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Logical Bias

8/18/2019

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Bias being a tendency to shift current in a certain direction electronically, or for fabric to lie in a certain way haberdasherally, in terms of human relations it's described by the online dictionary as, "inclination or prejudice for or against one person or group, especially in a way considered to be unfair." An overview of bias and how it becomes embedded lies behind the picture looking suspiciously like a Fibonnaci spiral.
When it comes to science, and quantum physics in particular, we have a situation wherein one group of people (those who write and understand equations, let's call them the EQ) are biased against another group of people (those who neither write nor understand equations, the Non-EQ) resulting in a seemingly unfair tendency for the EQ to dismiss the thought processes and ideas of the Non-EQ based on inability to do maths. As someone who only knows their native language might find themselves dismissed by someone who doesn't speak it. Bias can produce dark dangers of its own.

The EQ argument goes that an argument must be logical, empirical, and mathematically sound before it can even be a point worth making. Logic is mathematical, logic circuitry methodical, as in semiconductors. Now that quantum computers have flown into orbit, classical logic gates now have quantum counterparts, only a quantum logic gate is not restricted to 1 or 0, but has free rein in superposition, and a quantum computer can even produce entangled states. Reading a popular entry on their measurement, the author says that, "This type of value-assignment in theory occurs instantaneously over any distance and this has as of 2018 been experimentally verified for distances of up to 1200 kilometers.[8][9] That the phenomena appears to violate the speed of light is called the EPR paradox and it is an open question in physics how to resolve this. Originally it was solved by giving up the assumption of local realism, but other interpretations have also emerged." 
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Other interpretations? Follow the link and you will find it most elucidating, citing as it does seven challenges to scientific interpretation of quantum mechanics, boiling down to the fact that you can't really measure the immeasurable. Oxford Physics lab is making a fair feast of efforts in researching new technologies, though, as linked behind their picture. But we still find that, fundamentally, mathematics doesn't cut it when it comes to quanta, for the world as seen from a quantum perspective doesn't conform to classical physics, and never has, which is why it's always been a problem that can never go away.

Seasons don't go away either. As we get older, we see more patterns in the changing year, we know when a season comes early or late, we sense the shift from summer to autumn, winter to spring. We observe environmental alterations, such as loss of wildlife and climactic warming. We don't need to apply these things to mathematical formulas to know and accept that they are there. So why is the bedrock of our existence so apparently dependent on calculus for its definition?


"There's nothing logical about magic," someone recently said to me. Yet the odds against our lives existing at all are somewhat other-worldly, and not just in the probability of being resident in a Goldilocks Zone. The chance of a universe setting up its construct to support life as we know it in the first place is apparently unfathomably unlikely. Logically we could argue that it's illogical that we are here. But the earthbound mind that cannot bring down an ethereal argument into an empirical formula collapses its packet into What Is, to question it not, or at least no further than necessary in order to make the maths work. Infinity will always be a problem underpinning quantum processes, which is why an EQ has to resort to renormalisation as frowned at by Feynman, who called it "dippy", even though his diagrams are all over it, and if you want to know about renormalisation this insight from Physics Forums as probably as good as it gets.

With issues like infinity, non-local entanglement (which laughs at the 'constant' of light speed), uncertainty (preventing true measurements of anything on the move), and superposition (the two [or more, depending on how finite things are] states that anything is in at any given time) struggling with duality (you're made of particles right now, but aren't you a wave form when you're not looking?)... well, the constraints on which maths so fervently relies don't look very solid from where I'm standing. I don't have the answers, I just think about this stuff, a lot... as you can tell, it's been a few years now and the bias against free thought is still rigorously maintained, its only defence seemingly being as someone commented at me, "there's no language other than math," not that such an argument sounds very logical, but then, am I missing something?
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Quantum Entanglement's Tantrums

8/3/2019

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Entanglement is no new kid on the block but it hasn't said much yet, other than through Einstein. LiveScience gives the run-down behind the spooky image here.
The trouble with this phenomenon is that it doesn't have a relationship with time. Entanglement is an instantaneous, simultaneous response to stimuli shared between two particles (or two bodies of material, for it's being shown to occur in larger things than first thought) irrespective of distance. And that causes a few headaches with the equations.

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Last month the first-ever photograph of an entangled photon pair was promoted as a herald to new types of technology. You can read the review from Science Alert behind the picture of said pair.
​The big question is, how does anything get entangled in the first place? Is there a definitive point at which things are entangled, or is it a case, being devoid of any conditional time measurement, that entanglement occurs in advance of its physical evidence? Are these photons (and all other entangled things) destined to be cleaved together and subsequently find each other so paired? Could entanglement, per se, be a real-life physics love story? This is not such a stupid question. For people get entangled just as particles do. Love can lead us a merry dance for a lifetime, and when it does, there's nothing you can do about it.

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When you've experienced entanglement.... you know when you've been Tangled. A study on the effects of consciousness applied to entanglement is previewed behind this beautiful image of tangled balance. On the understanding that the phenomenon is not confined to subatomics, but applies on the grander scale of Everything, the job at hand would seem to be to get the symmetry of our entanglements right, which is a bit of a tough call when you consider the flotsam our minds have to deal with in everyday living. Photons might not have much to think about in the course of their lives, but they live beyond time, without considering matters of constraint, and they continually give themselves up and pull themselves back to freedom in their eternal dance with electrons. Is that so very different from the relationships we have with those people to whom we would consider ourselves most entangled? Probably not. The matter of life after matter is another topic for hot debate, but  photons can speak for themselves. 

Personally I don't see the Entanglement conundrum going underground any time soon. In fact we could be right on the cusp of New Physics, a revolutionary era mooted by the latest generation of scientific thinkers who are quietly considering the implications of oscillation as we speak. While academics seek holy grails among darknesses in the universal soup, entanglement could come to mean more than the sum of spacetime. It could mean the beginning of the end for the Standard Model. About time too.
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    Kathy Ratcliffe has studied quantum mechanics since 1997 in a life surrounded by birds and animals, She's a metaphysicist, if such a thing exists, looking as we all are for the inevitable bridge between humanity and particle physics.

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