23 Apr 2007
Quantum Physics Parts Ways With Reality

Drat, there goes Life, imitating Art again!

"The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood-and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess' undergarments leap one foot simultaneously to the left in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy. Many respectable physicists said they wouldn't stand for that sort of thing, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties."
  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

PhysicsWeb has news guaranteed to induce headache in those wedded to the reality of, well, reality. Researchers from the University of Vienna have shown the violation of a stronger form of Bell's inequality known as Leggett's inequality. The result means that we must not only give up Einstein's hope of "no spooky action at a distance," we must also give up (some of) the idea that the world exists when we are not looking. From the article: "[Studies] have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell's inequality does not tell specifically which assumption — realism, locality, or both — is discordant with quantum mechanics." From the Nature abstract: "Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned." Only subscribers to Nature, alas, can know what features those are, as PhysicsWeb doesn't tell us.

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