evil3penguin

This is actually part of why I posted because I've heard people acting as though our consciousness is effecting the outcome and I don't like it. Here's a video I've seen from the infamously gay dr quantum that says "the electron decided to act differently as though it was aware it was being watched" I think this type of statement is very unscientific. Continually throughout history we have been faced with things that appear mysterious and later we figure them out. Whenever we come to the conclusion that it is caused by something mystical which is unexplainable it slows the progress of science. Even Newton said something like the planets were designed by god so we would not be able to understand them further. I think learning from the past will teach us that the world is probably much more deterministic than we think it is and that we will need more theories to describe the particles smaller than those described by quantum mechanics, particles which we haven't discovered yet.

I've seen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem before and just as before I came to the same conclusion. For Bell's theorem the correlation of spins calculated from QM makes perfect sense to me you don't even need these long explanations or complex math you can just picture it visually. So in my view the 2 entangled particles have opposite spin about an axis we do not know. When 2 people measure their own particle at the same axis with one axis 180 degrees you get a correlation of 1(always the same). At 90 degrees a correlation of 0(half the time its the same). And at 45 degrees a correlation of .71 because 3/4 the time its the same. Visualizing 2 spheres with opposite spins and comparing how often they have the same spin around a particular axis is not easy but it shows there is nothing "magical" going on. You could even describe this axis and spin as the hidden variables and correlation is perfectly described. I'm still a bit confused what Bell is doing when he picks some other hidden variables and then gets a correlation of 1, -1, and 0 for the same 180degrees, 90 degrees, 45 degrees. It seems to me like Bell is picking bad hidden variables or has a limited definition of what a hidden variable can be? but I think I need to read more into it if I really want to explain why he's wrong if he's wrong. For now it just seems as though the results of correlation and spin in entangled particles are very simple and don't mean anything.

Thanks, that's very clear Ndi. This is exactly one of the questions I'm wondering. I assume the answer is that if you observe with a machine then it has an interference pattern and my thought experiment of retrocausality which enables someone to know the future means nothing. However I've heard many people describe these quantum mechanics as though its not the machine but the person the conciousness that determines the outcome of interference and I interpreted one to mean it was possible to actually store the data and whether u looked at it later would determine whether it had an interference pattern before. I think this thought experiment of saving the data and looking at it later(if it doesn't work) shows that it is not the person or the conciousness that determines quantum mechanics but the machine. I've been interested in this partly because I'm a hard determinist like Einstein, I think there is only 1 possible future, etc. I've been trying to find a way to either prove or disprove this and retrocausality is something which disproves it.

I've heard people discuss retrocausality(that causes in the future can change effects in the past). It seems to me if anyone could do this they would be a millionaire and here's why. I've comprehended the ability to do this described in layman's terms like this. If you shoot particles through a double slit at a screen, whether u view them or not changes whether it has an interference pattern or not. So in order to predict the future and prove retrocausality you do the experiment 16 times and collect the data for each one store it away and then in the future you look at the experiments that are the binary number of the future lottery number. This will change each of those experiments to interference patterns and presently you will know what the lottery will be. Can someone explain to me in layman's terms why people aren't doing this if this is what's going on in that double slit eraser experiment or expirements where people are saying retrocausality is possible.