I certainly can't help with the technical part. I suspect the real problem is somehow an outgrowth of the whole "lies to children" issue.
Physicists learn how to describe the behavior of the universe by learning the MATH of it all. The math simply doesn't map very well to the concepts that monkey-brained creatures such as ourselves evolved to work with. We spent 4 billion years learning to dodge objects hurtling towards us, so classical mechanics is nice and intuitive, but once you start getting involved with the stuff that no one ever had any idea really *existed* until 150 years ago, we simply are not BUILT to get it.
I suspect the people who've devoted their lives to a field of study which ultimately cannot be described in any way which "makes intuitive sense" experience the same epistemological frustration that smart dabblers do, but they get through it because they know it WORKS. And they know with such certainty that "it works," and it was such a great deal of effort to get to that point of understanding, and when someone challenges them to reframe a set of concepts into more intuitive language, and they know they can't do it, they feel threatened.
Feynman used to say if you can't explain it to a child or a grandmother, you don't really understand it. And if he was right about that, that means no one "really" understands quantum physics. They just know how to do it, and they know it works. And that's good enough.
But it's got to be a major blow to the self-esteem, in some sense. If the people who understand physics "as well as anyone," and they STILL don't "really" understand according to Feynman's postulate, that must be extremely vexing.
I have a similar question about the wave model of light, rather like a few other members of the lunatic fringe who insist that for such a model to make any sense, there *must* be a medium involved.
Ultimately, doesn't this come down to some kind of "crisis of faith"? The laws of physics *must* be correct. Asking a pro to explain exactly why their confidence in those laws is different than religious faith in god is surely the quicker and simpler way to irritate them...
I'm not a physicist, but (you knew that "but" was coming a mile off, didn't you?) ... something that has always intrigued me is how in quantum theories the bosons operate over such different (to us) scales. You get the gluons "gluing" atomic nuclei together even though the positive charges should rip them apart. To our human senses, they are operating over unimaginably short distances and timescales. And then you get photons, which appear to be able to travel unimaginably large distances over millennia. Yet I would say that from the point of view* of the bosons themselves, they both take zero time to travel, and that therefore the distance over which they act is essentially zero. So perhaps the entangled photons are only experiencing action at a distance because to them distance is meaningless?
Perhaps our perception of the universe is wrong.
My 2p-worth. (we don't have cents where I live. I probably don't have sense, either.)
David
*(I said "I'm not a physicist", so allow me to anthropomorphise these fundamental particles and give them a point of view!)
The Hausdorff/nonlocality tension is genuinely underappreciated. The standard deflection is that entanglement doesnt transmit information so locality is preserved in the causal sense, but that sidesteps the topological question entirely. If distant measurements are correlated without a lightcone-constrained mechanism, the manifold structure has to accomodate states that arent separable in the way Hausdorff topology requires. Reminds me of debates in distributed systems where eventual consistency breaks assumptions about state isolation. The real question is whether the manifold is the right abstraction at all or if were forcing quantum phenomena into classical geometric containers.
Hausdorffness and correlations (even perfect ones) are two different things.
There is no requirement that statements about the neighborhoods around one point have no bearing on the statements about the neighborhoods of another. All that is required is that certain things, like limits of sequences at a point are unique. Nothing is barring the limits of a sequence taken at different points from having some sort of global symmetry.
The main point is that you appear here to be confusing the separability of points in space-time, just in the sense of how we can tell them apart (corresponding to your ab?use of the word "Hausdorff") and locality of a theory based on that space-time (which refers to some limit on how things happening at one point in space-time can affect those at another). Locality of a theory is a property that places some limit on how quickly actions at one place can affect the situation far away, but no such limit is required in order to tell events apart in either space or time. For example, I could still compute the distance from my home to the grocery store on the basis of how long it takes me to walk there - even if I had some way of instantly checking on the availability of a product and having them set it aside for me to pick up whenever I eventually arrive.
I seem to recall you offering this subject previously as a topic for extra credit on another issue, no...? In any case, if, as the references in Wikipedia's 'Bell's theorem' article (with the maths!) show, from Copenhagen to many-worlds to non-local variables to superdeterminism – not to mention Wiki's 'string theory' article (even longer, with more options) – real physicists don't seem able to agree on 'the answer', either, and maybe David Raynor's comment about this being a perceptual limitation leaves it as a more phenomenological question, with us being dogs that are unable to see red/green because we only have the cones for yellow and blue...
One answer to this problem could be String Theory. It talks about multiple dimensions as well as stuff going on below measurable size, and Calabi-Yau manifolds Manifolds. And there's also Cauchy Manifolds.
A huge problem with String Theory was that its sole testable prediction was supersymmetry---and this was falsified. Then Ed Witten muddied the water further with 'M Theory', which actually isn't a theory at all, but a suggestion that there _might_ be some sort of unifying theory, which is hardly satisfactory. In 50 years, String Theory doesn't seem to have produced anything of substance. Perhaps Peter Woit and Lee Smolin were right to be skeptical?
Yes. I have to admit I haven't followed it in years. Nor read Smolin's book. I will give it up (I don't really like non-verifiable science either). But coincidentally, today's Nature magazine cover story is about using a string theory methodology to understand vascularization...
I certainly can't help with the technical part. I suspect the real problem is somehow an outgrowth of the whole "lies to children" issue.
Physicists learn how to describe the behavior of the universe by learning the MATH of it all. The math simply doesn't map very well to the concepts that monkey-brained creatures such as ourselves evolved to work with. We spent 4 billion years learning to dodge objects hurtling towards us, so classical mechanics is nice and intuitive, but once you start getting involved with the stuff that no one ever had any idea really *existed* until 150 years ago, we simply are not BUILT to get it.
I suspect the people who've devoted their lives to a field of study which ultimately cannot be described in any way which "makes intuitive sense" experience the same epistemological frustration that smart dabblers do, but they get through it because they know it WORKS. And they know with such certainty that "it works," and it was such a great deal of effort to get to that point of understanding, and when someone challenges them to reframe a set of concepts into more intuitive language, and they know they can't do it, they feel threatened.
Feynman used to say if you can't explain it to a child or a grandmother, you don't really understand it. And if he was right about that, that means no one "really" understands quantum physics. They just know how to do it, and they know it works. And that's good enough.
But it's got to be a major blow to the self-esteem, in some sense. If the people who understand physics "as well as anyone," and they STILL don't "really" understand according to Feynman's postulate, that must be extremely vexing.
I have a similar question about the wave model of light, rather like a few other members of the lunatic fringe who insist that for such a model to make any sense, there *must* be a medium involved.
Ultimately, doesn't this come down to some kind of "crisis of faith"? The laws of physics *must* be correct. Asking a pro to explain exactly why their confidence in those laws is different than religious faith in god is surely the quicker and simpler way to irritate them...
I'm not a physicist, but (you knew that "but" was coming a mile off, didn't you?) ... something that has always intrigued me is how in quantum theories the bosons operate over such different (to us) scales. You get the gluons "gluing" atomic nuclei together even though the positive charges should rip them apart. To our human senses, they are operating over unimaginably short distances and timescales. And then you get photons, which appear to be able to travel unimaginably large distances over millennia. Yet I would say that from the point of view* of the bosons themselves, they both take zero time to travel, and that therefore the distance over which they act is essentially zero. So perhaps the entangled photons are only experiencing action at a distance because to them distance is meaningless?
Perhaps our perception of the universe is wrong.
My 2p-worth. (we don't have cents where I live. I probably don't have sense, either.)
David
*(I said "I'm not a physicist", so allow me to anthropomorphise these fundamental particles and give them a point of view!)
The Hausdorff/nonlocality tension is genuinely underappreciated. The standard deflection is that entanglement doesnt transmit information so locality is preserved in the causal sense, but that sidesteps the topological question entirely. If distant measurements are correlated without a lightcone-constrained mechanism, the manifold structure has to accomodate states that arent separable in the way Hausdorff topology requires. Reminds me of debates in distributed systems where eventual consistency breaks assumptions about state isolation. The real question is whether the manifold is the right abstraction at all or if were forcing quantum phenomena into classical geometric containers.
Hausdorffness and correlations (even perfect ones) are two different things.
There is no requirement that statements about the neighborhoods around one point have no bearing on the statements about the neighborhoods of another. All that is required is that certain things, like limits of sequences at a point are unique. Nothing is barring the limits of a sequence taken at different points from having some sort of global symmetry.
OK, one more recent data point to add yet another wrinkle, an article about ground-state or zero-point energy: https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-quantum-mechanics-nothingness-is-the-potential-to-be-anything-20260105/
The main point is that you appear here to be confusing the separability of points in space-time, just in the sense of how we can tell them apart (corresponding to your ab?use of the word "Hausdorff") and locality of a theory based on that space-time (which refers to some limit on how things happening at one point in space-time can affect those at another). Locality of a theory is a property that places some limit on how quickly actions at one place can affect the situation far away, but no such limit is required in order to tell events apart in either space or time. For example, I could still compute the distance from my home to the grocery store on the basis of how long it takes me to walk there - even if I had some way of instantly checking on the availability of a product and having them set it aside for me to pick up whenever I eventually arrive.
I seem to recall you offering this subject previously as a topic for extra credit on another issue, no...? In any case, if, as the references in Wikipedia's 'Bell's theorem' article (with the maths!) show, from Copenhagen to many-worlds to non-local variables to superdeterminism – not to mention Wiki's 'string theory' article (even longer, with more options) – real physicists don't seem able to agree on 'the answer', either, and maybe David Raynor's comment about this being a perceptual limitation leaves it as a more phenomenological question, with us being dogs that are unable to see red/green because we only have the cones for yellow and blue...
One answer to this problem could be String Theory. It talks about multiple dimensions as well as stuff going on below measurable size, and Calabi-Yau manifolds Manifolds. And there's also Cauchy Manifolds.
A huge problem with String Theory was that its sole testable prediction was supersymmetry---and this was falsified. Then Ed Witten muddied the water further with 'M Theory', which actually isn't a theory at all, but a suggestion that there _might_ be some sort of unifying theory, which is hardly satisfactory. In 50 years, String Theory doesn't seem to have produced anything of substance. Perhaps Peter Woit and Lee Smolin were right to be skeptical?
Yes. I have to admit I haven't followed it in years. Nor read Smolin's book. I will give it up (I don't really like non-verifiable science either). But coincidentally, today's Nature magazine cover story is about using a string theory methodology to understand vascularization...