Wednesday, February 10, 2016

new experiment as important as Michelson and Morley

The chart above was handed to me by Prof. Yanhua Shih and his graduate student Peng Tao at my first day attending the SPIE conference in Baltimore in April 2015. The day after, I gave my SPIE leadership award talk on neural networks in one session, and a talk related to the new experiment in the workshop on quantum information technology.
   The curve represents the predictions of time-symmetric physics -- of any of a set of new local realistic models I developed last year. The dots represent the actual measured data. These were the first results for the continuous-angle triphoton experiment (triple entanglement), which had never been performed before on earth,In that experiment, the predictions of time-symmetric physics disagree decisively from those of the traditional forms of quantum mechanics assuming collapse of the wave function.
    When Yanhua showed me these results, I stated in my talks that this triphoton experiment, in general, is as important as the Michelson and Morley experiment was. But it defies conventional thinking. It took some time to really explain it -- and Luda took on the actual task of translating it from my way of thinking to conventional language and thinking, as was essential to the peer-reviewed publication in the past few months in the journal Quantum Information Processing, in the special issue dedicated to Howard Brandt, a central player behind the scenes in IS work on quantum information science and technology.
   Because realism (literally, the belief in objective reality) and heresy are both far less accepted now than they were 100 years ago, we may have to wait before other leading labs replicate the experiment, and address the many issues described in our paper. But it really does change everything, and open lots of doors which will be closed forever if we do not go further with it.
   

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