Horst-Maxine-Windust

[bandwraith at aol.com]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm


In a paper published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters,
MIT researchers propose an experiment that may close the last major
loophole of Bell's inequality -- a 50-year-old theorem that, if
violated by experiments, would mean that our universe is based
not on the textbook laws of classical physics, but on the less tangible
probabilities of quantum mechanics.

Such a quantum view would allow for seemimgly counterintuitive
phenomenon such as entanglement...

Among other things, entanglement -- a quantum feature Albert Einstein
skeptically referred to as "spooky action at a distance" -- seems to
suggest that entangled particles can affect each other instantly,
faster than the speed of light...

Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains;
physicists refer to it as "setting indepedence," or more provocatively,
"free will." This loophole proposes that a particle detector's settings
may "conspire" with events in the shared causal past of the detectors
themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure -
a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running
the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each
detector's setting. Such a scenario would result in biased
measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more
than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics
than classical physics.


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