[Email re
the addition of a link to my Chaotic Ball paper in http://www.aideas.com/space.htm]
From:
c.h.thompson
To:
<pansystemsleon@yahoo.com>
Subject:
Re: From George: Re: From Paul---Caroline's Chaotic Ball
Date:
Monday, May 20, 2002 9:08 AM
Hi George
> I
would like to recommend to everybody to read the chapter
> on
Bell's inequality and Aspect's experiment in Paul Wesley's
> book
"Classical Quantum Theory", which can be ordered
>
directly from the author. (Weiherdammstr.
24,
>
D-78176 Blumberg, GERMANY; Tel.++49-7702.658).
Yes indeed,
I strongly support that suggestion! I
got in touch with him and had a little correspondence after someone had let me
know about his article in Physics Essays on subtraction of accidentals (Wesley,
J P, "Experimental Results of Aspect et al Confirm Classical Local
Causality", Physics Essays
7, 240
(1994)). He sent me his book.
We agree on
a great many things, one of which is that the whole Bell test business has
nothing to do with real physics! You
don't need to know about it as the quantum entanglement it is all about simply
does not happen.
We agree
that Aspect's source would have involved atoms acting coherently, so that it
was not reasonable to assume each pulse of light was one photon, but our ideas
about the nature of light differ. Paul
thinks each pulse was many tiny photons, whilst I think the photon does not
exist and we have continuous electromagnetic oscillations.
We agree
that Aspect had no right to subtract accidentals without giving us more
information, though Paul is wrong about the subtraction accounting for ALL his
results. It accounts for two out of the
three. The second
experiment,
with two detectors on each side, needs another explanation, and this is where
my Chaotic Ball comes
in. The subtraction here increases the
amount of the violation but even without it there is some.
We disagree
slightly about hidden variables. I
suspect that we are using the term slightly differently -- the "hidden
variables" in the class of models I consider are (as in Clauser and
Horne's work) just shared parameters from the source that, together with the
detector setting, determine the probability of detection. He has, I think, got the
mathematics
a little wrong too, unless he has spotted a short cut that I have missed. Looking at it again, I definitely think my
approach is the only logical one, though somehow he gets to the same
answer! So, unless you
can prove
me wrong, ignore his page 144 and look instead at Appendix C of my paper, quant-ph/9903066 .
Paul is
misleading, too, on the matter of claims to have detected single photons. The published papers DO quote the estimated
efficiencies of the detectors --- always very small, though (since his
"photons" are smaller than standard QM ones) not as small as he
thinks they "really" are. His
argument is that when a photomultiplier registers something it always requires
at least 4 "photons". The
logic of Bell tests does not, incidentally, really require that the experiments
handle single photons. It works equally
well if you substitute "light pulses", so long as these arrive with
gaps in between so that pairs can be identified unambiguously.
Much of the
book is devoted to defence of his photon ideas, but its 345 pages contain a
wealth of other material. It includes
insightful discussions on many topics, from Heisenberg Uncertainty to Fresnel
drag, wave packets, standing light waves, and the supposed evidence for change
of mass of the electron. Plenty of
references too. Highly recommended!
Cheers
Caroline