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There exists a classical model of the photon after all

lightbluetouchpaper.org

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Re: There exists a classical model of the photon after all

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>good reason to believe that quantum mechanics does not describe humans One simple idea is that the more energy and matter you shove into the wave function, the easier it is to collapse, so that at the macro level quantum effects are rendered impossible.

Ah, but macro-level systems can amplify quantum effects. For instance, the human eye -- under the right conditions -- is sensitive to individual photons.

A packet of energy absorbed and exciting a molecule in my eye, causing a cascade through a complex system still feels entirely classical. I'm not sure merely invoking "photon" is enough to imply quantum effects. It's when the behavior breaks from deterministic to probabilistic (independent of initial conditions) that we switch paradigms.

Re: There exists a classical model of the photon after all

#82
post #71
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different from that?

You can go down to the local diy electronics store and get what you need to demonstrate "spooky action at a distance" in your own garage. Just like how in Einstein's time anyone with decently precise mirrors and measurement apparatus could tell that the changing velocity of the Earth did not change the relative velocity of light. Such experiments have been replicated tons of times. Yet, phkahler is now calling BS bas…

I would greatly appreciate a link to anywhere that explains how to demonstrate "spooky action at a distance" in my garage or at a makerspace. Provided the materials aren't too expensive, I'd love to do a lab experiment showing it, especially if it can be done with common parts.

Re: There exists a classical model of the photon after all

#83
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually a pretty common mistake. Fluid is always compressible (else sound won't travel in STP water). It is whether one chooses to model the flow as compressible or not.

They really ought to stop teaching that fluid is incompressible in middle school.

I think that is a simplification of the model for high school level physics. It's like when we use Hooke's law to describe a spring constant that only holds true for part of the range. Compared with a volume of gas, fluids are "incompressible."

Re: There exists a classical model of the photon after all

#84
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning from intuition has a terrible track record, I'm afraid.

Really? Did Einstein have empirical proof of his ideas?

Part of Einstein's genius was that he took seriously the fact that in all the empirical data, no one had yet found a way to distinguish between inertial acceleration and gravitational acceleration. He decided this was not a coincidence, but a fundamental equivalence. It resulted in his elevator thought experiment that predicted that gravity can bend light.

Re: There exists a classical model of the photon after all

#85
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call BS. If that's true, then Victor can not only send information across a distance, but back in time. Victor is changing the correlation of Alice and Bobs measurements after they have already been made. That's going to need serious verification for me to accept.

There are 69 papers that cite that one, but I don't see any attempts to reproduce. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1565984354572506461... Also, do you have some explanation for violations of Bell's inequality that don't rely on spooky action?

>> Also, do you have some explanation for violations of Bell's inequality that don't rely on spooky action?

The article that started this thread is one. In some ways it's not even important that the model be a 100 percent match with reality. It behaves very similarly to reality and it matches the Bell inequalities without spooky action at a distance. Bells statement pretty much says this can not exist, yet there it is. So now we can stop talking about models that can not be - because they do - and see if any of them is actually a good fit for reality. Of course I'm assuming the math in the paper turns out to be correct upon review.

Re: There exists a classical model of the photon after all

#86
post #33
post #12

They claim to have found a classical system that reproduces quantum mechanical effects. But if they manage to extend it to many particles, interacting, they will find that they have just come up with another interpretation of QM which is experimentally indistinguishable from the rest. And it wouldn't even be the first one. (Bohm's hidden variable theory has precedence.) Furthermore the "incompressible fluid" they pos…

Models like theirs predate Bohm by a long shot. From the introductory paragraph of the paper: "In 1746 Euler modelled light as waves in a frictionless compressible fluid; a century later in 1846, Faraday modelled it as vibrations in ‘lines of force’ … Fifteen years later Maxwell combined these approaches, proposing that a magnetic line of force is a ‘molecular vortex’…" They basically updated Maxwell's model. From th…

>> What's nice is that their model is classical. Even if it "just" makes exactly the same predictions as other models, it's nice to have a model where physical intuition can be brought to bear.

A classical model can also be simulated on a classical computer, so if it produces the same results as QM then quantum computation would be... fiction or just redundant?

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