[ExI] R: Re: Cramer on impossibility of FTL communication

Thu Sep 3 17:37:35 UTC 2015

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Let us posit the existence of some universal observer.  Let us call it
> God, because God knows all.
>  
> God sees two entangled photons being formed, and knows their properties.
> God does not tell you, but God knowsSome time later, you find out the
> state of one of them.  Does this cause a change in the other?  No: it is
> still as God always knew it was

That would be equivalent to saying each photon has a lookup table telling
the photon how to behave but it's encrypted and only God and the photon
itself can decrypt it; 

that's what 
 "hidden variable"
means,
 something different about that particular photon that we just don't know
about
,
a lookup table inside the photon that we are unable to access but the
photon can when it wants to know if it should go through a filter or be
stopped by one.
 However that can not be correct because we can now devise experiments
that show that photons behave in ways that no lookup table could duplicate,
not even a lookup table made by God. 

I have a black box, it has a red light and a blue light on it, it also has
a rotary switch with 6 connections at the 12,2,4,6,8 and 10 o'clock
positions. The red and blue light blink in a manner that passes all known
tests for being completely random, this is true regardless of what position
the rotary switch is in. Such a box could be made and still be completely
deterministic by just pre-computing 6 different random sequences and
recording them as a lookup table in the box. Now the box would know which
light to flash.

I have another black box. When both boxes have the same setting on their
rotary switch they both produce the same random sequence of light flashes.
This would also be easy to reproduce in a classical physics world, just
record the same 6 random sequences in both boxes.

The set of
two 
boxes has another property, if the switches are set to opposite positions,
12 and 6 o'clock for example, there is a total negative correlation, when
one flashes red the other box flashes blue and when one box flashes blue
the other flashes red. This just makes it all the easier to make the boxes
because now you only need to pre-calculate 3 random sequences, then just
change every 1 to 0 and every 0 to 1 to get the other 3 sequences and
record all 6 in both boxes.

The boxes have one more feature that makes things very interesting, if the
rotary switch on a box is one notch different from the setting on the other
box then the sequence of light flashes will on average be different 1 time
in 4. How on Earth could I make the boxes behave like that? Well, I could
change on average one entry in 4 of the 12 o'clock lookup table (hidden
variable) sequence and make that the 2 o'clock table. Then change 1 in 4 of
the 2 o'clock and make that the 4 o'clock, and change 1 in 4 of the 4
o'clock and make that the 6 o'clock. So now the light flashes on the box
set at 2 o'clock is different from the box set at 12 o'clock on average by
1 flash in 4. The box set at 4 o'clock differs from the one set at 12 by 2
flashes in 4, and the one set at 6 differs from the one set at 12 by 3
flashes in 4.

But I said before that
the

boxes at opposite settings should have a 100% anti-correlation, the flashes
on the box set at 12 o'clock should differ from the box set
at 
6 o'clock by 4 flashes in 4 NOT 3 flashes in 4. Thus if the boxes work by
hidden variables then when one is set to 12 o'clock and the other to 2
there MUST be a 2/3 correlation, at 4 a 1/3 correlation, and of course at 6
no correlation at all.

A correlation greater
than
 2/3, such as 3/4, for adjacent settings produces paradoxes, at least it
would if you expected everything to work mechanistically because of  some
hidden variable involved.

Does this mean it's impossible to make two boxes that have those
specifications? Nope, but it does mean hidden variables can not be involved
and that means something very weird is going on. Actually it would be quite
easy to make a couple of boxes that behave like that, it's just not easy to
understand how that could be.

Photons behave in just this spooky manner, so to make the boxes all you
need it 4 things:

1) A glorified light bulb, something that will make two photons of
unspecified but identical polarization moving in opposite directions so you
can send one to each box. An excited calcium atom would do the trick, or
you could turn a green photon into two identical lower energy red photons
with a crystal of potassium dihydrogen phosphate.

2) A light detector sensitive enough to observe just one photon.
Incidentally the human eye is not quite good enough to do that but frogs
can, for frogs when light gets very weak it must stop getting dimmer and
appear to flash.

3) A polarizing filter, we've had these for a century or more.

4) Some gears and pulleys so that each time the rotary switch is advanced
one position the filter is advanced by 30 degrees. This is because it's
been known for many years that the amount of light polarized at 0 degrees
that will make it through a polarizing filter set at X degrees is [COS
(x)]^2; and if x = 30 DEGREES then the value is .75
 Li
ght is made
of 
photons
so 
that translates to the probability any individual photon will make it
through the filter is 75%.

The bottom line of all this is that there can not be something special
about a specific photon, some internal difference, some hidden variable
put in there by God 
that determines if it makes it through a filter or not.

  John K Clark
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