From: juan <juan.g71@gmail.com>
On Thu, 4 Aug 2016 21:58:11 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <
jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: juan <
juan.g71@gmail.com>
> >> Apparently, that is true. The tantalizing thing is that SOMETHING
> >> APPEARS (information, of some nature) to be transferred between
> >> one particle and another, distant one, and yet there seems to be
> >> no way to use that transfer to actually transmit useful FTL
>
> > Which sounds rather absurd no?
> Certainly that sounds absurd! It IS absurd!
> Oh, OK. So I don't need to bother with patently false theories.
> Because that's what 'absurd' implies.
No, you obviously don't understand. Something can be "absurd" and yet
quite real. "Absurd" merely explains how we react to something we do not
understand.
Simple example of thing that appears "absurd": To somebody in 6th grade
math, the question "what is the square root of negative 1" looks absurd.
But it isn't absurd to a 12th grader taking calculus.
>> Which explains a lot
>> of the fascinationhas for entangled photons and related phenomena.
> I don't follow. I don't think absurd ideas are 'fascinating'.
At one point, the idea that Earth is flat was the received wisdom, and an
allergation that Earth is round was "absurd". Einstein's theory of
relativity was "absurd" to people who grew up on Newtonian theory.
The idea that nuclei in atoms would decay, emitting huge
amounts of energy, was "absurd" in 1900. By 1946, nuclear bombs
had killed well over 100,000 people.
> And at any rate it should be obvious that absurd ideas have no
> place in rational discourse, or 'science'.
Until they do.
> Einstein never liked the quantum-mechanics idea, famously declaring
> "God does not play dice with theuniverse".
> A sensible remark, if you take out the god bullshit. And as I
> think you know, there are many so called 'interpretations' of
> QM and not all of them are absurd (i.e. patently false).
Einstein was wrong, and ultimately other scientists were right. And they
confirmed that, with experiments and further theory.
>> Unfortunately for Einstein, dice are actually played.
> So says one faction of the 'scientific' establishment. Just like
> statists say that the state is legitimate.
Scientific dispute exists. It's normal.
Curiously, in the 1920's, a Russian scientist named Lysenko believed
that characteristics could be acquired by an organism far more quickly
Soon enough, he was considered a fraud, a joke. And he was, but eventually the phenomon
of methylation of the DNA strand ('epigenetics') was discovered.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
In 1978, I visited the Smithsonian Institution for the first (and so far last) time. One
of the exhibits was a display of "quack" medical equipment, including gas-discharge
tubes that were activated with high-voltage and were said to control pain. Quack
medical treatment. By 1996, I was working at a company which designed and built TENS
units (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator) which reduce paid by using small
What did you say, above? "So says one faction of the 'scientific' establishment."
> >Either this is ordinary EM
> > phenomena that propagate at the so called speed of light, or
> > it is something else which could propagate at 'faster than
> > light' speed.
>> It's at least 10,000 times 'c' the speed of light in a vacuum,
>> according toexperiments involving fiber optics. It might be
>> essentially infinite.
> It can't be infinite
Why not? Have you ever heard the term, "phase velocity"?
>, but it certainly can be faster than
> light.
Prior to relatively recently, people generally thought nothing could travel
faster than 'c'. They thought that travel faster than 'c' was "absurd".
> So somebody actually did the measurements?
Yes. They determined that the 'speed' of whatever was going on had to be at least
10,000 times 'c', but they couldn't determine an upper limit to that value.
> > > If 'something' is moving at faster than light speed, then some
> > > information must be being transmitted. If no information is
> > > being transmitted, then by definition, there's no way to measure
> > > speed and the claim makes no sense.
>> Well, that's the problem.
>> Knowing that SOMETHING is being
>> transmitted, and actually USING that method to transmit useful
>> information, are (quite strangely) two different things.
> If you know that 'something' was transmitted, then al least one
> bit of information was transmitted, no?
Like I said, there's a difference between knowing something is happening,
and being able to actually employ that for useful purposes.
If I see a horse running in the prairie, and yet I cannot capture him, I
cannot use him to travel at horse-speed rather than man-speed.
Even in the 1s00s, people knew that light traveled at a finite
(non-infinite) velocity. Hint: It involved Jupiter's moons.
But until the invention of the Fleming valve (old name for an 'electron
tube') and then radio, people didn't know how to transmit information
from Europe to America in a few milliseconds.
Curiously, Thomas Edison really screwed up by not recognizing the value of
the "Edison Effect" (which he wasn't actually the first to recognize)
> Again, either information is being transmitted at FTL speed or
> not. So, what is being claimed here?
We simply don't know how to use entangled photons to transmit information
at greater than 'c'. And there is no guarantee we will ever know how to do
so.
And if you believe that something must definitely be one thing, or another,
I will have to introduce you to Schrodinger's Cat.
Jim Bell