The is Entanglement Real Question

[Royal]

Trying to digest this article the best I can.

Is entanglement real or is there a super-deterministic cosmic conspiracy?
Researchers use quasars to kill off the last of the quantum hidden variables.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/ ... onspiracy/

Entanglement is one of the stranger aspects of quantum mechanics. Once two particles are entangled, you can separate them by any distance, and measurements of one will instantly set the state of the second.

So I'm in the Kitchen getting a drink and wondering about the first opening comment on this article. I think "don't make it shitty or hacky"...then I found what to say: "That is where my brain starts to turn off"...

as I return to the laptop, it shuts off...

Now I'm thinking ...Booya instant entanglement. Problem solved. Why read the article...

Because this behavior is so weird, researchers have been trying to find out if there might be some classical behavior going on that is masquerading as quantum physics. One possibility they've considered is that the detectors are interacting with quantum systems in a hidden way to fool us into thinking entanglement is real. Admittedly it's an unlikely proposition, but one that is difficult to dismiss entirely.

That is where my brain turns off...

It may be that we're limited to making only certain measurements because there is some sort of cryptic information exchange between particles and the devices measuring them. If this is the case, then human researchers have far less choice than they think they have when it comes to performing experiments. One way to test this is to arrange an entanglement experiment that will produce different outcomes based on whether these hidden interactions exist or not.

SO scientists are contemplating there is a hidden variable that tricks us into thinking entanglement is real. That would be weirder than the entanglement itself right?

[Pigeon]

I thought they were past the hidden variable idea. Maybe they are revisiting it. There is always the possibility that the human mind cannot understand the complete universe. It might be an exercise in futility.

I often think people look at thought and decisions about UFOs in human terms which might be a short coming. Why would they all think like we do.

[Pigeon]

Since we are part of the universe, can we know the complete universe? Maybe we cannot. Or maybe we only are measuring and postulating on part of it and do not know that we are.

[Royal]

SO you're saying we need to use our imagination to summon a higher intelligence to show us how incomplete our physical universe is?

[Pigeon]

I don't know if that would work. But then there is the possibility that what we think becomes reality, so could be. But since it would already exist then it would have been due to some mind(s).

If it has something to do with different realities or universes, we might not be about the know and measure it. We see the effect but do not know the source. I suppose we could get an understanding of the effect without knowledge of what causes it.

[Pigeon]

Experiments have definitively demonstrated entanglement, and ruled out any kind of slower-than-light communication between two separated objects. The standard explanation for this behavior involves what's called nonlocality: the idea that the two objects are actually still a single quantum system, even though they may be far apart. That idea is uncomfortable to many people (including most famously Albert Einstein), but it preserves the principle of relativity, which states in part that no information can travel faster than light.

To get around nonlocality, several ideas have been proposed over the decades. Many of these fall into the category of hidden variables, wherein quantum systems have physical properties (beyond the standard quantities like position, momentum, and spin) that are not directly accessible to experiment. In entangled systems, the hidden variables could be responsible for transferring state information from one particle to the other, producing measurements that appear coordinated. Since these hidden variables are not accessible to experimenters, they can't be used for communication. Relativity is preserved.

Hidden variable theories involving slower-than-light transfer of state information are already ruled out by the experiments that exclude more ordinary communication. Some modern variations combine hidden variables with full nonlocality, allowing for instantaneous transfer of internal state information. But could non-instantaneous, faster-than-light hidden variables theories still work?

Link

This is where the using quasars in the OP enter the picture, I do believe.

[Royal]

That provides a measure of independence for entanglement tests: if any hidden interactions exist, then detectors configured via quasar would produce different results than detectors configured by ordinary randomization procedures.

[Royal]

Welcome To The Entanglement

It isn't just the world of physics that has come to seem so exceedingly strange — at the level of the quantum and also that of the multiverse — but consciousness itself. We human beings seem to resist inclusion in a uniform, coherent conception of reality. How is it that human experience arises from the sorts of goings-on quantum physics teaches us, finally, that we are?

It's not just that the more we know, the more we realize how much more there is to know. It's that the more we know, the less we seem to understand.

An earlier generation, before Galileo and Newton and Descartes, might have taken it for granted that there are realities — life, morality, freedom, God — that are simply beyond our comprehension.

But since the new age of science, that sort of modesty has been in shorter supply. No where else is that clearer than in the domain of technology. What greater proof that we can understand and master reality than our ability, for example, to build a rocket, shoot it into space and hit the moon?

The philosopher Daniel Dennett argued in the 1970s that artificial intelligence provided a valuable philosophical and experimental framework for studying what it is to have a mind. By trying to build it, we can better understand it.

I have long suspected that if we did ever manage to build a genuinely artificial intelligence, we wouldn't understand its workings. It would be as complicated, and as messy, and as shaped by a history and by culture, as we are ourselves.

This brings us to the curious and delightful theme of Arbesman's book. We have entered the Entanglement — the phrase is due to computer scientist Danny Hillis — an era in which our technologies themselves are so complex as to exceed what any of us can really grasp. It used to be thought that a "Renaissance Man" could know everything that was known. If Arbesman is right, no person alive today can even really understand everything that we human beings make.

The book is full of examples from the recent history of technology: from "correctly functioning" medical equipment administering lethal doses of radiation, to software instabilities wreaking havoc with global financial markets, to self-accelerating Toyotas.

We are like map-makers (a la Borges) whose maps are so complicated that we get lost in them; we make products that are no less difficult to grasp than the world for the sake of whose mastery and comprehension we make them in the first place.

There has been much discussion of the "Singularity": The supposed point in time when our own machines get smarter than us and find that they can make ever more improved versions of themselves without us. It's debatable whether we'll reach this point.

But it's plausible, as Arbesman explains, that we are already well embedded in the Entanglement. Here, the problem is not machines that are too smart, but the need to recognize that we are not as smart as we think we are.

Is it possible to thrive in the Entanglement? Arbesman's prescription is a return to the intellectual modesty of an earlier time, together with a deeper appreciation of the sources of the new complexity.

But is that enough?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn ... -detector/

[Pigeon]

A simulation explains much or all of it.