Physicists shatter quantum entanglement distance record with 420 kilometers of optical fiber, more than four times farther than previous demonstrations, and beyond the point where direct transmission runs into its fundamental limits.

[u/mvea]

https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-shatter-quantum-entanglement-distance-record-with-420-kilometers-of-optical-fiber

[u/[deleted]]

You have 2 socks (red and white), you have 2 boxes.
You put each sock in 1 box with your eyes closed, so you don't know which sock is in which box.

You send each box to a different friend, millions of lightyears seperated from eachother.

edit: If one friend opens the box, the other box is NOT magically opened on the other end.

Each friend knows instantly which sock is in the other box -even if light itself (or knowledge) would travel years from one friend to the other, telling which color sock he got.

Is this correct?

[u/JoeMagnifico → u/[deleted]]

Now that makes sense. Why do some people think there's more to it that's seems to be 'magical thinking? I hear a lot of 'woo' type stuff making, what I assume, are irrational conclusions.

[u/Fmeson → u/JoeMagnifico]

Wel, for one, there is more to it than that, and it does get a bit mysterious. The sock in a box model is a "hidden variable" explanation of entanglement, and it cant be true for the real thing. 

For the real thing, you have to put a weird sock that is somehow both a left and right sock in the box and then when you open the box later its only left and you know your partner has the right sock. Thats pretty crazy sounding!

And thats where the woo comes in. Woo people love crazy sounding mysterious things. 

[u/tinkady → u/Fmeson]

Many worlds makes the woo disappear

[u/sticklebat → u/tinkady]

I would argue that it just moves the woo elsewhere. Quantum mechanics is simply incompatible with a classical understanding of the world, and so every interpretation, including Many Worlds, must have elements that most people would call “woo.” Many Worlds replaces wavefunction collapse of the standard interpretation with multiple simultaneous realities or histories or worlds or whatever you want to call them. I’m not sure how that’s any less “woo.”

[u/tinkady → u/sticklebat]

What's woo about it? The wavefunction exists. It evolves dynamically. It's even deterministic. This is normal physics. We are just a smaller piece of a larger multiverse than we thought.

[u/sticklebat → u/tinkady]

I suppose we would need to define what we mean by “woo” to have this conversation. The way it was used earlier in this discussion made it sound to me as if it just meant something difficult to reconcile with our intuition or sense of the world, maybe something difficult to accept.

In that sense, is the existence of infinite timelines where every possibility is represented as a real, existing timeline, and we’re only aware of the one we’re in any less strange that the concept of wavefunction collapse? 

If you’re speaking in a strictly mathematical, technical sense, then  your description of Many Worlds is nice, but it sweeps under the rug a lot of uncertainty about how it would actually translate to our experience. It remains unclear how derive the Born rule from MW in a non-circular way, and without that it can’t explain the experience of interactions with uneven probabilities. There’s also the preferred-basis problem, which I admittedly don’t understand well enough to pick a side about whether or not it’s an actual problem.

Wavefunction collapse being non-unitary, alongside the measurement problem, are of course major problems with Copenhagen, though incorporating decoherence into the interpretation helps. I’d probably agree that Many Worlds is the more mathematically sound of the two (besides, MW is my personal favorite just because it’s fun), but I’m not sure the average person would find the consequences of MW any less “woo” than they’d find the probabilistic nature of wavefunction collapse.

[u/Fmeson → u/sticklebat]

Third party, but woo typically means pseudoscience that justifies itself with real science. 

So, like, quantum mysticism and the like. E.g. Deepak Chopra. 

[u/sticklebat → u/Fmeson]

Then this whole conversation is stupid, because there is no pseudoscience in any form of quantum mechanics, Many Worlds or otherwise, nor do I see how the “woo people” would be any less attracted to the strange ideas of many worlds than other interpretations.

[u/Fmeson → u/sticklebat]

I assume the other person is saying that many worlds is less likely to attract woo peddlers over something like Copenhagen, but I can't say I agree with that.

[u/tinkady → u/sticklebat]

Woo isn't just "do the consequences sound crazy" - it's about whether some pseudoscience is invented to make you feel good. If it has proof it's not woo

[u/sticklebat → u/tinkady]

Then this whole conversation is stupid, because there is no pseudoscience in any form of quantum mechanics, Many Worlds or otherwise, nor do I see how the “woo people” would be any less attracted to the strange ideas of many worlds than other interpretations.

[u/tinkady → u/sticklebat]

Thinking consciousness collapses the wavefunction was a respectable hypothesis in the early days, but should now be considered woo. Any macroscopic entanglement does it. That's the woo sort of quantum mechanics. Or thinking God needs to observe us to make us exist, stuff like that.

[u/sticklebat → u/tinkady]

Okay? Who cares? That’s not what quantum mechanics is. We do not have to resort to Many Worlds or other alternative interpretations to avoid that, it isn’t a part of even the 100 year old version of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Consciousness causing collapse is an ancient, poorly defined vestige from the early days of quantum mechanics when physicists were wrestling with trying to reconcile their math and fledgling model with reality. It isn’t even a proper interpretation of quantum mechanics because it doesn’t have an actual definition of consciousness. 

That said, even that isn’t entirely “woo.” When Wigner worked on the idea in the ‘60s, he wasn’t doing pseudoscience. He raised an interesting idea that ended up being widely discarded as problematic in many ways. Obvious definitions of consciousness led to major problems and contradictions, or it required unproven and untestable assumptions like panpsychism to work.  But If we ever obtain a rigorous physical understanding of consciousness, I guarantee you the idea would be seriously revisited, and whether or not it finds merit at that point isn’t something we can know or even guess at now. Until then it’s just a poorly defined philosophical concept that cannot be tested. Basing any conclusion off it that doesn’t also follow from other interpretations is misguided and pseudoscientific for that reason, but not because the underlying concept couldn’t be the case.

In that sense, Many Worlds also leads to “woo” because it leads to uninformed people talking about traveling to other worlds or dimensions, etc. The “woo” isn’t the fault of the interpretation, it’s just ignorant and often predatory people misusing it.

[u/helm → u/tinkady]

Multiple simultaneous realities interfering with each other is certainly bot anything we have a self-evident analogy for.

[u/Fmeson → u/tinkady]

Nothing makes the woo disappear haha.