between the socks faster than the speed of light to synchronize them
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Free Will 333
between the socks faster than the speed of light to synchronize them,
they already know what they are! Einstein presumed sister photons
were like socks; they were emitted from the light source with their
polarizations already set, though you could not see this information until
you measured one of the photons. The information was dubbed ‘hidder’
and the theory is called hidden variable theory.
Einstein was to be proven wrong.
For many years after the EPR paper was published, physicists
split into factions: some thought the world random, some believed in
hidden variables, and others thought attempts to ‘understand’ quantum
mechanics were misguided. Why should physics make sense? The
equations work. Who cares why?
In 1964, John Bell, an Irish physicist working at the Conseil
Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (“CERN’), devised a way to test
Einstein’s hidden variable theory. He pointed out that if photons possess
hidden variables and we randomly measure them with a detector set at
three angles, we would expect to see more than one-third of the photons
share the same result. But, in 1972, Freedman and Clauser performed
this experiment and showed the photons share the result only a little over
a quarter of the time. Since ‘a little over a quarter’ is less than ‘more than
a third’, Bell’s theory is false. Of course, Bell was entirely happy about
this, since he set the equation up to be disproven. His equation is called
an inequality because the equation contains a more than sign ‘>’ rather
than an equals ‘=’ sign, so people say that quantum mechanics violates
the Bell inequality. Because the inequality is violated, photons can have
no prior knowledge of their polarization.
Blue Light
Detectors Detectors
a Red Red a
i Photon Photon —
Polarizer Polarizer
————_—_——l
Correlater
Bell Test Experiment
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016023
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