Page 24 - GALIET PHYSICS BLOSSOMS IV+

2.2: Let us now consider the philosophical implications of these results. In your opinion, is the spin of either of the 2 spins discussed above ’physically real’, in any direction of the spin polarization? If none of the individual spin states are ’physically real’, then what is physically real for these photon pairs? Justify your answer by explaining very carefully what you mean by ’physically real’, and showing how your definition applies to this physical situation.
This makes my head spin! It is indeed chaotic and strange, and replete with randomness! There is so much uncertainty that nothing seems real if what we mean by real is the truth or certainty of a particular state at a given moment. To me, neither individual state — the right spin or the left spin — appears to be physically real because it just seems absurd and illogical that an up spin could yield left or right with equal probability, or that a down spin could yield left or right, or that all these states are entangled! I feel as if an evil daemon were deceiving us! (Perhaps it is another trick by Milton’s Satan in pandemonium!). It is a divine mystery to me how QM could show that only the joint and entangled state of the two positions has any physical reality and assert that the state of individual spins is meaningless. I can understand why Einstein felt that God did not play dice, and why he came up with the EPR switch thought experiment to reject Quantum Mechanics. It is very difficult to give up one’s notion of what is real, particularly when that is associated to certainty, and to truth.
Although Quantum Mechanic’s entanglement and superposition states of affairs feel illogical, unreal and chaotic, they are not so absurd, as some physicists believe. Quantum Mechanics’ uncertainty principle does not differ at all from what humanity historically experiences to be the real state of ambiguity in affairs of the world. Superposition and entanglement states are no different than dualism expressed in many world literatures including ancient Grecian tragedy and ancient Babylonian, Egyptian and Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions and mythologies, never neglecting the rich tragedies of the English, German and Spanish golden ages, and some of our modern ones. If I were to translate this state of affairs into notions of good and evil, we can confirm that both states dwell simultaneously in the world, along with chaos and order, and liberty and oppression, just to name a few, and all of these are similarly entangled and superposed yielding other random- like states, such as war and peace, omnipotence and impotence, etc.
But more important, Quantum Mechanics confirms Plato’s allegory of the Cavern. Indeed, we do live in a world of shadows and appearances, and of profound ambiguity, where can never know anything for certain, where A is B and B is A, and hence, reality as truth, as certainty eludes us. So as a species, 2400 years later, we are still the chained prisoners inside Plato’s Cavern (as if we were a particle in a square potential well, unable to escape at all unless we borrowed the energy from somewhere!), looking at eidolons and the shadows of real things pass by!! Despite all our hubristic tendencies, and our Protagorean complex that yearns to believe that “man is the measure of all things that are and are not,” we still remain in the lowest degree of Being according to Plato’s line!! Indeed, Plato’s world of appearances is no different than the ambiguous reality presented by Quantum Mechanics and Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty.
What perplexes me is that humanity’s ancient mythic reality and modern myth theories, including Jung’s universal archetypes in the collective unconscious, are light years ahead of quantum mechanics in having perceived not only our dual reality, but also the existence of fortune and chance, which is nothing but the Grecian “tuxe.” In other words, the findings of an uncertain, entangled, superposed reality, as proposed by Quantum Mechanics, is only a mirror of our ancient
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