NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/sci/physics/21767

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From: [e-mail] (Jack Sarfatti)
Subject: re: Peer review of Budnik's objection to Aspect's expt.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1992 02:44:24 GMT
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Sarfatti replies to:

From: [e-mail] (Paul Budnik)
Subject: Aspect's experiment, was Re: Peer review ...
Date: 24 Dec 92 20:06:15 GMT
Organization: Mountain Math Software, P. O. Box 2124, Saratoga. CA 95070
In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Jack
Sarfatti) wri
tes:
>[...]
> *Paul, I'm sure Alain Aspect would not agree with you! Aspect stayed with
> me in San Francisco a few years ago.

I do not what Aspect thinks but the two references that I am relying on
are:
J. D. Franson, Physical Review D, pgs. 2529-2532, Vol. 31, No. 10, May
1985.
A. Leggett, Foundations of Physics, V 17, p. 875.

*OK, Paul, good. Since I do not have easy access to these references, and
since others interested in the truth here may not, please take the time to
type it relevant quotes from Franson and Leggett that you think explain,
clarify, and support your point - a point that, so far, evades me since
your idea about "delay" is like Merlin's many changing forms.*

Both make it clear that Aspect's experiment was not conclusive.

*But do they make it clear in your one sense of "dely" that I thought I
understood, namely, the delay in the photon passing from a polarizer to a
detector - then you changed it in midstream to the uncertainy in the time
of emission at the source - so anyone trying to follow you will be totally
confused!*

I am not aware of any refutation of the arguments these two present. I have
read
Aspect's original papers and I think the arguments that Franson and Leggett
make are correct.

*What the hell are their arguments? And how do thir arguments connect with
whatever it is you are trying to say?*

> [...]
> In my analysis this delay is negligible (i.e. short compared to flight
> times from source to polarizer) and essentially irrelevant. Why do you
> think it important?

Unless you measure it directly you have no proof that locality is violated.

*Paul , I do not understand your point here at all. Can you draw a picture?
Can anyone else reading this explain what Paul means? I may be stupid -
assume I'm stupid - but I'm not that stupid - try to explain it to a stupid
person like a smart high school senior on his way to Cal Tech -
I mean a person without experience in physics - "stupid" was sort of a joke
of course - they way a sly old southern Senator says he is "Po country
boy." "Folks are dumb where I come from (Cornell) - never had no learnin!."
I remember Ed Salpeter telling us dummies that the art of the theoretical
physicist should be to explain deep physics in terms of as elementary
mathematics as possible! He and Morrison were good at that. So was Gold.
And Feynman was of this Cornell school created by Bethe - Bethe was always
able to say important things with simple math. I guess it all goes back to
Arnold Sommerfeld - Bethe's teacher - and probabl Oppenheimer as well who
was notorious for making sloppy mistakes even in arithmetic (see Gleick's
GENIUS - who also talks about Werner Erhard's funding of physics elite in
early 80's). The Cornell Physics Dept attitude in the late 50's was that
fancy math in physics was for sissys - Baez take notice!.*

It is also central to my argument that QM is incomplete. You can measure
the
statistics of these delays, but QM does not predict what those statistics
are.

*Paul, I still do not understand which delays you are talking about and how
you would measure them in principle - you must be much more specific !*

> [...] What
> possible relevance can 24 or 35 have to the basic idea of Aspect's
> experiment? So far, Budnik I fail to see where the problem is. Perhaps,
> someone else sees the problem?  Does anyone else see what Budnik sees?
Well
> let's continue.*

You cannot know what any of the times are that you discuss.

*Fine, Paul, I agree that in the actual experiment done by Aspect that you
cannot know those times. But, that is not the point, the point is you do
not need to know them! And if you did need to know them, it would be a
different experiment! Why do you want to know them? Aspect was trying to
measure (cos@)^2/2 - or, rather, the deviation from it predicted by Bell's
locality inequality - and his curves are quite beautiful - and the
correlation is over a spacelike interval between detections of both photons
in same pair - that's all that matters.*


A photon cannot be regarded as a classical particle traveling at the speed
of light.

*That depends, if the width of the packet is small compared to the relvant
distance and if the
packet does not spread too much then to a good approximation is it like a
particle. Besides, all that doesn't matter because of Aspect's coincidence
circuitry!*

You can only know what the delays are in QM if you observe them directly.

*OK, so what- it's another experiment- what does it buy you?*

>[...]
> You cannot know where a particle is at a given time unless you observe
the
> particle at that time.
>
> *I agree with the above abstract remark but fail to see how it is
relevant
> to the concrete question at issue. Does any one else recognize how it is
> relevant?*

It means you cannot base an analysis of delays on distances and the speed
of the particle.

*As Ronald Reagan would say "There you go again Paul!"  I thought we agreed
that Aspect did not measure, or need to measure (well maybe we do not agree
on the need part) the delays from polarizer to detector for each photon in
the pair - who gives a damn? Frankly Paul, I don't give a damn - and
neither, I suspect, did Aspect - and for good reason.  What is important is
the flight time from pair source to detectors to calibrate the counter
coincidence circuits - assuming small
wavepackets compared to distance and time it takes to register photon etc -
all standard stuff that is second nature to a good experimentalist like
Aspect.*

> [...]
> The way you measure the delay is by varying the polarizers between states
 that maximize and minimize the probability of joint detections.

*Yeah, Paul - but what does that mean operationally- what do you actually
do -I mean in principle what would you try to have done? You are still
being very vague - what does "between states" mean, for example?*

>
> *The probability of joint detection is (cos@)^2/2 so that @ = 0 is max
and
> @ = pi/2 is min. That much I understand. But I do not understand in
> operational terms "measure the delay is by varying the polarizers between
> states".

You switch from a state of minimal joint detections to maximal joint
detections.

*OK, I switch an electric field in a crystal with a phonon (?)- but fast
enough so that different groups of photon pairs arrive in the different
relative (i.e., 0 or pi/2) polarizer orientations - this does not at all
change flit times between polarizers and their detectors directly behind
them. All this has to do with Aspect's acoustic switching If I remember
right (i'm a littlerusty on the experimental details at the moment). So
where's the beef?*


You then see how long it takes before this switch starts increasing the
number of joint detections.

*OK, finally I begin to see, maybe, what you are driving at.

*But the point is, to get good measurements, you want to pulse the emission
of the pairs so that no photons are in the polarizer during the time the
orientation is changing. Or you want to do it so fast that the noise
introduced is very small compared to what you are looking for. Also these
delays are not what Bell's inequality is all about - these new delays of
yours can be understood in local classical-like wavepacket terms - each
photon is a wavepacket of tiny width compared to other scales - the
incident intensity is a bunch of overlapping wave packets -  the relevant
zero-order spacelike delay time is the difference in flight times from
common source to each detector (with time of flight uncertainty from
polarizer to detector a first , or better, higher order correction)*

 It is a moderately complex statistics problem to analyze this but presents
no fundamental difficulties

*Suppose you measure what you want to measure - what does it tell you that
is of fundamental interest in your mind?*.

Paul Budnik with comments added by Sarfatti between *...*