From: Martin Shough <parcellular.nul>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:35:21 +0100
Archived: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 06:21:53 -0400
Subject: Re: D'oh! Light Speed Threshold Broken?


>From: Robert Powell <rpowell.nul>
>To: post.nul
>Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:33:00 -0500
>Subject: Re: D'oh! Light Speed Threshold Broken?

>>From: Martin Shough<parcellular.nul>
>>To:<post.nul>
>>Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:00:51 +0100
>>Subject: Re: D'oh! Light Speed Threshold Broken?

<snip>

>Causality as it relates to the quantum world is a fascinating
>topic. I believe causality can be broken without exceeding the
>speed of light. Instantaneous reactions of entangled photons
>could be considered a breakdown of causality. It is somewhat
>similar to one twin in the U.S. being killed by a car and his
>twin vacationing in England also dies. Not much causality there.
>One could also argue that causality also ends when an object
>reaches the speed of light. Since time reaches zero at light
>velocity, there is no way to have causality without the passage
>of time.

Hi Robert

Sorry for delay responding. This is connected with what I wrote
in another post yesterday. What we call causality is tacitly
assumed to be restricted to local effects that communicate from
one particle to another on the light cone, but I think we need
an expanded definition. That relativistic definition was born in
the afterglow of classical determinism and seems to have been
imported wholesale into quantum physics. But, as you say,
instantaneous correlations are neither locally contiguous nor
antecedent, so are not causal in the restricted classical sense,
by definition.

Yet clearly they are part of the overall causal structure,
because they are ubiquitous. I believe they can be described as
the numerically dominant type of connectivity in molecular
structure. What do they signify? Because they do not transport
local iinformation ("no signalling") it sometimes seems to be
assumed that they are a sort of useless appendage, a curious
quantum quirk, maybe an extra indexing or book-keeping device
with no structural purpose, that nature could almost do without.
Like you, presumably, I don't buy that.

I personally suspect that the entanglement correlations reflect
the fact that every particle state at every local "here and now"
is, despite the habits of "fuzzy" thinking in which 20thC
quantum theory has entrained us, _rigidly_determined_
(calculably or not) by an exhaustively-interconnnected,
nonlocal, cosmic causal background, but only probabilistically
connected to its local past. One way of framing this point of
view would be to say that it turns the old argument against sub-
quantum "hidden variables" inside out, by "hiding" them
_everywhere_. The "missing" half of the causal structure is in
the cosmic future of every measurement. We only see the the
palimpsest of that nonlocal imaginary background in
correlations, where it generates the here-and-now, sandwiched in
a press between it and the probabilistic local past. I also see
this global background as being the donator of gravitational and
inertial mass.

If this line of speculation would ever be relevant (in the right
hands) to understanding superluminal neutrinos I don't know.
Anyway, it's fascinating to watch physics dealing with an
observational anomaly.


Martin



Listen to 'Strange Days... Indeed' - The PodCast

At:

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/sdi/program/

These contents above are copyright of the author and
UFO UpDates - Toronto. They may not be reproduced
without the express permission of both parties and
are intended for educational use only.