Musings on Bell

"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" So, I've officially joined the ranks of online science cranks with some musings on Bell's inequalities. I am actually pretty much a firm believer in his result, but it was a thought I wanted to expand somewhat further.

I've been right and wrong in the past. I was using a linear transformation from digital circuits to CNF in SAT solving and was pointing out that years before other people noticed that existed, turns out it was a rediscovery of Tseitin mid-sixties; I pointed out that all you need for embedding an impure program into a pure language is a form of composition, so the natural choice for that would be function composition over monads, and Haskell programmers are using applicatives instead. Then a host of small and big views on compiler construction, often as right as they were wrong.

So, the QM thing started off with the notion 'what if superposition is a form of oscillation?' Turns out that doesn't matter much and you need to prove Bell 'wrong' in both cases. A pretty tall order. Especially since this is way out of my field.

But I decided to write it down anyway, maybe it goes somewhere:
https://twitter.com/egel_language/status/1550579321160491013

That QM entanglement thing

While I slowly change a few lines in the Egel interpreter source code from time to time, I am thinking more about QM these days. For whatever reason. So, my braindead musings in all public light for people to laugh at below.

I couldn't help but think: QM is exactly what you get for describing 'spinning' or 'oscillating' phenomena with probability distributions.

The metaphor I have in my mind: Envision you're on a nice tropical island with a lighthouse. The light the lighthouse casts on the island is a spinning phenomenon. 50% of the time it faces you, 50% of the time it doesn't. The 'state', or rather 'behaviour', of that lighthouse can be described with a ket, and letting your hermitian loose on it will confirm that it's a 50/50 chance that you'll 'see' the light passing in front of you.

Now suppose you're on an island with two lighthouses, One lighthouse faces you 70% of the time, another 40% of the time. (The analogy with QM breaks here a bit but fix the behaviour of the lighthouses to fit your fantasy or understanding of QM.)

So when you make measurements of one lighthouse you'll know the probability distribution of the other lighthouse, without any 'spooky action at a distance.' I just don't see it.

ADDENDUM: These are indeed musings on Bell's inequalities.  I agree with all that. But my idea is: Bell showed that there are no hidden variables, there cannot be a definite state satisfying the inequalities. What he didn't show was that there cannot be an 'oscillating' state (resulting in related probability distributions.)

ADDENDUM2: Dumbing it further down. Consider a fair coin, a ket faithfully describes: this is a system that once observed will have a 50/50 chance of returning heads or tails. Bell says there are no hidden variables in there. True, the system's behaviour, not state, is completely and faithfully described. Because there is no definite state until you flip it.

ADDENDUM3: The basic observation is that the difference between a superposition and an 'oscillating' state isn't that big. But where Bell says, reject local+real, I would say, local+real makes more sense so just accept that what you're studying is 'oscillating'. To make that stick is of course another issue.