Re: Quantum mystics

On Sun, 9 Jun 2024 20:46:53 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

I just watched a talk by Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics
at the university of Vienna, and 2022 Nobel laureate, about
quantum effects and entanglement.
>
I feel a rant bubbling up!

Good so far!

>
The guy is a mystic, a fraud! He pretended to demonstrate that
light consists of particles by showing a little box that starts
clicking, like a Geiger counter, when exposed to light. Even if
the little box really did detect light, that means nothing! Light
*detection* is quantized, yes, but that does not imply that light
itself is so too.

Light isn't packaged in discrete photons of measurable energy?

Of course you can't say much about a thing that has never been
detected. It's just a rumor.

>
He attempted to convince the public that entanglement means that
the results of measurements made at two remote places come out
identically, and without any time delay. That's just not true,
but he didn't even give a hint of how this really works. He did
not mention that you have to make *correlated* measurements to
detect entanglement.

Do people still say "duh" ?

For that, you need to communicate *what*
measurement is to be made at each location, and that implies
that you either prescribe the exact measurement in advance or
select a subset of the results after the fact. Either way, this
skews the data.

Most measurements, and the measuring instruments, are defined in
advance of the event.  Calibrated even.

>
He's in it for the money and the fame. Grrr. And he's one of
many, too.

That's hardly usual, or a reason to call him wrong. He won the Nobel
Prize just to get free plane tickets.

>
Jeroen Belleman