At 09:19 PM 4/30/98 -0700, Stephen Speicher wrote:
>
>The current standard theory, of quantum mechanics for instance, is both
>nonlocal and indeterministic.

True. But, why is this "wrong?"

>The facts are to seen in experiments of
>the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) type, or the Aspect experiment. The
>current theory explanation of these experiments leads to the contradictions
>which have become enshrined as the 'weirdness' of quantum mechanics.

Woops - my understanding of these results is that Einstein, who "felt" QM
could'nt be reality, made a prediction based on causality, and the resulting
experiment disagreed with that prediction, and agreed with QM predictions.

>When
>the theory explains experimental facts by resorting to acausal behavior,
>when effects occur with no physical means, when the state of matter is
>characterized as indeterminate, it is then time to realize that the
>contradictions of a wave-particle existence is nonsensical.

Non-intuitive, perhaps, but nonsensical needs a lot more support - The
agreement between QM predictions and experiment are among the best in all
science. Why is this nonsense?

>The original
>poster, Bob Duncan, had it right. The tenacity with which modern _theories_
>of physics holds on to contradictory ideas is nothing short of >religiousity.

The above statement also sounds a lot like a religious belief that, because
the macroscopic world seems (mostly) deterministic, that determinism must be
true at all levels. Even for situations that are now modeled by
deterministic molecular dynamics calculations (molecular level activities),
there is a flavor of indeterminism - and, Statistical Mechanics, another
non-deterministic viewpoint, also works really well, including producing
fully deterministic-like macroscopic results from only statistically
determined micro-detail situations. But doesn't work if the ensembles are
too sparse for ensemble averages to overwhelm individual behavior.

The real problem I see with your above statements is, what do you propose as
a replacement that has the same weight of physical evidence supporting it,
and an equivalent degree of predictive power? QM may be a tough concept,
and undoubtably there is a lot more to be discovered than is already known
(even to a paradigm change, if we discover that string theory or something
like it becomes tractable), but just because the concepts are not intuitive,
doesn't a priori mean the theory must be wrong. Maybe it is wrong, but it
works, and works better than any other current model, and it produces
testable, falsifiable predictions - that is all one can expect of a theory.

Most scientists will, when something better comes along, adopt the new -
just not until it is at least as useful. For instance, Newton's law of
gravity is generally considered now to be an incorrect view of reality - yet
it is so convenient, and so close, that it is the model used for mechanics,
except where relativistic effects can't be ignored. Relativity is "better,"
but not as useful in non-relativistic situations.

I really would appreciate hearing about your alternatives to current
theories (BB, QM, whatever) But, perhaps would be better if we took the
discussion out of MAPUG. My only reason for posting this is that, given the
back-and-forth, there might be some others who would want to be included.

Regards, all David
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301/975-5755 (Voice) Nat'l Inst. of Standards & Technology
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