The quantum world is fundamentally different from our everyday world. The quantum world behaves according to quantum physics, and our eve...
The quantum world is fundamentally different from our everyday world. The quantum world behaves according to quantum physics, and our everyday world behaves according to classical physics. There are irresolvable differences between the two physics, and hence, between the two worlds.
There are at least two fundamental differences between the two worlds. One of that is that the classical world is predictable. If we know the initial state, we can predict the final state as well. Of course, we cannot predict everything in the classical world, but this uncertainty is not coming from the physical laws of this world. It comes from our limited knowledge of the initial state. If we would know "everything" about the initial state, we could predict the final state with absolute certainty. And there is no fundamental limit of our knowledge to know everything in the classical world.
The quantum world is different. There is a fundamental limitation of our knowledge about the quantum world. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation defines this limit. Our knowledge has theoretical limits about knowing everything, primarily because the laws of the waves govern the quantum world. The laws of the waves have a fundamental limitation on knowing all of its parameters. And the quantum world is the world of the waves.
After we recognized the wave-like behavior of the quantum world, we accepted the limitation of our knowledge about this world also. Because we have limitations on the measurement, we cannot acquire absolute knowledge about an initial state, cannot predict the final state either with absolute precision in the quantum world.
Is the initial state a concrete, defined state, and only we cannot acquire this concrete and defined knowledge about it? It is a futile, irresponsible question. The waves behave like that, and that is.
The quantum world yet not the world of the chaos, and still governed by laws, because we have exact probabilities on this world. We cannot predict the next state of a given system in absolute certainty, but we can sneak into its reality and define laws, which predict with probabilities what will happen. Well, it is a strange world, but acceptable, we can even get used to it.
However, there is even a more divisive difference between the quantum world and the classical world. And in this case, we do not even have a grabbing handrail, a definitive explanation, like the wave behavior before, to accept this aspect. The quantum world is non-local. Or, at least, it seems to be. And the non-locality defined not by just theory, but by experiment, by the physical reality too.
What are non-local means? In the classical world, if an event happened, this event is defined only by what was in the close vicinity. An event cannot be influenced by any other events, only those, which are close enough to have the ability to modify that particular event. The locality does not mean that every affecting event must be next to the given event. However, there is a golden rule that determines what can be affected by what. It is the maximum speed limit. Our physical world has a speed limit, which limits the ability of any effect to provide an actual impact on a particular event according to the cause and effect law. If two events are farther away from each other than that maximum speed limit would allow producing interaction between them, the two events cannot be correlated in any way. They are independent of each other fundamentally, one's cause cannot be influenced by the other's effect. The classical world is like this. The fundamental local cause and effect law governs it. The quantum world is not such that.
The quantum world is non-local. It means, in the quantum world, there are events, which seem to be related, but they could not be influenced by each other according to the classical yet fundamental laws. Non-locality is the world of the entangled quantum particles. These particles are somehow correlated, "know about each other" without the limitation of their distance. They can be any far from each other, yet the interaction with one of those somehow affects the other as well. And it has serious consequences on how our world, at least our quantum world works. These consequences are disturbing like local realism is not a valid statement in the quantum world.
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen suggested a solution to this problem in the EPR paper. They suggested that quantum physics is an incomplete theory and the quantum particles must have operating rules, which the quantum physics cannot discuss. These are the hidden variables. According to the EPR document, because quantum physics is incomplete, must have another theory, which can explain the entanglement state using only local parameters, a local set of rules, which determine the behavior of the strangely behaving entangled particles. Otherwise, the quantum world would be non-local and need the "spooky action in the distance," which cannot be a valid statement. Then it came Bell's inequality.
The Bell's inequality quantifies the probability values of the entangled quantum particles, in the case if they would be driven independently by local variables, a local set of rules. Bell's insight was ingenious, because his theory referred to all local parameters, a local set of rules, even for those, which we did not discover yet. According to Bell's inequality, probability values, which should be measured if the quantum world would be local, are different from the actual measured values measured by real experiments on the entangled particles.
Bell's inequality is a groundbreaking discovery. It proved that in the case of the entangled quantum particles, they could not have such a set of local rules, which could determine the states of the particles independently from each other, according to the measured reality. However, somehow it happens anyway. Somehow, when we determine one of an entangled particle's properties with measurement, the other's property becomes defined too with that measurement. The unavoidable conclusion is that they have to have a connection, a force, a something between them, which able to influence one member of the pair's states with the other's state without the concern of the distance of the particles.
It is an unbelievable fact. It means that the local cause and effect, as of how we know it in our everyday world, the locality not valid in the quantum world. This observation opens the door to a world with strange possibilities.
However, maybe there is another explanation for the non-locality. It could be the third option.
What if the particle's local rule would say that: always do what the other particle is doing. Actually, the entangled particles are doing the opposite things, but it does not change the principle. In this third option, the local laws would govern both entangled particles to stay synced with the other at all times. The stay-synced property does not affect Bell's inequality, because their local laws do not define the entangled particles' states independently from each other. A common condition defines the stay-synced property, and which is maintained and stays in the same all the time.
However, this setting looks like does not change the non-locality phenomena. Each entangled particle must know what the paired particle is doing, from any distance. However, the stay-in-sync variable may change the game entirely.
The "spooky action in the distance" property affects the entangled particles only; it is what the entanglement really means. The entangled particles have an intimate relationship with each other. They are born at the same time, in the same place, in the same way. They are like identical twins. They knew everything about each other at the time when they born. They are born from the same quantum state. They can be in a synchronized state at the time when they born. What if they could maintain this synced relationship all of their lifetime?
Entanglement is a very delicate relationship, what complicated to maintain in the real world, where interactions happen all the time. It can be maintained, but only in separation from any disturbing circumstances. The entangled particles easily disentangle from each other if any of them participate in an interaction. It is suggesting, that the entangled state maintains a unique state for each entangled particles. This way, entanglement could allow and mean an all-time-related, a synced state for each of the paired particles in the entanglement relationship, in any distance from each other and without any additional action between them. They can always do what the other is doing, all the time until an interaction happens, and the synced state, the entanglement breaks.
However, there is another problem if we try to understand and explain the non-locality phenomena by synchronicity. Quantum mechanics says, when we perform a measurement on a quantum particle, its probability wave collapses at the moment of the measurement and takes a random value from what is possible, according to the probability laws of the quantum mechanics. We can never know what that value will be before the measurement actually happens. We can calculate the likelihood of any possible values, but which one will take place actually, we cannot know in advance. In what state a probability wave collapses to is an unpredictable event. Or, at least, according to the quantum theory, which is the most precise theory we ever invented. How can a member of the entangled particles know, to what state the other particle's probability waves collapse into, randomly?
The synced model could be an explanation for this phenomenon, too. This approach can be the third case of the explanation of the entanglement, if we would find a corresponding physical process, a theory, which can act random-like, can mimic the quantum behavior, but it is really not random, but deterministic, as the synced model requires it. The synchronization, which could save the locality for our everyday world, also gives a direction, which may drive us to that theory. That is the topic of a following thought.
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