On Spin, Physics, and Arrogance (podcast)

“Groundbreaking tests of quantum mechanics conducted between 1980 and 1982 ... provided definitive answers to the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox and cemented quantum non-locality.” — Google A.I. summary

Something Between Arrogance and Lack of Judgement

The above A.I. statement is a fair summary of what physicists believe, what is currently stated in textbooks, and what I’ve now shown to be false. False assertions are accepted as truths because of poor research and exaggerated certitude. Exaggerated certitude comes from a reluctance to admit ignorance. This arrogance has always threatened science, it has percolated into politics and led to today’s Trumpian stupidness.

The EPR paradox, to which the above quote refers, is well described on Wikipedia (2026). The paradox arises from an explanation of why two elementary particles thought to have no fixed property to start with, and which have been separated any distance apart, suddenly and without any mechanism, display the same behavior when a particular property is measured. It’s a paradox because the mathematics makes the correct prediction but the physics makes no sense. The mechanism that’s proposed is called “action at a distance.”

The groundbreaking tests referred to above were conducted by Alain Aspect, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2022, and which he describes in his acceptance speech:

His experiments are masterful, naturally, but he didn’t understand what he was looking at any more than anyone else did.

...

An original version of the paradoxical situation was stated by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in 1936. Nobody knew quite what to make of it. In the same year, Neils Bohr published a confusing refutation of the paradox which has never been understood. David Bohm came up with a more intuitive version of the paradox in 1951. In 1964 John Bell showed the paradox’s greater importance, and Alain Aspect found a definitive test of the paradoxical predictions in 1980. Science is supposed to get incrementally more correct over time, but in this interesting case it got incrementally less correct.

• Something Between Arrogance and Lack of Judgement

• Medieval Necromancy

• Overconfident Mathematics

• It’s Not a Paradox, It’s a Problem

• The Details of the Paradox

• No One Understands Spin

• Solution of the Problem

• What Will Be the Consequence?

• References