🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <650@pbhyc.UUCP> djo@pbhyc.UUCP (Dan'l Oakes) writes:
>In article <766@klipper.cs.vu.nl> biep@cs.vu.nl (J. A. "Biep" Durieux) writes:
>>... So the
>>information that you observed your particle must have travelled in
>>zero time to the other half-wit. FTL information transfer. <Applause>
>
>... Physicists
>become so used to manipulating equations that they confuse them with
>the particles they describe.
>...  The particle
>has been spinning very happily left all along. 

OK, it's time somebody brought up Bell.

Starting from the assumption that there is no superluminal linkage in
your apparatus and that particle pairs are in definite states while
unobserved, relationships among probabilities of observed particle
state conditional on apparatus configuration are entailed.  It's too
sad for words, but certain of these relationships (Bell-type inequalities)
are strongly contradicted by experiment.  

So, everybody, what do you want to give up: the impossibility of FTL
information transfer, that the particle was spinning happily left all
along, or the relevance of mathematics for physics?  Oakes sounds like
he might opt for doing without the last, but it's interesting to note
that the Bell inequalities don't depend on the formalism of quantum
mechanics at all (though QM does correctly predict the observed
probabilities).

--Paul kube@berkeley.edu, ...!ucbvax!kube