This conference was very interesting and very topical. Phase decay is a well known part of our quantum universe and it is a natural consequence to use phase decay to limit measurement and entanglement.
This makes gravity different from charge because gravity does not depend on phase while charge does. Continuous spontaneous localization is the latest method science uses to collapse wavefunctions and make sense out of reality. Since coins and other macro objects do not show phase coherence, it is hard to make macro determinate sense from quantum effects.
One thing that is still true is that very smart people continue to argue about the nature of physical reality. Determinists argue for a reality without phase with certain futures without free choice while quantavanglists argue for uncertain futures with free choice.
Now the challenge is to explain how space and time emerge from a simpler reality of matter and action...
Steve Agnew replied on Aug. 8, 2017 @ 04:27 GMT
Nature is certainly full of noise and you call noise intrinsic...Nature certainly has indistinguishable particles and that is the nature of chemical bonds among other things. The Shannon noise of chaos certainly has a role in physical reality, but quantum phase noise is something that Shannon never addressed.
We can argue endlessly about quantum phase noise, but the only way to predict the actions of quantum particles is with quantum phase noise. Without quantum phase, no atom would ever bond to another atom and what a mess the universe would then be...
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 8, 2017 @ 15:33 GMT
"Nature certainly has indistinguishable particles..." But what makes them "indistinguishable" is not that they contain a vast number of observably identical bits of information, as people have naively assumed. Rather, it is because all interactions only depend upon the few bits of information, that actually happen to be identical, when properly observed, or interacted with. That is what the Shannon Capacity and The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle are all about.
Rob McEachern
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Steve Agnew replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 03:36 GMT
Somehow I love it when a very important topic gets very very comments...we are alone my friend...you are an inverterent determinist and I am a contravangelist. We shall therefore agree that noise is what determines the future but we will forever disagree about the nature of quantum phase noise. I agree that Shannon noise usually dominates, but I also believe that quantum phase noise also plays an important role in physical reality...
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Georgina Woodward replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 09:54 GMT
Here's a thought. I don't know if you will think it at all relevant. What if what we think is noise is other signals not being picked up on? I mean I can tune a radio to one station and get interference which is just noise in my signal I'm tuned to. But I could tune in to a different channel and get different noise which might even be interference from the channel I've tuned out of. That's not very quantum mechanical of itself but I have been thinking about how different perspectives affect how something is regarded. In relation to the future I don't think its noise per se that can affect outcomes (referring to your discussion) but the totality of what there is out there, which we aren't aware of with our singular viewpoints and measurements.
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 12:54 GMT
Steve,
There is no real difference between "Shannon noise" and "quantum phase noise".
When you set Shannon's limit to one bit, the result is identically equal to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Simply put, the difference between the classical and quantum world is purely quantitative, not qualitative; when the classical information content is reduced to a tiny number of recoverable (quantizable) bits of information, then quantized observations and interactions result. The continuous behaviors, so evident in every day life, are no longer even a possibility - by the very definition of the word "information" as it was used by Shannon.
Rob McEachern
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 13:00 GMT
Georgina,
It is directly relevant. That is what "information" is all about in Shannon's theory; the exclusion of whatever it is, that the receiver does not wish to receive. But in order to do any such thing, the receiver has to know, a priori, how to "tune-out" everything other than that which is desired. What is left is "information."
Rob McEachern
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Steve Agnew replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 15:01 GMT
Shannon noise does not show superposition or coherence states while quantum phase noise does. One bit of noise can come from two or more sources and that one quantum bit can come then come from both sources but a Shannon bit must come from one or the other source.
As we have discussed in the past, the noise function that you have very cleverly designed to coincide with Bell's theorem is just that...designed to mimic Bell's theorem. You might have done it with any number of fitting functions as well and Bohm's pilot wave theory since it likewise uses hidden variables to fit quantum effects.
Many very smart people refuse to recognize quantum behavior for what it is...representing knowledge that does exist but is nevertheless unknowable. Shannon noise is due to classical chaos and Shannon noise is therefore in principle always has a knowable source and a knowable cause.
I like the radio station metaphor because it is the noise in between stations that has relevance here, not the information from a single broadcast. A single radiowave photon gives in principle a single bit of noise, but what was the cause?
The radiowave photon could have come from a station or from the ionosphere or from the cosmic background...or it could have come from a superposition state of two (or any number of) coherent sources as interference. If the source were knowable, it would be Shannon noise...if the source was a superposition state of two or more sources, the radio photon origin would be unknowable.
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 16:58 GMT
"Shannon noise does not show superposition" Of course it does. It all boils down to the properties of a Fourier Transform, not any physical laws. You seem to have forgotten that superposition is a mathematical procedure, not a physical phenomenon. Fourier invented his procedure, specifically to exploit large (infinite) superpositions in classical thermodynamics, in order to solve partial differential equations like the heat equation. Physicists have merely "reimagined" it, while adopting the exact same procedure to describe a different phenomenon (probability flow, rather than heat flow).
"I like the radio station metaphor because it is the noise in between stations that has relevance here." Not in modern wireless systems; all the channels are transmitted at the exact same frequency in CDMA code-division-multiple-access systems. The channels are separated at the receiver via the correlation properties of different pseudo-random codes employed by the different channels. The other channels all just look like noise, occupying the exact same bandwidth as the one signal "tuned to", not in frequency-space, but in code-space.
Rob McEachern
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John R. Cox replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 18:02 GMT
Robert,
I think I finally got a handle on what you've been driving at.
Yes. It's the math that makes a microprocessor digital. Shannon does the same thing as QM, normalizing to one. A modern processor might operate on 2GHz but its still Wavy Gravy, and that 1 bit is all the lumps at or above a threshold limit that happen in total at any junction, in the (registry circuit) span of 1, 2Trillionth of a second.
Drat, I'm more like three weeks of procrastination. :-) jrc
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 19:16 GMT
Hi John,
I'm glad you've got a handle on it. Now stir what's in the pot and start cooking:
Steve said "the noise function that you have very cleverly designed to coincide with Bell's theorem", but I did not do anything clever at all (this is just World-War-II era RADAR signal-detection theory), rather, physicists have been doing something very dumb - Bell tests.
Once you understand the nature of the One-Time-PAD figure in my first post on this page, then it is OBVIOUS that it is completely FOOLHARDY to ever even attempt a Bell test. Because all the test is doing is injecting Steve's "quantum phase noise" into each and every measurement, by foolishly choosing a random (hence erroneous) phase detector angle for each and every measurement, rather than the ONE AND ONLY correct One-Time-PAD phase angle, that MUST be used, to enable error-free measurements. Steve also said that "representing knowledge that does exist but is nevertheless unknowable." But the One-Time-PAD demonstrates that it actually IS knowable - the correct decoding can be accomplished every time, but only by an entity that knows, a priori, the correct procedure (in this case, the correct One-Time-Pad) that must be used to recover the information, without error.
The ONLY way to make non-erroneous measurements, is to send both entangled entities to ONE observer, thus enabling that observer to use one element from each entangled pair as the One-Time-PAD that is absolutely required, to correctly measure the other member of the pair. This is what Stern-Gerlach experiments are all about. By failing to do that, BY A FOOLHARDY EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN, physicists have been fooling themselves, about the significance of Bell tests, for half a century.
Rob McEachern
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John R. Cox replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 19:41 GMT
Robert
Oh yes, One Time Pad! It only works if you only use it once! Ask the old Soviet apologists. KGB got so internally competitive they started duplicate usage in the field and that is how the Kim Philby circle got caught.
I have to wonder if Bell didn't knowingly create a flawed brain-teaser to see how long it would take people to recognize it (or have the sack to say so). His writings beat around the bush, but it was career suicide to question the efficacy of QM at that time. It was less than a decade since QM had successfully built The Bomb. :-) jrc
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 11, 2017 @ 20:48 GMT
John,
I don't think Bell did it knowingly. It is a classic example of a supposed, self-evident truth, that is actually not true at all.
Bernard d 'Espagnat pointed-out the problem forty years ago on the bottom of page 166 in this article But then proceeded to take it as a self-evident truth.
Rob McEachern
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John R. Cox replied on Aug. 12, 2017 @ 00:23 GMT
Robert,
Good point, that's easy enough to do.
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Steve Agnew replied on Aug. 13, 2017 @ 15:41 GMT
I am also not a big fan of the Bell's theorem approach...not because it is wrong but rather because it is so complex and therefore easy to game. The endless arguments about the nature of noise are a case in point. Any number of classical noise functions will fit Bell's theorem with the right parameters.
Shannon noise certainly does show wave interference and so there are classical analogs for both superposition and coherence as well. This is what is so confusing about these terms. Quantum superposition and coherence are particle effects of quantum phase noise while wave superposition and coherence are classical effects of Shannon noise.
Interpretation is the key since a particle of Shannon noise comes from a single Shannon source and that source is classically determinate and in principle, always knowable and certain. A particle of quantum phase noise can come from any number of sources and so any exact path or source is uncertain, even after measurement.
Quantum phase noise is knowledge that is not knowable. For some reason, people complexify this simple fact into endless arguments like Bell's theorem. Our own quantum phase noise is a part of any measurement of quantum phase noise and so necessarily leads to fundamental uncertainties in those measurements.
Among those uncertainties include an uncertainty of sources and paths and this non-locality is not consistent with the classical notions of Shannon noise or general relativity. However, the Shannon noise function can usually be patched up with any number of hidden variable functions and so that simply complexifies the underlying quantum simplicity.
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John R. Cox replied on Aug. 13, 2017 @ 16:31 GMT
Oh Balls!
'Shannon particle?'!!!
Quant is 'a particle' in the first place?!
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 13, 2017 @ 17:42 GMT
"knowledge that is not knowable" is a self-contradiction.
"This is what is so confusing about these terms." It is only the physics community that is confused. Communications engineers understand Information Theory - they invented it.
Rob McEachern
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Steve Agnew replied on Aug. 14, 2017 @ 02:43 GMT
Knowledge is a term do describe the various parts of existence. Classically, all knowledge is knowable...but there is some quantum knowledge that is unknowable. That is simply how the quantum universe works...
Maybe we should turn over the interpretation of the universe to communications engineers since you claim they are so much smarter than physicists. Somehow I don't think that will solve anything...
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Georgina Woodward replied on Aug. 14, 2017 @ 09:19 GMT
Hi Steve, your definition of knowledge isn't quite right. I have just read a long article about the analysis of 'knowledge' because you got me wondering what is the correct definition of it. There is no clear consensus it seems, though "knowledge' might be 'justified true belief' with some extra condition or conditions, or instead K-reliabalism's explanation based on reliable cognitive process, or a causal connection between belief and the fact. However I did think a lot of the debate on what it is and isn't could be eliminated by just agreeing on an extra term 'misinformed knowledge', problem solved. I'll link the article so you can take a look yourself.
The Analysis of knowledge: stanford.eduI'm not sure quite what you were referring to by 'some quantum knowledge that is unknowable'. I wonder if there is a connection with what I have been saying about 'sub information'(less than detectable quantum) allowing the effect of an illusion in double slit and half silvered mirror experiments.I would prefer to call that (sub-)information that is undetectable (by us), except indirectly by its interference,(which might be justified true belief but unverifiable at present) rather than unknowable knowledge. Analogy:I can have a justified true belief that a magician is concealing information, I can have that knowledge in that 'JTB" sense but not in the reliable cognitive process sense, because the information receipt is necessary for the cognitive process providing the knowledge.
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Georgina Woodward replied on Aug. 14, 2017 @ 10:38 GMT
JMB: Justified Misinformed Belief: Misinformed knowledge
JTB: Justified True Belief: Knowledge
This is helpful in stopping the arguments about what is and isn't knowledge when the thinker is misinformed but has a justified belief. It is also possible to see that JTB can change to JMB when additional information is available. IE what was true for the known data set is not true for the expanded data set E.g. All swans are white -until the first black swan is found. And the other way around, supposed (e.g. according to available data and expert opinion) JMB can change to JTB when more facts are available at a later time. E.g. a high fat diet can be healthy. I think this recognition of how the categories are not necessarily permanently fixed but change with the information that is available is useful for science too. With that extra JMB term, What was knowledge is not becoming not knowledge or non knowledge but misinformed knowledge when superseded.
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 14, 2017 @ 17:28 GMT
Steve said "Somehow I don't think that will solve anything... "
It would at least put an end to all the ludicrous interpretations proffered by physicists; i.e. retro-causality, an unobservable multiverse, collisions between unseen universes in the unseen dimensions of string theory, spooky action at a distance, etc.
Rob McEachern
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Steve Agnew replied on Aug. 15, 2017 @ 04:30 GMT
Look...I love it that there is so much interest in knowledge...I am a purveyor of knowledge...but there are many things that are unknowable.
Why is the universe the way that it is? Why are we here at all? Why is it us who are here right now and not someone else?
There is many more famous unknowable knowledge out that beside quantum that no one seems to mind. But when it comes to quantum unknowable knowledge...oh, that cannot be!
Look...our universe is complex and has many different explanations and those explanations are not all consistent...except for aethertime...
Once again...classically, all knowledge is knowable and the universe is therefore determinate and certain. Quantum knowledge is not all knowable and therefore the future is uncertain even though the future is probable.
Classical philosophy is really not that useful with quantum knowledge since classical philosophy is largely determinate. There is often a confusion about what is fundamentally knowable but just not yet known and what is fundamentally unknowable...
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Robert H McEachern replied on Aug. 15, 2017 @ 12:21 GMT
"classically, all knowledge is knowable"
Classically, knowledge is that which *is* known. Thus it follows that all knowledge is knowable and that which is "fundamentally unknowable" is not knowledge and never can be.
Rob McEachern
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Georgina Woodward replied on Aug. 15, 2017 @ 21:21 GMT
Steve, I think you are thinking about the uncertainty of both position and momentum. It is worth thinking about how measurements are conducted at macroscopic and quantum scales. For the macroscopic object a course grained scale is used that is appropriate for the scale of the object. A football for example would not have its position measured in nano-meters. So tiny variations in position, such as thermal vibration or changes in shape due to air pressure variation are lost in the generalized course grained measurement. Macroscopic measurements can be made without touching the object itself, such as using a camera. The position relates to position at emission of the em radiation not receipt; Inconsequential at everyday distances and speeds because of the extremely small difference(as light speed is so fast)- but again this is a matter of the scale to which attention is being paid. The position of the macroscopic object isn't exactly known but what is known by measurement is considered good enough; scale appropriate. If the macroscopic object itself was measured the situation would potentially be the same as for quantum experiments, as interaction with the measuring apparatus would affect the object. Even though it would be possible to use a very small delicate senor that would make very little difference, some energy would have to lost in the interaction if the smallest scales are thought about. However because the measurement is scale appropriate such considerations are excluded.
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Steve Agnew replied on Aug. 16, 2017 @ 04:13 GMT
I am not completely certain why this topic is of such interest. Of course the uncertainty principle deals largely with position and momentum, the standard quantum conjugates. Aethertime deals with matter and action, which are the standard quantum conjugates of aethertime.
But what is classical knowledge? Only that which is known?...Hardly. Classical knowledge also includes that which is not yet known but is knowable. Classically, there is no other knowledge besides that which is knowable...but quantum knowledge comes along and spoils everything. Quantum knowledge includes that which is not knowable and therefore violates a basic premise of classical philosophy.
The questions of why the universe is the way that it is and why we exist and why it is us and not someone else that exists right here right now represent unknowable knowledge. We must simply believe in the universe the way that it is and we must simply believe that we exist and we must simply believe that it is us and not someone else that exists right here right now.
With these beliefs, we anchor our consciousness and then better predict the future...
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Georgina Woodward replied on Aug. 16, 2017 @ 05:14 GMT
The point I was trying to make Steve, is that the cut off in know-ability applies to objects of all scales. However because it is so small in comparison to a large object the accuracy of the measurement is never taken to that extreme of measureabilty. What we know for macroscopic objects is approximations, they can be really good approximation but still not absolute to the smallest possible resolution of measurement. The classical 'we can know these values with certainty" is based on the certain values being acceptable scale appropriate approximations.
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Steve Agnew replied on Aug. 17, 2017 @ 03:48 GMT
The question is very simple...does a bit of noise come from a single source or an uncertain superposition of sources?
This is at the core of quantumology and does not have to do with the smallest possible resolution of measurement. Classical Shannon noise always comes from a single source while quantum phase noise is necessarily due to a superposition of two or more sources and therefore is uncertain.
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Steve Agnew replied on Sep. 1, 2017 @ 03:28 GMT
You gotta love it when replies stop cold...
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Robert H McEachern replied on Sep. 2, 2017 @ 16:12 GMT
"Classical Shannon noise always comes from a single source"
That is completely untrue. In
Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum signaling, the communications signaling technique is specifically designed to force that to be untrue; all the hundreds or even thousands of other signals within (overlapping) any given signal's bandwidth, are just multiple, simultaneous, sources of noise as far as any one given signal is concerned. Most modern wireless communications are based upon this property.
Rob McEachern
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Steve Agnew replied on Sep. 3, 2017 @ 22:52 GMT
You are right...I should have been more specific. Only when bit of Shannon noise is equivalent to a single photon is my statement true. A single photon of noise comes from a superposition of sources while a single Shannon photon can only come from a single source.
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Robert H McEachern replied on Sep. 4, 2017 @ 14:23 GMT
A photon is not noise - regardless of how it was sourced. It is a photon. It is no more a photon of noise, than a coin is a heads or a tails. It is only the actions of the observer/receiver, that DECIDES to treat a photon as either noise or non-noise, or decides to treat a coin as either a heads or a non-heads, that determines the observational outcome and thus what a photon or coin *is* (in other words, what it REPRESENTS) in the mind of the observer.
That is the entire point of Shannon's insight; the recovery of all information is entirely based on the "mind-set", the a priori deterministic response, of the receiver/observer to its input.
If an observer ignorantly persists in treating its input as noise, then it *IS* noise. But only for an observer that fails to realize that the observer does not *have* to persist in treating the input in that manner.
That is what the physics community has utterly failed to understand about Shannon's fundamental insight in regards to the nature of information and measurement theory: There is no law of nature that necessitates treating a measurement *as* a measurement - an observer is free to treat it as a symbol, that represents whatever the observer has decided to represent by such a measurement. And when observers start to take such actions, they start to behave in ways entirely unfamiliar to physicists and unrepresentable by the continuous differential equations that mathematical physicists are so enamored with. Quantum Theory cannot describe such behaviors. That is why quantum theorists have been so totally confused about why their equations fail to adequately describe their own behaviors, even though they do adequately describe the behaviors of the particles from which they, the observers, are constructed.
Rob McEachern
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Steve Agnew replied on Sep. 8, 2017 @ 23:06 GMT
First you say a photon is not noise...then you say it is noise if the observer treats it as noise. So now you seem to have it both ways.
A photon is a fundamental measure of reality and measurement includes both information as well as noise and so photons convey both information and noise. We seem to be agreeing except for the source of the photon.
A Shannon photon comes from a single source while a quantum photon comes from a superposition of sources. There is nothing wrong with believing in a determinate Shannon world except that it leaves out the underlying quantum nature of reality.
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Robert H McEachern replied on Sep. 9, 2017 @ 16:59 GMT
Over two thousand years ago, Socrates and Plato pointed out the important distinction between the way something *is* and the way the same thing *seems* to an observer.
"A photon is a fundamental measure of reality" No. It *is* a reality, not a "measure of reality"; a measure is something else entirely, produced by something else, like an observer, via an interaction with the photon.
"a quantum photon comes from a superposition of sources" No. It only *seems* to come from a superposition (like a ventriloquist's voice seeming to come from a dummy), but should never have been treated mathematically as a superposition, in the first place. There is no reason whatsoever, to believe that such a mathematical superposition exists physically. The introduction of mathematical superpositions was done entirely out of convenience (it made it easier to solve the partial differential equations) not out of necessity. Communications engineers (the inventors of Information Theory), long ago, figured out that describing sequences of measurements as superpositions, was useless for extracting the information content of those measurements. Instead, they developed modulation theory to describe such measurements, precisely to enable the recovery of information. Now that physicists have finally (decades too late) recognized that Information Theory has something important to say about measurements and thus physics, it is time for the physics community to reformulate their theories, without the confusion of persisting in the inappropriate use of superposition-based, mathematical descriptions of measurements of reality.
Rob McEachern
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Steve Agnew replied on Oct. 11, 2017 @ 04:30 GMT
Well, it is chemists and not communication engineers who use quantum theory to bond matter in molecules and information theory is simply not up to bonding.
Bonding of matter is a result of quantum and it is very difficult to bond matter without quantum.
You can believe a photon does not come from a superposition of sources, but that is the truth. Classical determinism is a very good approximation for physical reality, but quantum is really the truth...
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