Posted: Jun 04, 2011 9:37 pm
Evolving wrote:Unless this is about interpretation: the realism debate. Are they saying that their averaging calculations show that each particle is, in fact, passing through just one slit, i.e. the system has non-probabilistic qualities, independently of whether they are measured? Which would be the EPR claim that was disproved by Bell (involving, indeed, entangled particles, in that case).
Yes it is about interpretation, but such interpretations can play pivotal roles in more complete theories, as well as inventing applications that are not so obvious and cannot be intuitively dreamed up prior to running the math on a situation that has not been thought of yet.
Whether or not EPR was disproved by Bell hinges on whether you accept the *operational* meaning of causality defined in EPR. To articulate the difference between a definition and an *operational* definition consider an experiment that demonstrates that event A empirically leads to event B. Then did A cause B or did a cause C cause A then B. If C caused A then B then a third observer in a different frame that sees B then A is not the reversal of causality that the assumption that A caused B would make it seem to be.
The counterfactuals the Bell's theorem hinges upon to claim a "proof" is exquisitely dependent on the assumptions of specifically what caused what, while the measurement problem dictates that we cannot know what causal factors are involved between measurement A and measurement B. You cannot factually know what you cannot see, and between measurements you *by definition* do not see what is happening.
Nice piece of work in that paper.