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"Paradox" conjures up arrows and tortoises. But it has a
speculative, gedanken ring: no one would dream of really conjuring
up Achilles to confirm that he catches the tortoise. The paradox of
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, however, is capable of empirical
test. Attempted experimental resolutions have involved photons, but
these are not detected often enough to settle the matter. Kaons are
easier to detect and will soon be used to discriminate between
quantum mechanics and local realism. The existence ofan objective
physical reality,which had disappeared behind the impressive
formalism of quantum mechanics, was originally intended to be the
central issue of the paradox; locality, like the mathematics used,
was just assumed to hold. Quantum mechanics, with its incompatible
measurements, was born rather by chance in an atmosphere of great
positivistic zeal, in which only the obviously measurable had
scientific respectability. Speculation about occult "unobservable"
quantities was viewed as vacuous metaphysics, which should surely
form no part of a mature scientific attitude. Soon the
"unmeasurable, " once only disreputable, vanished altogether. One
had first been told not to worry about it; then, as dogma got more
carefully defined, one was assured that the unobserved was just not
there. This made it easier not to think about it and to avoid
hazardous metaphysical temptation.
If you have two small objects, one here on Earth and the other on
the planet Pluto, what would you say of the following statement: No
modification of the properties of the object on the earth can take
place as a consequence of an interaction of the distant object with
a third body also located on Pluto? The opinion that the previous
statement is correct is very natural, but modern quantum theory
implies that it must be wrong in certain cases. Consider in fact
two arbitrary objects separated by such a large distance that they
are unable to exert any important mutual influence. It is possible
to show rigorously that a measurable physical quantity exists, with
a value more than 40% different from the value theoretically
predicted by quantum mechanics. Necessarily then, either space is
largely an illusion of our senses and it does not exist
objectively, or information can be sent from the future to the
past, or ... something important has to be changed in modern
physics. This is the essence of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR)
paradox. A paradox is an argument that derives absurd conclusions
by valid deduction from acceptable premises. In the case of the EPR
paradox the absurd conclusion is that Bell's observable d should
have two different values d = 2.Ji and The "acceptable premises"
are the following: 1. All the empirical predictions of the existing
quantum theory are correct.
The Louis de Broglie Foundation (which was created in 1973, for the
fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of wave mechanics) and the
University of Perugia, have offered an international symposium to
Louis de Broglie on his 90th birthday. This publication re-
presents the Proceedings of this conference which was held in
Perugia on April 22-30, 1982. It was an opportunity for the
developing of physical conceptions of all origins, which may serve
to throw light on the mysterious power of the quantum theory.
Quantum Mechanics has reached matu- rity in its formalism and
although no experiment yet has come to challenge its predictions,
one may question the limits of its va- lidity. In fact the true
meaning of this vision of the microphysi- cal world remains the
subject of endless debating, at the heart of which lies "the
foundational myth" of wave-particle dualism. Albert Einstein and
Louis de Broglie are the two discoverers of this fundamental
duality, which they always considered as a deep physical reality
rather than a phenomenological artifice. During the conference a
survey has been given of the essential recent experimental results
in corpuscular and quantum optics and the most up-to-date
theoretical aspects of the specificity of mi- crophysical phenomena
: various interpretations of quantum mecha- nics, "al ternati ve
theories" and hidden parameters theories, pro*- babilistic and
axiomatic questions and tentative crucial experi- ments. The
conference took place in the magnificent atmosphere of the villa
Colombella lent to us by the Universita per Stranieri di Perugia.
The Olympia conference Frontiers of Fundamental Physics was a
gathering of about hundred scientists who carryon their research in
conceptually important areas of physical science (they do
"fundamental physics"). Most of them were physicists, but also
historians and philosophers of science were well represented. An
important fraction of the participants could be considered
"heretical" because they disagreed with the validity of one or
several fundamental assumptions of modern physics. Common to all
participants was an excellent scientific level coupled with a
remarkable intellectual honesty: we are proud to present to the
readers this certainly unique book. Alternative ways of considering
fundamental matters should of course be vitally important for the
progress of science, unless one wanted to admit that physics at the
end of the XXth century has already obtained the final truth, a
very unlikely possibility even if one accepted the doubtful idea of
the existence of a "final" truth. The merits of the Olympia
conference should therefore not be judged a priori in a positive or
in a negative way depending on one's refusal or acceptance,
respectively, but considered after reading the actual of basic
principles of contemporary science, new proposals and evidences
there presented. They seem very important to us.
Although the debate about the true nature of the quantum behavior
of atomic systems has never ceased, there are two periods during
which it has been particularly intense: the years that saw the
founding of quantum mechanics and, increasingly, these modern
times. In 1954 Max Born, on accepting the Nobel Prize for his
'fundamental researches in quantum mechanics', recalled the depth
of the disagreements that divided celebrated quantum theorists of
those days into two camps: . . . when I say that physicists had
accepted the way of thinking developed by us at that time, r am not
quite correct: there are a few most noteworthy exceptions - namely,
among those very workers who have contributed most to the building
up of quantum theory. Planck himself belonged to the sceptics until
his death. Einstein, de Broglie, and Schriidinger have not ceased
to emphasize the unsatisfactory features of quantum mechanics . . .
. This dramatic disagreement centered around some of the most funda
mental questions in all of science: Do atomic objects exist
il1dependently of human observations and, if so, is it possible for
man to understand correctly their behavior? By and large, it can be
said that the Copenhagen and Gottingen schools - led by Bohr,
Heisenberg, and Born, in particula- gave more or less openly
pessimistic answers to these questions.
Quantum mechanics has reached maturity as an a wesome scientific
theory, and undeniably no experiment has so far produced any result
conflic ting with its predictions. Nevertheless, an increasing
number of scholars are seriously questioning the limits of this
discipline's validity, a fact that is eloquently attested to by the
four international conferences devoted to the foundations of
quantum theory which were held in 1987 alone - in Joensuu, Vienna,
Gdansk, and Delphi, respectively. There is an increa ing awareness
that the founding fathers of quantum mechanics have left behind a
theory which, though spectacularly successful in its applications,
severely limits our intuitive understanding of the microworld, and
that their reasons for doing so were at least partly arbitrary and
open to question. The problem of the relationship between the
existing quantum theory and objective reality at the atomic and
subatomic levels can be tackled in essentially two ways: (i) One
may focus attention on the formalism of the theory and attempt to
deduce from it a coherent description of our measuring processes
and a deeper understanding of the microworld. Oi) Alternatively,
one may start from the experimental evidence and/or from models of
the objective reality compatible with it and go on to inves tigate
whether or not formalization of this knowledge can be accomodated
within the broad confines of existing quantum theory."
"Paradox" conjures up arrows and tortoises. But it has a
speculative, gedanken ring: no one would dream of really conjuring
up Achilles to confirm that he catches the tortoise. The paradox of
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, however, is capable of empirical
test. Attempted experimental resolutions have involved photons, but
these are not detected often enough to settle the matter. Kaons are
easier to detect and will soon be used to discriminate between
quantum mechanics and local realism. The existence ofan objective
physical reality, which had disappeared behind the impressive
formalism of quantum mechanics, was originally intended to be the
central issue of the paradox; locality, like the mathematics used,
was just assumed to hold. Quantum mechanics, with its incompatible
measurements, was born rather by chance in an atmosphere of great
positivistic zeal, in which only the obviously measurable had
scientific respectability. Speculation about occult "unobservable"
quantities was viewed as vacuous metaphysics, which should surely
form no part of a mature scientific attitude. Soon the
"unmeasurable, " once only disreputable, vanished altogether. One
had first been told not to worry about it; then, as dogma got more
carefully defined, one was assured that the unobserved was just not
there. This made it easier not to think about it and to avoid
hazardous metaphysical temptation.
Although the debate about the true nature of the quantum behavior
of atomic systems has never ceased, there are two periods during
which it has been particularly intense: the years that saw the
founding of quantum mechanics and, increasingly, these modern
times. In 1954 Max Born, on accepting the Nobel Prize for his
'fundamental researches in quantum mechanics', recalled the depth
of the disagreements that divided celebrated quantum theorists of
those days into two camps: . . . when I say that physicists had
accepted the way of thinking developed by us at that time, r am not
quite correct: there are a few most noteworthy exceptions - namely,
among those very workers who have contributed most to the building
up of quantum theory. Planck himself belonged to the sceptics until
his death. Einstein, de Broglie, and Schriidinger have not ceased
to emphasize the unsatisfactory features of quantum mechanics . . .
. This dramatic disagreement centered around some of the most funda
mental questions in all of science: Do atomic objects exist
il1dependently of human observations and, if so, is it possible for
man to understand correctly their behavior? By and large, it can be
said that the Copenhagen and Gottingen schools - led by Bohr,
Heisenberg, and Born, in particula- gave more or less openly
pessimistic answers to these questions."
Schommers introduces the foundations, mostly from a histori- cal
point of view. Eberhard gives an introductory account of the
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and Bell's celebrated inequalities.
D'Espagnat discusses realism andseparability and concludes that
contemporary physics does not lead to a definite conception of the
world. Eberhard shows how a model consistent with Bell's theorem
can be constructed by ad- mitting faster-than-light action at a
distance. Schommers discusses the structure ofspace-time and argues
that physi- cally real processes do not take place in but are
projected on space-time. Selleri discusses the idea that
objectively real quantum waves exist and could in principle be
detected.
Astrophysics: Anomalous Redshift Question: Empirical Evidence on
the Creation of Galaxies and Quasars (H. Arp). Periodicity in
Extragalactic Redshifts (W.M. Napier). Quasar Spectra: Black Holes
or Nonstandard Models? (J.W. Sulentic). Relativity: Problems of
Energy and of Ether: Fourdimensional Elasticity: Is It General
Relativity? (A. Tartaglia). Universality of the Lie-Isotopic
Symmetries for Deformed Minkowskian Metrics (A.K. Aringazin, K.M.
Aringazin). From Relativistic Paradoxes to Absolute Space and Time
Physics (H.E. Wilhelm). Geophysics: Expanding Earth: Earth
Complexity vs. Plate Tectonic Simplicity (G. Scalera). An
Evolutionary Earth Expansion Hypothesis (S.T. Tassos). Fields and
Particles: Space-Time Structures: Electromagnetic Interactions and
Particle Physics (A.O. Barut). Isotopic and Genotopic Relativistic
Theory (A. Jannussis, A. Sotiropoulou). Quantum Physics: Duality
and Locality: A New Logic for Quantum Mechanics? (E. Bitsakis).
Classical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (V.K. Ignatovich). 62
additional articles. Index.
This book appears in the year of de Broglie's hundredth birthday
(Mr. Wave-Particle Duality, himself). Each chapter is by a
different author. Paper titles include: Probability,
Pseudoprobability, Mean Values; Local Vacua; Duality of
Fluctuations, Fields, and More; The Aharonov-Bohm Effect From the
Point of View of Local Realism; Unsharp Particle-Wa
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