Is locality an illusion?

Magical Realist

Magical Realist

Valued Senior Member
Been studying some experiments that firmly back up Bell's conclusion that our universe is basically nonlocal. IOW, that at least at the quantum level, what happens at one place and time can instantaneously effect what happens in another place and time, even if separated by billions of lightyears. Does this mean that locality is just an illusion that helps us live our lives? Here's an AI summary of Google search results on this question:

"According to quantum mechanics, locality can be considered an illusion, as experiments suggest that at the quantum level, particles can be entangled and influence each other instantaneously across large distances, seemingly violating the principle of locality which states that an object can only be affected by its immediate surroundings; this phenomenon is often described as "non-locality.".



Key points to remember:


  • Our everyday experience:
    At the scale we experience daily, locality appears to be true - objects only interact with their nearby surroundings.


  • Quantum entanglement:
    Quantum mechanics challenges this notion by demonstrating that entangled particles can be correlated even when separated by large distances, implying a non-local connection.


  • Interpretation debate:
    The exact interpretation of quantum mechanics and the implications of non-locality are still debated among physicists."
Here's a good article explaining nonlocality and the background of how it was discovered and proven by experiments in 2022 by physicists who won the Nobel Prize for it.

discoveringcosmos.com

The Universe Is Not Locally Real. Or Is It?

Explore the quantum realm where 'local realism' is challenged, redefining our understanding of the universe.
discoveringcosmos.com discoveringcosmos.com

"Quantum mechanics reveals that at its core, our cosmos doesn’t stick to the classic rules of space and time, showing us a world where things can be mysteriously linked in ways we wouldn’t expect. This turns the idea of a universe with clear-cut, independent elements on its head, hinting at an underlying complexity where everything might be mysteriously linked.

As we uncover the deep ties that bind particles across vast distances, it’s clear that our quest in physics will pivot to grasping this profound interconnectedness hidden within the quantum fabric. As we dive deeper into the quantum web that stitches everything together, expect a wave of fresh ideas and blueprints that paint a more intricate picture of how every piece of the cosmos is linked."
 
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One important point about non-locality that is often overlooked is that no useful information can be transmitted faster than light by means of non-local interactions. Thus, non-locality does not provide a means for faster-than-light communication of "mysterious links" in which information is communicated instantaneously from one place to another.
 
Magical Realist said:
[...] "According to quantum mechanics, locality can be considered an illusion, as experiments suggest that at the quantum level, particles can be entangled and influence each other instantaneously across large distances, seemingly violating the principle of locality which states that an object can only be affected by its immediate surroundings; this phenomenon is often described as "non-locality." [...] "The exact interpretation of quantum mechanics and the implications of non-locality are still debated among physicists." [...]
Click to expand...

The latter perhaps a good reason for refreshing QM's mathematical toolset being for calculating predictions, not fomenting and establishing metaphysics. "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description..." --Bohr, the Como conference, 1927 (that was well prior to CI's debut in the 1950s)

But does the potency of those experiments rattle that original conservatism a tad? The universal wave function that the Everett interpretation (many worlds) depends upon falls out quantum entanglement. (That snazzy name for it apparently wasn't around yet at publication -- 1956.)

  1. Spooky action at a distance can lead to a multiverse (Paul Sutter): When we retrace all the steps of a measurement, what comes out is a series of entanglements from overlapping wave functions. The electron entangles with the atoms in the screen, which entangle with the electrons in the wire, and so on.

    Even the particles in our brains entangle with Earth, with all the light coming and going from our planet, all the way up to every particle in the universe entangling with every other particle in the universe.

    With every new entanglement, you have a single wave function that describes all of the combined particles. So the obvious conclusion from making the wave function real is that there is a single wave function that describes the entire universe. This is called the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics.

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  2. MWI History (excerpt): Everett originally called his approach the "Correlation Interpretation", where "correlation" refers to quantum entanglement.

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    The Theory of the Universal Wave Function (original retitled paper by Hugh Everett, published in 1956)

    Page 10: In fact, to any arbitrary choice of state for one subsystem there will correspond a relative state for the other subsystem, which will generally be dependent upon the choice of state for the first subsystem, so that the state of one subsystem is not independent, but correlated to the state of the remaining subsystem.

    Such correlations between systems arise from interaction of the systems, and from our point of view all measurement and observation processes are to be regarded simply as interactions between observer and object-system which produce strong correlations.

    Page 87: In a similar fashion larger and more complex objects can be built up through strong correlations which bind together the constituent particles. It is still true that the general state function for such a system may lead to marginal position densities for any single particle (or centroid) which extend over large regions of space. Nevertheless we can speak of the existence of a relatively definite object, since the specification of a single position for a particle, or the centroid, leads to the case where the relative position densities of the remaining particles are distributed closely about the specified one, in a manner forming the comparatively definite object spoken of.

    Page 118: In conclusion, we have seen that if we wish to adhere to objective descriptions then the principle of the psycho-physical parallelism requires that we should be able to consider some mechanical devices as representing observers.

    The situation is then that such devices must either cause the probabilistic discontinuities of Process 1, or must be transformed into the superpositions we have discussed. We are forced to abandon the former possibility since it leads to the situation that some physical systems would obey different laws from the rest, with no clear means for distinguishing between these two types of systems.

    We are thus led to our present theory which results from the complete abandonment of Process 1 as a basic process. Nevertheless, within the context of this theory, which is objectively deterministic, it develops that the probabilistic aspects of Process 1 reappear at the subjective level, as relative phenomena to observers. One is thus free to build a conceptual model of the universe, which postulates only the existence of a universal wave function which obeys a linear wave equation...
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