been', as I understand it, is the *common-sense
>error* in interpreting QT. Actually the state is not fixed *until*
>the interaction

That's the Copenhagen interpretation, it's pretty much consistent with
observation but certainly not the only interpretation that is. In the 30's
and 40's it was the only game in town, it has lost a lot of steam since then
but it's still a leading contender. When the change happened is debatable,
but In any interpretation something I did changed a photon 10 billion light
years away and whatever transferred this change contained neither energy nor
information and must have moved faster than light.

>A different relativistic reference frame can show that your distant
>pal was the one who `first' set the polariser, entraining the result
>you see here and now. Without simultaneity, traditional causality
>vanishes.

True. What Einstein tells us is that event A could happen before event B in
one frame of reference and event B could happen before event A in another
frame of reference and both viewpoints are equally valid. He also tells us
that the space-time distance between any two events is exactly the same in
any frame of reference. In my example I used the viewpoint that my experiment
changed my friend's experiment 2 billion light years away, and it was a
perfectly valid viewpoint. Equally valid would be the idea that my friend's
experiment changed my experiment 2 billion light years away.

>Strange world.

Very True.

John K Clark johnkc@well.com

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