[ExI] Many Worlds (was: A Simulation Argument)

[Vladimir Nesov]

On Jan 13, 2008 8:58 PM, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:
> Some physical processes produce 2 photons that have the same
> polarization but move in opposite directions. A billion years before I
> was born somebody in the Virgo Cluster started making pairs of
> photons that have identical but unknown polarization. He sent one
> stream of photons to the earth, a billion light years away and he sent
> the second stream of photons to the Coma cluster in the opposite
> direction from the earth also a billion light years away.
>
> A billion years later on Earth I spin my polarizer to a random direction
> and record its position, I observe if the photon made it through the
> polarizer or not and record that too, the exact time also. Now I spin
> the polarizer again and do the same thing for the next photon and then
> for the next several thousand photons. When his stream of photons
> reach my friend in the Coma Cluster he does the same thing with his photons.
>
> Now I decide to visit my friend. I get in a space ship with my records
> and blast off for the Coma Cluster at 99% of the speed of light.
> After 2 billion years I arrive in the Coma Cluster, we must be in the
> same universe because I can shake his hand.
>
> I now compare notes with my friend. I notice that the direction I had
> my polarizer turned to and the direction my friend had his turned to
> were different, not very surprising since both were picked at random,
> but then I find something astounding. The square of the cosign of the
> angle between the 2 detectors for each photon pair is proportional to
> the probability that a photon will make it through my friend's detector.
> That is weird and I see no reason to put the word in quotation marks;
> I know of no theory that can remove that weirdness.
>


But why is it weird? Photons are 'black boxes' that can produce
responses  during interaction with experimental setup, and you can't
know contents of these black boxes prior to actually looking. So each
photon 'knows' how it will respond to next experiment, but you do not.
Photons in an entangled pair are synchronized, that is their
'contents' are the same, but still unknown to you. Then, when you
independently probe them, you get the same result, since they have the
same 'contents'.

In fact, you can construct classic system that will have the same
properties. Just have your computer generate two e-mails with
identical contents, and send them to two different respondents. Prior
to opening these e-mails respondents wouldn't know their contents.
They can open them at the same moment, so that speed of light wouldn't
be able to magically transform one e-mail to be in agreement with
another. And they would find that contents of these e-mails are
exactly the same! The only difference is that you can read e-mails
many times, but you can't repeat observation of photons. No big deal:
add 'destroy after reading' requirement to these e-mails.

-- 
Vladimir Nesov                            mailto:robotact at gmail.com