Publisher's Synopsis
This is a printed B & W Edition for the 4th book in the series "Quantum Physics free of Folklore'. Besides lack of consensus among scientists/philosophers, there is passion and contention when it comes to interpreting Quantum Theory vis à vis our notion of REALITY. This book presents a novel interpretation, while clearly distinguishing it from the Copenhagen Interpretation, as well as from the Many-Worlds Interpretation defended by Sean Carroll in his recent book.In 2013, the camera in the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft captured Saturn's rings plus our 'pale blue dot' in the same frame (book's cover). At 1.2 million km near Saturn, an inanimate piece of silicon 1.4 billion km far from us digitally encoded our planet's existence. Remarkably, we were not the observers but the observed! Without our knowledge or volition, reflected light from Earth 'kicked' Cassini's image sensor. In turn, a digital representation of the image was transmitted back, 'kicking' the antennas on our planet. Whether those numbers reached Earth or not, the REALITY of our "lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark" was already 'etched' into the piece of silicon until its demise in 2017.This book's objective is to deeply understand what the 100-year philosophical struggle regarding REALITY is all about. In the process, we will learn that:1)Through sunglasses and a TV set, complex probability amplitude and phase for the state of a single micro-object seems natural to explain the macro-phenomena of intensity and interference. Born's probability rule is thereby justified. The Principle of Uncertainty is unrelated to measurement, uncertainty, and knowledge. The probability distribution for a physical attribute is far more fundamental than the values the attribute can adopt.2)The notion of quantum spin is related to the Zeeman Effect and the Stern-Gerlach Experiment. Considering a physical interaction as an ordinary measurement is one of the main reasons behind the hogwash surrounding the so-called 'measurement problem'. The real spin property is the probability distribution of its two values, not the values themselves.3)Schrödinger's Wave Mechanics and its Born's probabilistic interpretation have profound philosophical implications: locality in the configuration space implies nonlocality in our physical space. The miscalled 'interference of probabilities' is related to decoherence, to the reduction of the wavefunction, and to REALITY.4)The Cauchy-Schwarz Inequality in complex vector spaces leads directly to the 'Principle of Uncertainty', proving it is not a Principle but a theorem and has nothing to do with the micro-object being disturbed, with measurement errors, or how much knowledge is attainable upon observation. 5)The real property of a qubit is the probability distribution of its values. When a 2-qubit system is in the singlet state, an event involving one qubit does influence the state of the entangled qubit at a distant location -- even if the two events are space-like. Quantum computers promise a novel kind of parallelism, with computational speed exponentially increasing with the number of qubits. A novel approach to safeguard confidential information was critically needed, and the solution turned out to be Quantum Cryptography.6)A deep understanding of the EPR paper is crucial to grasp the century-long dispute about REALITY. Preconceptions regarding what a physical property is, the Principle of Locality, and the meaning of the 'Uncertainty Principle' populate the EPR paper. EPR conflates the joint reality of two noncommutative physical properties with 'predictability' and 'measurability' of their values. EPR believed the wavefunction did not provide a complete description of REALITY. They believed that such a theory was possible. Einstein was right: such a theory is in fact possible... at the immense cost of his being proven wrong on other front: any such theory must entail his worst nightmare (nonlocality)!
