Goal
My solution to hidden variables, spooky action at a distance, Bell's inequality, etc.
I am proposing a fairly simple model of a hidden variable. This removes the need for “spooky action at a distance.”
Overview
This model contains only three things.
| One type of particle, | |
| One hidden variable (per particle), and |
The orange side is pointing… [This entire DIV will be
overwritten].
|
| One type of measurement. |
Particle
Imagine an electron.
I'm drawing the particles as spheres for convenience. In fact, the particles might be points or might be too small to measure. The important thing is that I can highlight directions relative to the particle.
Measurement
Think quantum spin. These are the standard measurements. I have not performed any new experiments. I am adding a new interpretation to well known measurements.
You can control the direction the measurement equipment is pointing. You can describe these with two numbers, analogous to longitude and latitude.
For simplicity I always place the measuring device flat on the screen. I will only measures points on the edge of the sphere. I can still measure any two points that I choose. I might have to rotate the particle, instead of the detector. That's an insignificant detail.
The output of the measurement is a single value. In this representation the result will be a color. The output can be interpreted as any Boolean value, e.g. true vs. false, spin up vs. spin down, kill the cat vs spare the cat.
Hidden Variable
This is my take. I have not seen this anywhere else.
When we talk about a quantum property like spin or polarization, I represent that as a direction: Which way is the orange side pointing? You can describe this as two numbers, the latitude and the longitude of the center of the orange hemisphere.
When you make a measurement, two things happen. The first part is completely deterministic. If the measurement apparatus is pointing anywhere in the orange area, the result will be orange. Otherwise the result will be white.
The second step is to randomize the direction of the orange part. The resulting position will not change the result if the exact same test is repeated. I.e. only half the possible directions are legal. Aside from that it is impossible to predict the exact direction after the measurement, so I will call the new direction random.
This is how my version of a hidden variable differs from the versions I've seen. My measurement step is always deterministic. There is randomness at the end of my measurement, but the random value will not be used until the next measurement.
Example: Single Particle
Example: Entangled Particles
Example: Three in a Row
Add an animation showing a photon going through multiple sheets of polarized film. Show one photon at a time. Keep score on the screen. Allow the user to adjust the rotations.
This should work very similar to the entangled particles, but I will need to tweak a couple of things. In this case I need a period of 180°. If the center of the orange side is pointing in a specific direction, or the center of the white side is pointing in that direction, I need to treat those cases identically. In the previous two examples, those two cases were exact opposites.
In fact, the half orange / half white spheres probably need to change. I can imagine a circle with a stripe through the middle. The direction of the stripe corresponds to the direction of the polarization. And the 180° symmetry will be obvious.
There isn't any need for a 3d object, like a sphere. We only have 1 degree of freedom in this example. Light can't be polarized in the same direction that it moves!
Testing / Samples / Notes / Temp / Peeking‑Behind‑the‑Curtain
Move your mouse over the bottom sphere to move one of the detectors.