Posted by D J Lancaster on February 14, 1999 at 12:11:30:
In Reply to: Thanks for the post posted by Lenin on February 13, 1999 at 17:59:01:
If Bell's theory is an unrefutable 'fact'any possible working model for the way the world really works has to incorporate 'non-locality'
as a fundamental.
While 8 possible models for the way the world really works exist, there are two of them that I think would be an appropriate response to your statements.
Herbert's # 7
"Consciousness creates reality. Bell's theorem says that if consciousness does indeed create reality, it cannot be a purely local matter. The decision of a mind here must be able to change the value of an attribute there, where here and there may be separated by immense distances.
Rash speculations that this strong quantum connection permits telepathy or long-distance mind-over-matter effects need to be balanced by the realization that Bell's theorem concerns only reality--that is, raw quantum jumps--not phenomena, the regular patterns of quantum jumps.
Thus even if consciousness could create reality, the power of mind to intervene in distant happenings may be limited to the production of single, statistically unusual events--the so-called outriders or glitches that show up from time to time in even the most well-controlled experiment.
That faraway minds can alter the fabric of reality but not the pattern woven thereon need not limit minds to the production of trivial deeds. Some physicists believe that the whole physical universe originated out of nothing as a single quantum jump--just the sort of wild, unpredicatably unique quantum even that a mind could initiate without upsetting the statistical applecart."
Herbert's #3
"The world is an undivided wholeness. The notion that the world is an inseparable whole arises from the presence in quantum theory of "phase entanglement". In the quantum formalism, two quons that have once interacted do not separate into two waveforms when they move apart but are forever afterward represented as a single wave. Whether this wholeness of representation is matched by a wholeness of being is a question tha was posed by certain toughtful physicists, especailly Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm.
"Although superluminal phase entaglement is necessary to make the answers come out right, it never leads to any superluminal results. Since these instant connections which bind separated quons into a seamless whole(in the formalism, at least) never surface in the world of phenomena, most physicists regarded them as purely formal features of the quantum language--necessary for calculation but having no counterpart in reality.
"Bell's theorem shows that the holistic grammar of the quantum formulation reflects the inseparable nature of reality itself. Beneath phenomena, the world is a seamless whole.
"Although it points beyond phenomena, Bell's theorem is proved by arguments drawn solely from the facts. Because of its strictly phenomenal base, Bell's theorem by itself gives no hint as to the mechanism by which reality might achieve its necessarily on-local connections. These ubiquitous phase connections in the quantum formalism offer a non-classical image for how a non-local world might work: quons are instantly connected not because something stretches between them but because each has left part of itself in the other, a part to which it retains immediate access."
dj