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A Link Between Wormholes and Quantum Entanglement
sciencehabit writes "Theoretical physicists have forged a connection between the concept of entanglement — itself a mysterious quantum mechanical connection between two widely separated particles — and that of a wormhole — a hypothetical connection between black holes that serves as a shortcut through space (first abstract, second abstract). The insight could help physicists reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity, perhaps the grandest goal in theoretical physics."
I am not a physicist.
But I keep hearing that there is actually nothing mysterious about entanglement at all... Something along the lines of:
You post 2 envelopes containing cards in opposite directions, one with a printed letter A, the other card with the letter B.
At one destination, the envelope is opened to reveal the letter A. ... then through some mysterious quantum mechanical connection.... you know that the envelope at the remote destination contains the letter B.
And that's about all there is to entanglement....
Can any physicist confirm?
Sigs are for the weak.
Relativity has little to do with dark matter or dark energy -- the matter content is irrelevant, since relativity only really dictates the geometry; basically you have an equation G=T, where G is the geometry and T the matter; what that matter *is* is something for someone else to worry about. It has absolutely damn all to do with the Higgs. The Higgs field is a part of the standard model of particle physics that gives fundamental particles their mass. It has absolutely nothing to do with relativity at all; if it did, we would already have a quantum field theory that was general relativistic in nature, and we'd all be laughing. Or crying, since many of us would now be out of a job.
Quantum electrodynamics throws out infinities as a matter of course. This worried a lot of people, and then "renormalisation" was invented. It basically says "if you see a number multiplying an infinity, just write it as another number". The best example is the electron mass. What we see is actually m_electron * infinity. So we "renormalise it", and say that m_electron is actually m_bare electron * infinity.
It was either Feynman or Schwinger - probably both - who expressed serious doubts about the mathematical validity of renormalisation. Thing is, as they also acknowledged, it works. QED is the most accurate theory we currently possess, so despite the air of bullshit that surrounds renormalisation something's obviously working fine.
The issue comes when you have theories that are non-renormalisable, so you can't ditch the infinities this way. Quantising general relativity typically leads to a non-renormalisable theory. That's where all our problems have been for the last sixty years...
I went to a local physics lecture a while back and a bunch of physicists tried to explain some things to people that were interested. They all took questions and such, it was a lot of fun. I asked one of them "But what do I have to do to 'get' relativity. I believe in it, I think it's been scientifically proven. I've read LOTS of books on the subject but I still just can't make my brain do it!" and he gave about the best reply I've ever gotten to a question. Paraphrasing he said "We don't get it either. I have study mathematics my entire life. I have 3 PhDs. I've designed machines that take advantage of many of Special relativities theories. I've proven those theories in hundreds of lab experiments. But I cannot make my brain understand it either. What I can do is prove it with math. Numbers cannot lie. We take very careful measurements, we use near savant like theories and prove them scientifically. In the whole of human history I'm willing to bet the number of people that could actually picture how relativity, special relativity, and higher level dimensions work in their mind could be counted on 2 hands. So don't feel bad, we're all in the same boat."
I guess he could have been just trying to make me feel better. But I believed him.
Something that's a little bothersome is that when you are designing a video game that portrays a classical world, the physical limits of the computer end up imposing many of the physical laws we are used to.
for example, consider diffraction limited resolution. Basically the further away something is, the less resolved it becomes. The bigger the eye or telescope you look through the more you can resolve at a distance. In the real world we call this diffraction limited resolution. In a computer game we call it pixels, and the bigger the monitor (in pixels) the better the resolution.
To object oriented variables cannot simultaneously know each other's state. One of them has to be updated first. There's a finite limit on how fast the computer can alter the memory locations and it can't change both at the same time. So there's a kind of speed of light limit on how fast the world can change. If were doing this on distributed architectures or iterating serially over the objects then that limit actually shows up in the connectivity of objects with distance: nearer objects can influence each other sooner than remote objects.
Finally, there is an exception to that rule. Two objects can communicate instantly if they share the same class variables. This is spooky action at a distance. While it's often claimed that quantum mechanics does not allow hidden variable theories , this is a mis-interpretation of Bell's theorem. In fact it only disallows local hidden variable theories. Global hidden variable theories are what QM says do exist. That's exactly how you get entanglement.
So QM emerges because of the class variables, diffraction emerges because of memory limits and the speed of light comes out from serial processing at the CPU or memory access level.
Thus you can't actually create a simmulation of reality that didn't have the characteristics of our weird world even if you wanted to.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.