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Quantum Physics Parts Ways With Reality
aeoneal sends us to PhysicsWeb for news guaranteed to induce headache in those wedded to the reality of, well, reality. Researchers from the University of Vienna have shown the violation of a stronger form of Bell's inequality known as Leggett's inequality. The result means that we must not only give up Einstein's hope of "no spooky action at a distance," we must also give up (some of) the idea that the world exists when we are not looking. From the article: "[Studies] have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell's inequality does not tell specifically which assumption — realism, locality, or both — is discordant with quantum mechanics." From the Nature abstract: "Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned." Only subscribers to Nature, alas, can know what features those are, as PhysicsWeb doesn't tell us.
When we see an insect being tricked into thinking an orchid is a female insect we think "That orchid doesn't look anything like an insect, what a strange mistake to make", and a bat might use echo location and see us being aroused by something that simply has the texture and shape of a piece of paper which doesn't resemble the texture or shape of a female human and wonder how we could make such a mistake.
Our common sense and intuition don't necessarily tell us what's true, especially when it doesn't relate the world we evolved in, so we have to rely on experiments, and quantum theory constantly makes accurate predictions. If it's beyond our common sense and intuition then that's too bad for us.
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In particular, theories are judged based on what you might call 'philosophical' notions. And in fact, the great physicists - Newton, etc. - all had very deep philosophical ideas about their theories (although those are perhaps less well-known).
As an example, we now consider Newton's law of gravity to be correct (up to relativistic considerations). Yet, at the time, many thought this to be philosophical nonsense. For what is gravity - it is 'action at a distance', with no mechanism! When a billiard ball hits another, the operation of force is clear, but why should some force exist between two billiard balls far apart? This is pretty much the same issue as the 'nonlocality' issue with QM. It took quite a lot of convincing to get the scientific world to agree with Newton's 'action at a distance', and the discussion was both practical (numbers, experiments) and 'philosophical' (how it fits into the rest of the current picture of 'reality' at the time).
Anyhow, just trying to point out that science and philosophy are not disconnected. As science gets more specialized, it may seem so, since scientists don't get any philosophical training these days (they used to, though!).
Are you saying that you can't discover new technologies using quantum mechanics because it doesn't follow common sense?
Or worse; are you saying science isn't worthwhile as a search for truth, and that scientific pursuits are only worthwhile when it helps create new products for consumption?
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