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Fixed!

7 majo 2012, 06.28

Well, one hopes it’s fixed. :) If anyone can actually read it and would check for more errors, much appreciated: https://bytebucket.org/chemoelectric/pure-geomalg/wiki/nonloco_scribbles.xml

There have been the usual typos and so forth, as well.

I avoided the usual notational confusion by calling the probability of coincidence simply P^coincidence :)

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that is to say

7 majo 2012, 01.49

I don’t have my bell disproof quite right, yet. It’s too bad the physicists tend not to spell out the details, but more or less rely on a presumed prior knowledge of electromagnetic wave theory. It ends up with me having to work out details, and probably with a lot of readers, even physicists, going ‘Huh?’

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Argh

7 majo 2012, 01.45

I did the equivalent of turning in my test without the last minute check that catches the major oversight that can be corrected before time is up if you just hold onto the test for longer.

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Clarifying the arguments

6 majo 2012, 22.14

I have been clarifying the presentation at https://bytebucket.org/chemoelectric/pure-geomalg/wiki/nonloco_scribbles.xml

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My disproof is done

6 majo 2012, 01.36

My disproof of the basis for ‘quantum non-locality’ is complete, though not fully discussed, as it were: <link>
The joint probability result is the one that is supposed to be impossible without spooky superluminal action at a distance, but here it operates in an ordinary manner (if ‘moving tangent vectors’ can be considered ordinary objects). To make the counterproof even more devastating, the ‘correlations’ are between two experimental runs on the same apparatus.

To reproduce the error made by the orthodoxy, instead of doing an integration over theta, you would do a double integration over two different variables, one for each cosine-square in the integrand. This error is what is ‘justified’ by claiming it ‘encodes’ ‘locality’.

It’s absolutely astonishing what theoretical physics has become, but then it seems less so when I consider how overblown the reputation of physicists is in our society. We would actually expect such incompetence and orthodoxy in many other academic fields.

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While barking up a wrong tree

29 aprilo 2012, 11.00

While barking up a wrong tree
I noticed something different
Between ‘modern probability theory’
And ‘calculus of plausible inference’.

Suppose you want to make a robot.
Suppose you want it free of prejudice.
Then you must make that robot
So it never adds a new assumption.

It happens often that some quantity
Shows up in your expressions
But what you know about that quantity
Amounts to less than a hill of beans.

A robot, faced with this situation,
And programmed according to the ‘moderns’,
Must come to you for more instructions,
To be given a density for the quantity.

The human must make a declaration,
‘Assume that X is uniformly distributed’,
Which the robot on its own cannot do,
Because it never makes assumptions.

In calculus of plausible inference, though,
The robots are commanded as follows:
‘You must never neglect what you know,
And you must never disagree with your fellow.’

Thus the robot must choose a density
That every other robot would have chosen,
Which always gives the same conclusion,
No matter how you integrate, etc.

Of course it ends up the same function,
Just forced by logic instead of assumed,
A little weightier in human judgment,
And keeping robots off our lazy backs.

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This would help explain A LOT

28 aprilo 2012, 17.45

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism

A number of physicists began to advocate vitalism. Niels Bohr was one of the first to suggest that special laws not found in inanimate matter might operate in organisms. He thought of these laws as analogous to the laws of physics except for their being restricted to organisms. Erwin Schrödinger supported similar ideas, as well as the physicists Walter M. Elsasser and Eugene Wigner.^[25]

Physicists by day, superstitious kooks by night.

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I have hidden yesterday's posting. Here is why.

27 aprilo 2012, 08.07

 I have a constant obsession that I will drop dead while working on a problem and not finish it. This leads to a compulsion to post whatever half-baked level of thought I have at the moment, so at least that won’t be lost. It used to be much worse.

That this is due to my fear of leaving an unfinished problem, due to death, is a clarifying insight after many years of self-observation. By that I mean this explanation for the compulsion may actually be correct.

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Non-loco scribbles

25 aprilo 2012, 17.53

See https://bytebucket.org/chemoelectric/pure-geomalg/wiki/nonloco_scribbles.xml

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Misfortune

24 aprilo 2012, 22.13

Unfortunately, if I get this right, I still won’t write a paper, due to my disability. I’ll just make a summary available to people who can write papers. We could use more laypeople writing scientific papers, though.

The difficult part, which I have not seen done by anyone, is how to make correlation due to phase more intuitive without forcing the reader to revert to the mind-picture of a classical field. Little known may be that it is insufficient to produce the right numbers; you must convince with geometry. This goes against the romantic picture of ‘self-correcting’ science; the force of your argument depends on how you speak.

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My brain pain, and my back pain

24 aprilo 2012, 21.55

Hofer’s argument in geometric algebra can be more intuitively given in the conformal model of space and by using coordinate systems less. Also his presentation uses questionable (though probably not uncommon) GA terminology and has at least two ‘shortcuts’ given without explanation. I plan to reformulate, as soon as I figure out one or two things. Well, really, it’s how best to fill in one of those shortcuts.

Meanwhile I have back spasm. Not fun.

On the other hand, the burn on my arm seems to be healing.

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Feynman

24 aprilo 2012, 03.29

BTW I imagine the late Dr. Feynman as one of the majority of physicists who don’t understand QM but also don’t care enough to worry about it. I saw some of his lecture statements today and they were of the ‘I don’t understand this and don’t think anyone does’ variety, without any ideology laden upon that. Also his own contributions to physics are renowned for their contrived character and desire mainly to get the answer as easily as possible, from what I have read.

As so often is the case, it’s the philosophers we really have to worry about. (For this dispute, their main technique is Special Pleading. I think d’Espagnat was illustrating the method at its finest, though for some reason he wrote in florid free verse.)

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Hypothesis confirmed

23 aprilo 2012, 22.51

I was curious to verify my prediction that the author of the postmodern poetry at http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0302167 would be a kook, and was not disappointed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_d%27Espagnat

What I did not predict was that he would be a kook of a little stature, who has even been published in Supersticious American.

( :) I unsubbed from Scientific American many years ago, having tired of its ‘balanced journalism’, ‘he said, she said’. Have they reformed, or by now are they publishing ‘Intelligent Design’ articles to balance out the paleontology reports?)

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Surprise, surprise!

23 aprilo 2012, 19.47

I had been trying to remember who it was, and when I found him again (http://www.liv.ac.uk/~whofer/) it turned out he too recently used geometric algebra to make an argument against ‘non-locality’.

This actually shouldn’t surprise me, even though it does; geometric algebra is increasingly popular in physics as a substitute for the vector algebra we used when I was in school. (Whether GA has made inroads in the electromagnetic engineering field [pun intended] I do not know.)

Looking over Joy Christian’s paper, I see she seems to give Bell’s ambiguous notations a different reading that IMO does not apply to his Lyons-Lille example, so IMO probably she is reading them incorrectly, or alternatively the Lyons-Lille example was a poorly devised analog for his argument about EPR. (Bell wrote several papers, sometimes using very poor notation.) But that would merely change where the math error manifests, given that no matter how you read Bell he arrives at the wrong result. She’s going to argue (I peeked ahead) that he assumed the products of functions of the ‘hidden variables’ in the ‘local’ theory had to be commutative.

Hofer’s article looks more interesting, because it seems he’s actually claiming something like a new interpretation for the quantum mechanics; he seems to be blaming Bell’s error on discounting a phase component (in the ‘local realistic’ case) because in QM it was represented by imaginary numbers. In geometric algebra it can be represented by real numbers and given a visualizable geometric interpretation.

Wish me luck.

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A disproof of Bell's conclusion by (counter)example that I ought to read

23 aprilo 2012, 18.17

See http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0703179.  The math in it is geometric algebra, which I happen to be working with at the moment anyway, so it is fresh in my mind. Therefore, it is a good time for me to read this paper, especially as I am in a programming rut (partly due to migraine).

One type of response to this kind of argument is that it doesn’t strive to provide a model for that actual experiment. This response is entirely irrelevant, though it is understandable how it would appeal to physicists. If you write a simulation, for instance, it is necessary not only that the simulation disprove the argument, but that it look as much like the published experiments as possible. Thus we have papers like this one: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105034

(An error in application of Bayes’ rule is just one of the ways the problem can be characterized, and happens to be the first on record and probably the one most accessible to non-specialists. Lots of people know probability theory, and some of them actually trust it to give the right answers if you strictly follow its rules.)