Sunday 19 June 2016

Independent Confirmation of Joy Christian’s Model

Last week a young physicist from Ireland, Brian O'Sullivan, published an article(1) in which he arrives at the same conclusion as Joy Christian that the hidden variable that is responsible for the spin related behavior of fundamental particles, is based on the constraints of the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere (S3).

While Brian's approach is quite different (for example he uses the quaternion representation of the spin, while Joy tends to use bivectors and Geometric Algebra) both physicists state that the particular quantum behavior is caused by the hopf-vibration between the S3 and the S2 space.

His conclusions are as remarkable as those of Joy Christian:

The parameter space of the quaternion accounts for the statistics of all the fundamental particles, integer and half-integer, in a natural way, and most importantly it does so deterministically.
The theory of the fundamental particles formed from Hamilton's quaternions is a deterministic local Hidden Variable theory.
and
With no superposition, there is no decoherence, and it follows that Quantum Information is a fundamentally flawed science, and the reason that Quantum Computing has not been achieved to date is that it will never be achieved ...
Brian has not referenced the work of Joy Christian. This, and the fact that his approach is quite different, makes it reasonable to believe that he has made his case and conclusions independently from those of Joy Christian.

EDIT 26/06/2016: The author has temporary retracted his article: "Withdrawn due to the lack of sensitivity regarding the consequences of the presented results"

  1. The Hopf-Fibration and Hidden Variables in Quantum and Classical Mechanics, Brian O'Sullivan, June 14, 2016, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.02569.pdf

9 comments:

  1. Albert Jan, many thanks for this post, and for the reference to an interesting paper.

    It was pointed out to me by Ward Struyve on my Facebook page that this paper does not talk about quantum correlations at all. His discussion about S^3 and Hopf fibration etc. is all very nice, but also quite well known. His observation that spin can be understood purely classically is also well known, at least in the literature on Geometric Algebra.

    But as you say, it is nice to have an independent confirmation of, or investigation into, these issues.

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  2. You (and Ward) are quite right. I have removed the sentence about correlation of entangled particles from the post.

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  3. Weird! The paper was withdrawn but still exist as version 2.

    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.02569v2.pdf

    "Withdrawn due to the lack of sensitivity regarding the consequences of the presented results. Upon reflection the author believes the approach used to present his argument was unethical as it has failed to capture the vast efforts made by the community toward achieving QC, and furthermore the claims made in this article are not yet experimentally proven - so any assumptions made by the author as to the credibility of the presented calculations are premature, and are reflective of haste on the part of the author. This article will be replaced at a later date with a formally cohesive presentation which is reflective of the grand efforts made by the scientific community in the exploration of the atomic and subatomic realm."

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    Replies
    1. The poor kid has obviously been gagged, as they have been trying to gag me for the past nine years.

      In his case, however, the gagging may be justified because he made poor and half-baked arguments for his rather rash claims.

      I can clearly see from his statement you quote that someone took him to a corner and gave him a serious dressing-down. Poor kid.

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  4. The paper does propose an experiment that I believe might determine that the S3 topology is correct.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.250404
    http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08144
    "Classical Physics and the Bounds of Quantum Correlations"

    As we have been saying, Bell's theory is junk physics.

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  7. 1. Noticed this blog and this post only today.

    Regarding Joy Christian, I, in the past (c. 2012) had commented on the debate/whatever which he had at Scott Aaronson's blog, at many places on this thread: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=993, esp. here: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=993#comment-44933. (Before that, in March 2011, I had exchanged emails with Joy suggesting him to conduct C++ simulations so that his argument becomes better concretized. I no longer remember how I came to know of him.)

    I am happy to see that quite a bit of simulation code has appeared on this blog.

    Are there any salient objections which people have made about these simulations? or about the conclusions obviously to be drawn from the simulations? ... Just curious.


    2. Re. The second excerpt from O'Sullivan mentioned in this post, viz.,

    ``With no superposition, there is no decoherence, and it follows that Quantum Information is a fundamentally flawed science, and the reason that Quantum Computing has not been achieved to date is that it will never be achieved ... ''

    I think that this conclusion is untenable in the broader context of QM taken as a whole.


    Best,

    --Ajit
    [E&OE]

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  8. Hi Ajit,
    much discussion on the simulations can be found in the comments section of the blog posts from june 2015 and earlier, as well on http://www.sciphysicsforums.com/spfbb1/viewforum.php?f=6. In the june 2015 post I have tried to express the current status of the simulations. I think there is still need for a event by event simulation with a clear separation of the measurements at Alice's and Bob's stations. However this is difficult, given that we're so much used to think and program in R3, and Joy's model is embedded in S3.
    Albert Jan

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