If you haven't come across this yet, don't miss it. This is a very good review of what is essentially the most comment topic in Quantum Mechanics - randomness that is inherent in the standard interpretation of QM. The co-author of this article is Anton Zeilinger, so you are getting some of considerable authority on the subject. The review on the Bell-type experiments are excellent - pay attention to why this doesn't violate SR.
Zz.
1 comment:
Zeilinger is definitely a Boss, but the position seems a little Ptolemaic -- instead of pushing the experimental data into circles and epicycles, it's pushed into bits, indeed into qubits (S^3 instead of S^1). Add more qubits as necessary, ad infinitum in the case of interacting QFT. Fair enough, for much experimental data it can be done, but whether this is the most perspicacious way to model the experimental data is to be seen.
I felt a little uncomfortable at the 1958 Heisenberg quote, where we are told that we deal "no longer with the particles themselves but with our knowledge of the elementary particles"; a more empiricist comment would say something like "no longer with the particles themselves but with our knowledge of the experimental results", with such discrete structure as we may think we observe needing rather more care to characterize it. Of course such distinctions may or may not help when it comes to predicting and engineering the results of new experiments.
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