[ExI] Demonstration of Bell's Inequality

[John Clark]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 12:13 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

​> ​
> Oh, this part.  Okay, try this:
> Have two identical sacks, one with a red ball and one with a blue ball
> (or any two other objects, indistinguishable without opening the sacks
> but easy to tell apart once the sacks are open).  Keep one sack at
> random - perhaps have a random number generator that takes atomic
> decay as a seed - but send the other an arbitrary distance away, even
> billions of light years.
> ​ ​
> Then, open the sack you have.  You immediately know what's in the other
> sack.
> Now, the "locality" of the information is somewhat arbitrary.  You are
> obviously not changing anything at that far-distant location when you
> open the sack.  Does opening your sack cause an event that ripples out
> at the speed of light, such that whatever is in the other sack will
> retroactively have become the other object by the time you could

arrive to see it?
>


​
That's the wrong analogy, a better one would need 3 complementary properties
​ not just 1​
, so in addition to red/blue lets have heavy/light and
radioactive/nonradioactive.

With 3 complementary attributes you'd have 8 different types of balls
​:​


1) Red heavy radioactive
2) Red light radioactive
3) Red heavy non-radioactive
4) Red light non-radioactive
5) Blue heavy radioactive
6) Blue light radioactive
7) Blue heavy non-radioactive
8) Blue light non-radioactive

In secret and at random 2
​ ​
balls
​ ​
are chosen and
​ ​
put in a
​box and ​
mailed in opposite directions a long way apart. You get one
​ ​
and can X ray your package to learn if it is red or blue
​,​
or you can weigh
​ ​
it to learn if it
​ ​
is heavy
​,​
or light
​ or you can use a geiger counter on it to learn if is radioactive or
nonradioactive. But you can only use one test.​

So if you X ray your package and find that it is red you'd expect that on
average there would be 2 chances in 8 (1 in 4) that the other package
contains a heavy ball; it could be blue heavy and radioactive or
​
blue heavy and non-radioactive. However when this Quantum Mechanical
experiment is actually performed it is found that
​when it is weighed ​
on average the probability
​the other package​
 is heavy is not 1 chance in 4 but is in fact 1 chance in 3.
​ ​
Bell's inequality says if things
​​
work according to common sense then it must be 1/4 or smaller, but it
isn't, it's 1/3. The experiment produces a correlation between the
attributes that is greater than
​classical physics ​
expected but it is exactly what quantum mechanics predicts.

Thus either things are non local and somehow
​X​
 raying your package changes the attributes of the other package, or things
are not realistic and so despite the name neither package can be
prepackaged, that is to say neither package has any attributes at all until
you X ray it or weigh it or check it with a Geiger-counter.

John K Clark




>
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