Quantum theory - are there limits to its validity? If so, can they be probed and tested?
Recorded at Wolfson College Lecture Series, Oxford (2000), featuring Roger Penrose. From the Michael Wright Collection, held by the Archive Trust for Research in Mathematical Sciences & Philosophy.
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2:30 Something about how we understand today. I'm going to move on it, because what I want to say here is that we have two ways of talking about physics. I don't know whether we're talking about reasonably large things, but for classical physics, we use the toning mechanics, or we talk about many steps, we want to talk about what happens when velocity is large,
5:00 We can describe the nature of these theories as deterministic, symmetrical in time. Now, if you talk about very small things like atoms, octo-rules, quantum mechanics, I would use terms like this, which is quantum physics, quantum extension. But, at the word problem, this one has a system which is at what one would like to call a quantum level, a system which is oscillating, behaving on its own, and very small. I'll be talking about quantum mechanics shortly, but again in a series of terministic, time-symmetric, and local, same words as I've been describing past the well, I didn't go too deep with it, but as we do with it, we use that as a form of Newtonian evolution, or the Schrodinger equation, the Schrodinger equation tells you how much the quantum state of the quantum system evolved in time, and this is the equation. Quantum mechanics. However, we do have uncertainty, we do have non-communism, but that's not what happens. That's basically what happens when you do what's called measurement, which involves going from one level to the other, and the sort of situation is described here very well. For example, if you have a Geiger counter, there you have a particle, and if you have a Geiger counter, that particle is definitely a quantum object, described by quantum neural physics. But the trick here is the classical level of this thing in various ways and areas and so on, described in a classical way. And you have this measurement of character that takes you from one level to the other, and this, in the sphere of quantum mechanics, is done in a completely different way from the equation of equations.
7:30 What's called the measurement of measurement, the measurement of character, there's a bit of a part to this. Parts are the reduction of the quantum state. This is down here, you have the state that's involved according to this determined equation. As soon as a measurement is made, you can track with it and you have non-determinism. In fact, you have non-determinism and asymmetry. I'll come to that in a minute or so. And non-cultivation. So all the things that we've come up with, which to me is a strong indication that if you want to try and understand what's involved in this medical trope test, it's no good simply looking at it one way or the other. If you talk to those physicists, I think what they would say is that S of E, quantum, quantum law, is related to the law of the quantum level, all the way up to all scales, it's just that things get very complicated, you get from the far end of the map up to the fifth degree, and things like this, and then you get to combinations, and combinations look like physical parts. So I think that's it. Common views. There are all sorts of common views, I should say, all sorts of conventional views on the subject. I'm not going to go into them all, but I think it's useful just to have this opportunity here, because whatever philosophical views are not about quantum mechanics, this is what you do. Now I want to illustrate quantum mechanics by giving you two experiments that you can argue about here. Here we have the source of particles, the source of particles, and here we have the source of the Inks River, which is like a particle of a mirror, which transmits part of the light, which continues to light and reflects the other half. It might be that this light is a photon, part of a particle, and part of a particle which is transmitted, part of a particle which is reflected. And that little picture will be consistent with the form of this vector, where you have a detector here, and a detector here, and half the time this detector will detect the particle, and this is exclusive, so this one detects the particle, and this one doesn't.
10:00 So that concept is a partial picture of their life. Now here we have something that illustrates the weight of the nature of life. Again, we do the same thing as before. We begin with two groups A and B, one by A. And here we have now two groups A and B. And another group B here. Supposedly, what you find is that this detector always, now, This one, never done. So, in some sense, the two things which the photon might do, and that is the term that you see, is that it might talk, it might go this way, it might think it might go this way, it might think it might go this way, it might think it might go this way, it might think it might go this way, it might think it might go this way, it might think it might go this way, it might think it might go this way, it might think it might go this way. It's very likely that the proton is wrong. That's not what happens. What happens is there's some kind of an amazing cancellation between the two alternative things that the proton might do, which are here, this would be 1 to the fifth wave and 1 to the fifth wave. The sphere is perhaps a color up, but there is another probability that it could be a forcey color, and we'll talk about that in a moment. So I can understand this sort of thing if I take the proton opportunity away, and make sure that we do good. And the ways in which we deal with each other one way, we deal with each other the other way, and there's a way in which we don't perform and we have to do sets of both of these kinds of things at once. And what you want to do after this is, I'm going to use a rather strange technique with quantum mechanics. If you have, and in this case here, the two alternatives between what the problem might be, say A or B, All these terms between here and here co-exist in what's called quantum heat position, so when they all turn to A, they go this way, when they do, they go this way, and the state of the photon, when it's between here and here, is what's called a mini-heat position, or a complex quantum heat position of the two alternatives. And there are weighting factors here, which I've already done a bit there, weighting of the two alternatives, and I might take those apart a bit.
12:30 But that stuff's not right. That's not what we do in quantum mechanics, because these numbers are not propositions, they can't be their contact numbers, they're involved in the square root of 9-1. Take that, and this diagram, and do that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that. And provided you have your systems at the common level, so as you can see down here, Jordanian equation deserves these two things of linear, which means that whatever alternative A does according to the Jordanian equation, and B does according to the Jordanian equation, if you have some combination of those two, that combination will resolve as the same combination of one and the other. However, when you make a measurement, and you go from here to here, what you do is you take these two common numbers, W and Z, and you look at what we're presenting here, and you see how far away they are from the origin, and you take where the distance is, and you're going to put a square number, take W and Z, and you put a square number. Completely different, not a two-year problem, but at least that's because they're constructing a real number out of the two complex numbers that are in this great project, and they're not using our policies. Only at that point. Only when you make this measurement. So, this is illustrating the zero in the way that I've done. Now, this is very remarkable. I mean, to the previous, it looked completely different, but mathematically, they are completely different. But they sort of dovetail in a very remarkable way.
15:00 I'd like to talk a little bit about quantum mechanics as we get into the field of mathematics and mathematics already, quantum mechanics, and one of the most striking things I always find is how it fits in. So I've talked about complex play, complex play. You really can steer out of it, because we're really talking about ratio, and you can see what the ratio is. When you talk about probability of the ratio of the spin, I think that you're really primarily interested in the ratio of the spin. And the ratio, if you can't get the numbers, is the meaning of your understanding of what's going to be in the sphere. Clearly, that is. These are the two quantum states. So this one, I'm talking here, in this illustration here, about the spin, or the spin half-half, okay? That's the quantum of Newton, and that's the state of the part force that we have of matter, and quantum matter, of nature. And they have a theory of homony, where they all spin by the same amount, in the same direction, and you narrow it there, and you get the axis of spin, and you get the right-handed upward direction here, the dumb space is the right-handed upward direction, and the other space is the right-handed downward direction, and all the other states are written by a combination of these two, and the problem here is that... Every combination of the two is given by Connolly-Briggs. The key to the topology is the quantum, which is one hundred degrees per week. And we can see one here. Another U represents the ratio, and that's really relevant here. The ratio of the two complex quantities is called the complex number. Or it could be infinity, because W happens to be zero when you get infinity. So it's the complex number together with infinity that I'm talking about.
17:30 I'm sure here is a complex plane of you, and you get that here, which goes from the surface to 1, 0, to 1, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 51, 52, 53, 56, 58, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 51, 52 Thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to seeing you again next time. And there is this clear relationship now between the two serious quantum numbers that we have here, which is not much, but it does indicate that there is a deep down in nature a kind of relationship between space structure and quantum. Now there are a lot of mysteries about mechanics, and I just want to give you a few of them. There's a phenomenon known as ECR, or X, Einstein had also written. Einstein originally found this thing out, I think, because he wanted to show the quantum mechanics of physics in quantum mechanics, which is up here on the screen. However, it turns out that the quantum mechanics actually don't. Here it's a little sort of formalized. You have in the middle, for some sake, something happens in the middle, you fill two boxes with some objects. You do the boxes apart, the new boxes can now be separated by some specific degree, and then you make measurements on what goes on the inside box.
20:00 On the side, too many measurements are made, it tends to be, and because of a famous theorem we've done well, the connection to quantum mechanics in certain cases, I think, there's no explanation in terms of the content of these two boxes. The set of interdependent objects which have no foreknowledge about what kind of measurements are going to make on them, no communication. So I'm not going to give you a list, but I'll just give you a particular case that's very striking to some of you who've written this party. It's a good fact because most of these, let's say, pirated, sterling hypotheses don't show that there's a particular thing where there's a major set of interdependent objects. There may not be a probability for many to be satisfied with their relationships, as it turns out, quantum mechanics violates the system entirely, for example, it's very nice, but the probabilities are reduced to almost nothing, it's just a little bit of a blurb. Here, you might take the up-down measure. Imagine that each of these is a spin-half-half, so it's a little bit bigger, and you might take the measurement in some direction. And all you're allowed to get is to be able to guess or know. It might be this, it might be this direction, it might be that, it might be the opposite direction. And therefore, the result remains to be either this direction or the opposite direction. You lose, you have to say it has to be this, or maybe it's the other direction. You either get this answer or this answer. You lose the information, or it's lost. The thing is, that's what you're doing. You're up or down, whatever direction you're at. And the point of the loop is how you can start on this structure. And what you find is that sometimes you get down and up, but you never get down and left, but you never get left down, but you never get left down, but you never get left down, but you never get left down, but you never get left down.
22:30 The typical logic is that you have to be prepared to give you down, down, and sometimes you have to be prepared to give you up, down, and sometimes you have to be prepared to give you up, down, and sometimes you have to be prepared to give you up, down, and sometimes you have to be prepared to give you up, down, and sometimes you have to be prepared to give you up, down. So there are the sets of names you can use depending on the form of it, depending on what it means. The quantum history, known as, as I say, I forgot the word in the last text, or it's an illustration of quantum tangles. That's the journey of the theory of the first question. The point is that the parts of the content are always entangled with each other. Let me tell you something else, another profound point of history. If something... I should say, first of all, before I get into that, these experiments, I don't know about this particular one, but other EPR experiments, have been performed, most famous ones were done in Paris by Anastas and his colleagues, and the quantum mechanics expectations were very, very clearly confirmed, and that's what I'm telling you, you can get the answers to these questions. So it's very, very hard not to perform in the room, you know what I'm talking about. And they became the single entities right after that time period. So when I was saying quantum mechanics holds a small bit, you can remember what I talked about this year. It's a small level, it's a quantum level, but you've got constant, and constant, and constant, and constant.
25:00 You find the quantum effects stretch at least over 12, 12 meters in the aspect experiment. Where the distances are of the order of kilometers, and I understand you can't do experiments with this. So you see the quantum effects can stretch to distances, enormous distances, and there seems to be no limit to the distances. So that's quantum mystery. Let's look at another quantum mystery. I've coined this phrase that there's no classical quantum information. You need to know that by the term quantum information, it really is a translation of information. It's sometimes a photo of quantum teleportation. The idea is that you can send something from one place to another, you can send a quantum state from one place to another without actually sending the state itself. Let me really say, I wish you could describe, I wish you could describe this with a comparison of Addison-Dahl. You have to imagine that Addison-Dahl is widely separated, and there might be a distance panic or something, and one of them wants to send to the other. And Alice is supposed to say this as well, but we imagine that somehow the conditions between the two planets are such that we could very easily use a quantum state. What we can do is obtain the classical radius and how we can use the matrix to state them. So the way it works is that both Alice and Bob have to have written them a suitcase or something containing one of these VR tests. Just like we've been talking about.
27:30 You can hang the particles and imagine that they're in this case. Let's take the nearest case. It's good to be able to say, it's good to be teaching at Harvard. It's good to be able to be one of the key speakers. I would say, come away and talk to the other end. The key speakers are going to keep you up to date, isolated, so you can come and develop it and learn this. Well, the partial comes along with it. Alice doesn't measure the direction, so all she can do, if she had to measure it, would be to get an answer, yes, it's in that direction, or no, it's not, because there's one bit of information, so you can get one measure. But Alice doesn't do that, because that would lose the information. What we've done is to bring it up to the remarkable human case and to make one of four measurements, I'm not describing it in detail, but I'll put it in the description here, and there are four possible outcomes, two bits of information in this, and they could be 0, 1, 2, or 3, I'd say, and so each of them could be similar to Bob. I have a 0, 1, 2, or 3. Bob then takes this case... And if it's a zero, you can pass it into this one. You can rotate it around and make degrees like this. That's just a few of the things we've got to buy out of it. It's really interesting to be able to find the red axis, the red pole, the hard force involved in this is now the same as we want it to be. Now it's two. The information comes from one to the other. What's very extraordinary about this is that the information that's going on the room here is And you can become a critic if you can continue on with probability, using the two real coordinates. Yet, Alice has only sent two bits of information. What she's given is zero, one, two, or three. And that's enough. It's off. And you can start to expect it. So where has that information come from? It's not from one side or the other. That's not what it's done. I feel it's improvised. There's a plan about it. I'm going to come up with a picture. And you're going to use this to do your life, your life. How is information dropped from one side to the other? Well, the only connection cut from this particular number of two bits here, we want to call that all-continuing information, the only connection done here, backwards in time, is the origin there, forwards in time, backwards in time. And that's really the best way to do that. But it's very strange how information goes backwards in time. It's ridiculous. You could send information back into the past, you could, your thought would get paradoxical in the future.
30:00 This is important, it's very important, you can't do it. So, how does this work, so that's why we're making a number of terms, there's a lot of information, you can't, how you can't spend it, you can't spend information on this, you can't, it's a very strange thing, it's the opposite of what you can do, and that's why we're confusing the subject with the show, and then it's good, and it's not good. Now, let me... These, I should say, are things about quantum mechanics that are very mysterious, but can be experimentally confirmed. The effects of the UCI experiment, there are many things that have appeared in the past, and these experiments have also been experimentally confirmed. And we know that that actually doesn't make much sense. You have to trust all the fun things about it. Well, in fact, let me tell you one of the fun things about it. Here we have the thing we call disparate, the ones I was talking about before. We have a photon, let's say, and a leaf giver. See, it's one way or the other way. The photon is a combination of these two things. And if it comes this way, the objective here, which I have done, and if you look at the poor cat, you can see that the other way, the cat survives.
32:30 But bear in mind, when I said the Trojan equation is linear, that means that whatever happens to this group, not so to this, but obviously whatever happens to this group, happens to the cat, not to the linear, to the clean, not to the polite, yet. So that's what Cronin was doing, so I'm Cronin is going to do this experiment, and I'm Cronin is going to do something like this, and now we're killing the cat, I'm sure, and Cronin is going to do something like that. So what he's doing is saying, look, don't leave my brain at the level of the cat, something else. So if you think about it like that, Cronin is really trying to say why we have to... My attempt at this is going to be one of the other ways to do this, so I'm going to start at the beginning, which reminds me of another experiment, which is the question here, which is not that way, and that can only happen if somehow the two, the proton and the oxygen, take. So this, otherwise you can't get the equation here to take, and the proton can only be able to do this or this, so it has to be test. So you can do this, or two, test. All of these terms exist in the state of life and death, but these terms do not exist in the state of life and death, but these terms do not exist in the state of life and death, And all these different things could be arranged to develop a simple experiment, if you like to say, to set up something like that, and all you have to do is have something like this, and there is a sort of, there is a part of it that the students are going to have to do. So it's certainly valid. Practice could be a good experiment actually to do, and you will have it happen. And that's what you can do, and that's it. And that is the result, not of certain equations of string theory, but of amazing approaches. And he was trying to say, look, this is something different.
35:00 Don't try to explain amazing approaches as a multiplication of my equation of certain expressions for a large number of other things. But a lot of people these days just prefer to take these terms of the equation themselves, and in this case we have to use them at a lower level, and then we have to explain why we don't see combinations of them by a cat, and by the way, what some people might say is that if you come up with a cat, and you try to use that by a cat, and you use it as a dead cat, you've got to try to get a new version of the shell. And that's more or less what we're going to get to if you don't want to change the rules. Tell me that what one really means. The theory we have at the moment is that the population is something which objects to disruption. So the cat really is alive or dead, one or the other. That results from a project we don't understand yet, which happens to play for a system that's a bit large and complicated or something. And the procedure results, nowadays, in a standard mental project, in a population theory, a new theory, which I call the object of reduction, which really does take place in the world, model in mind, as some people might argue, and object of reduction, as you might imagine, is still four. It can't be still four, can it? So I think for me, that these new digits that we're going to need, which we don't understand yet, has to also be involved in the introduction and explain why I hate this, don't we? So here we have the main theory of the 20th century, of physics, of social relativity, quantum mechanics, here. In general relativity, we have a set of two results. The first one is here, and the second one is in quantum mechanics, twistor theory.
37:30 Now, all these theories of special relativity, so to go right, and all the rest three, have a fundamental problem. General relativity has a problem of significant arrogance, big time, significant arrogance, big time, but gravitation is flat, you've got holes. Typical physics is a problem of general relativity too. From the field theory, I also have social problems, and the accuracy that I referred to in my earlier slide here, but there's also another problem, which is the problem of quantum mechanics itself, The large objects don't seem to be very important. Now, my own view is that if we go all the way to the combination between general relativity and quantum theory, but we still miss it, we don't know what that theory is. It's quite a conventional viewpoint that if we bring quantum mechanics into general relativity, that we can do that. It's also fairly conventional that in quantum chemistry, we can do that. It's also a feature of our putting together of quantum mechanics together. Now, the standard feature of problem-like quantum mechanics together is that the formulaic
40:00 The appropriate application of quantum theory theory confuses the lifetime generativity, or perhaps the lifetime theory doesn't submit to the degree of multiplication. It may be that that's not the life theory. In fact, I must say it's not. And we want something that's more even-handed. More even-handed marriage between... It involves some give on both sides, that is to say, we don't expect quantum mechanics to oppose the rules on relativity, so it's a give on accommodations on sides, but usually there is some difference between them. But why do I tell you that? Because there is some factors in quantum mechanics where it's easier to measure them. It's not ethical. I want to tell you why, okay? This is probably the time. Here we have, again, a very, very, very nice installation. It's all sort of put on. And we put it here. This is Hector. Here's the ceiling. Floor. Here we have some, I've got a mirror in the middle. That's not a long way. I'm not sure. There's something, something to do with that. But the thing is, the ceiling is the floor. Now, if we go forward in time here, what we find... And let me just tell everybody about this, because it's really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really,
42:30 Mathematical refining is half the time, get the source in it, half the time, half the time, you get there, you can do it. And that's the way to do quantum mechanics, forward the time, to pick this, then this, and you get the right answer. You can make it, it works, it doesn't keep working. However, if you ask your question for the last time, I don't think you're going to determine if it's good or not good. If you didn't determine, then I'm going to ask my question. You're going to get the question. That's to say, if the detector receives a photon, what is the probability that it will change this way, as opposed to the other thing that's marked down, which comes to the field, not to the mirror, here. And if you go through the quantum mechanical calculation, you get the exact same answer. If you just draw, that is to say, the square modulus we were able to give you, then it's equally probable that it will come to the source, and, of course, this is how it's starting out to appear. Now that's going to be long, because if you test it, you test it with protons, you test it with protons, you test it with protons, you test it with protons, you test it with protons, you test it with protons, you test it with protons, But if you do, you'll get what you don't want. And that's what it's trying to explain to you. Now, that's not linked to anything else. But what I want to say is that it does. It's linked to something that we know that we could. Now, I had fun with that experiment. I don't know what the theory of that was. It depends on my very basic observation of facts. I'm going to be out of there. And so on and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth,
45:00 Theoretical theories agree with each other, extraordinarily agree. This has been going on for over 20 years now, about 25 years now, and the connection to the general relativity agrees with those many over that period of time. Time is so precise. With over a period of 20 years, the conclusion is something like 1,510 to 14. Remember when I talked about quantum mechanics, I said it was bigger than this. 11, 12, 13, 14. You might argue whether this is a totalitarian thing or a physics section. I'm not going to go into that often here. It just takes time. Over that period of time, certainly it is efficient. It's something like 1, 5, 10, 14, which is extraordinary. So general relativity is, no less than quantum mechanics, an extraordinarily well-tested field. It doesn't have a surface. An actual theory is no way to be a theory at the time. So, you have to take a theory with you. And, uh, one of the techniques is called relativity. You have to know. There's a time going up and down again. Big bang at the beginning. I'm going to give you a few days to hold. I'm going to close the universe. I'm going to close. Come back and the big bang is going to come. We're going to look at that again. For this class, the first example is a statement that is definitely for a kind of law that's going to be good for your program, and that's going to be good for you, because if you take the observation, you're going to get a value which is going to be exactly what you want, and I like that, and I like that one, and I'm worried you might not like that, but that's what I do.
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