Nonlocality

[Kriminal99]

Suppose I was blind. I perceived the world through sound only.

 

One day I wandered into WW2 but some how was miraculously prevented from getting hit with any bullets. I would hear someone scream, ask if they were ok, and then hear the gunshot of the gun that hit them.

 

I try to place the location of a bullet endlessly ricocheting around me at speeds faster than sound. The bullet would hit a place far from me, and then one near me. I would hear the near ricochet first and the "previous" (by light reckoning) far one second. If it kept going at these speeds, I might hear all kinds of noises completely out of order.

 

But because the world is deterministic (ie cause and effect exists, a fundamental assumption of probability theory), I could calculate likelihoods of where the bullet might be based on either my statistical observations or based on some model of the room.

 

Me and another blind friend organized an experiment. One held a rifle and the other was near a target very far down range with ear muffs on. The target person measured if there was hole in the target at a given time, and the rifle person either pulled or did not pull the trigger at at a given time. It was repeated numerous times, and each time we got together after and compared results.

 

Miraculously, we find that there was a hole in the target if and only if the rifleman pulled the trigger.

 

So point being, nothing about quantum mechanics is abnormal or threatens determinism/ cause and effect as long as non locality is allowed.

 

Do we have any reason to believe subatomic particles obey locality? The assumptions made for relativity were based on information sampled from the macro world, and limited interaction with subatomic particles. However to claim locality for sub atomic particles, we would be extending predictions based on those samples to a population we did not sample from. This is a fundamental violation of probability theory.

 

Thus, we cannot claim locality for sub-atomic particles.

[freeztar]

I'm having trouble reconciling your blind-shooter analogy with sub-atomic locality. Can you please elaborate? It sounds like you have a great point here, but I've yet to see it. ;)

[Erasmus00]

Do we have any reason to believe subatomic particles obey locality?

 

Yes, hundreds of thousands of experiments. Modern particle physics is built on locality and special relativity and it has been verified over and over again.