Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ken G
The only way you see this as an "affect" is if you apply philosophical concepts that are outside of science, like if you say that the electron "has a wave function" and changes in the way you would describe its wave function somehow actually affect the electron.
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I'll step in to point out (as I always do
) that this isn't really accurate. Ken G is correct that there is no way for us to use quantum entanglement to send messages that violate causality, or anything of that sort. However, Bell's theorem demonstrates that, for the results to be consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics and observation, the whatever underlying mechanism determines the result at A must take into account information about the choice of measurement at B, which can be arbitrarily far away, and can be outside the light cone (past or future) of measurement A. It does not require ascribing any reality at all to the electron's wave function, or treating it as anything more than a bookkeeping technique to come to that conclusion.
Now, it's true that Bell's theorem does rely on a couple basic assumptions; all theorems do. If you're committed to preserving the assumption of locality, you can focus on those other assumptions as well. In some cases, that's hard to do (for example, one assumption is simply that the most basic rules of logic are valid), but others are a little trickier to defend (such as contrafactual definiteness, the assumption that the choice of measurement at B could have been different, and that if it had been, we would have seen definite results which still would have been consistent with the other measurements we made and the predictions of quantum theory). There's been a fair amount of discussion about all of that within the scientific community over the years, but most physicists whose views on the matter I'm aware of, either from direct communication or from reading their work, accept the conclusion of nonlocality.
Ken G seems to accept most of the steps of that argument, but balks toward the end, insisting that the universe is neither local nor nonlocal, preferring to use words like "holistic". Except that the way he uses "holistic" is essentially equivalent to a subset of possible nonlocal universes, as the term is used by everyone else. But for some reason, he doesn't want to use the term.
I've given up on convincing Ken G to think other than he does after many long conversations about it; I fear that we just go around in circles, and I don't have the time to devote to it these days. However, I always feel honor bound to follow after him in these discussions, and point out that his views are not mainstream in this matter. In one sense, that's not particularly a problem, he's welcome to hold his own views. But since he's extremely knowledgable about many aspects of physics and astronomy, very skilled at explaining them, and therefore seen as an authority here, it might be easy to assume that his views on this matter
do reflect those of the majority of physicists.