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Article #4426Re: Wheeler's delayed choice refuting Ramsay's FTL objection.
From: Jack Sarfatti
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1992 05:12
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1992 05:12
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3713 bytes
OK Ramsay here it is. Wheeler writing in Law Without Law. He's got a simple Mach-Zehnder interferometer (e.g., Born & Wolf 7.5 p. 314 Fig. 7.51 is like Wheeler's Fig.4) "THE BEAM SPLITTER Of all the idealized experiments ... none is simpler than the beam splitter of Fig.4. With the final half-silverd mirror in place the photodetector at the lower right goes click-click as the successive photons arrive but the adjacent counter registers nothing." This is the key point! I Wheeler is right here, your general point about the phases cancelling out is wrong. If Wheeler is right then my quantum connection communication experiment will work because: 1. My experiment is equivlaent to an improved delayed choice double-slit experiment. Improved because I can delay the choice as to whether there are complementary fringes at the two receiver counters until after the receiver photon is counted but before its twin transmitter photon is counted. 2. Wheeler's device has two counters, just like my two receiver counters! One of Wheeler's counters has quantum "fringe" probability p(+) = [1 + cos(phi)]/2. His other counter has the complementary fringe probability p(-) = [1 - cos(phi)]/2 The case he is talking about in the text is for a sharp value of phi = 0, for example. According to you, this is impossible because Wheelers photon will land at different spots on each counter's photo-sensitive surface and so there will be a random uniform distribution of phi's which will cancel out cos(phi) - hence Wheeler is wrong if you are right! According to youe physical understanding of the limits imposed by the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle" Wheeler's probabilities should also always be 1/2. But Wheeler is right Ramsay - "and I am right. And we're as right as right can be!" (Mikado G&S). In my experiment the photon pair effect adds a factor of sin(2theta) to the interference term cos(phi) in Wheeler's formula (theta is the mismatch in orientations of the two crystals that scatter each photon in the same connected pair. Wheeler's two paths from his first beam splitter correspond to the e and o paths of my transmitter photon a (whose o path polarization is rotated 90 degrees by half wave plate. There are no fringes at the single transmitter counter because of the distant orthogonal correlations to the receiver photon b. Wheeler's two counters correspond precisely to my two receiver photon b counters because it is the receiver photon b that gets the phase information phi (also theta!) from the indistinguishability of the e and o paths of its twin photon a. The entanglement connection between photons a and b is a communication channel. There is spin disentanglement by the half wave plate, but not space disentanglement which is the bit link. The phase information slips out from under (formally it's the distributive law of algebra) the a photon and winds up in the b photon. It is phase information that is communicated on the nonlocal connection - and it does not use any wave front propagating directly between transmitter and receiver. If you like, an advanced wave from future detection of a goes back in time to the original emission of the a-b pair to give photon b the phi and theta information which is then propagated forward in time to receiver by a retarded wave.
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Newsgroups: sci.physics Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!well!sarfatti From: sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti) Subject: Re: Wheeler's delayed choice refuting Ramsay's FTL objection. Message-ID: <BxFnsn.Ivz@well.sf.ca.us> Sender: news@well.sf.ca.us Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 05:12:22 GMT Lines: 63