Researchers Demonstrate 'Quantum Surrealism'

[RainDreamer]

  http://newswise.com/articles/researchers-demonstrate-quantum-surrealism      

New research demonstrates that particles at the quantum level can in fact be seen as behaving something like billiard balls rolling along a table, and not merely as the probabilistic smears that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests. But there's a catch - the tracks the particles follow do not always behave as one would expect from "realistic" trajectories, but often in a fashion that has been termed "surrealistic."

In a new version of an old experiment, CIFAR Senior Fellow Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto) and colleagues tracked the trajectories of photons as the particles traced a path through one of two slits and onto a screen. But the researchers went further, and observed the "nonlocal" influence of another photon that the first photon had been entangled with.

On phone atm so excuse my formatting. So what our local physicists make of this news?

[K^2]

So these guys finally discovered path integral interpretation? And only what, 80 years late to the party?

And yes, the fact that equating photon's electric field to its wave function only works for a case of single particle is nothing new, either. Correct wave function description lives in a product space for the two entangled particles. Adding yet another interpretation to "help explain" this is not needed.

There is a tendency lately, and by lately I mean for the past few decades, to keep creating new interpretations of QM to fit prejudices of this or that research group. This is absolutely unnecessary. New interpretations do not provide additional clarity. Some interpretations have utility in simplifying formalism, and they have right to exist. But absolutely no interpretation ever gives better or worse explanation of Quantum Mechanics than any other. Because it's the same exact physics regardless of the interpretation. If any of them actually suggested new phenomena, they would be experimentally distinguishable from Quantum Mechanics, and would cease being interpretations.

If the only reason you are coming up with a new interpretation is to "explain" something in Quantum Mechanics, do us all a favor and keep it to yourself. If you really think your interpretation opens up new truths about Quantum Mechanics, then you've understood nothing about Quantum Mechanics. If, on the other hand, it's merely a better teaching tool, making it easier to explain QM to someone new to the field, then by all means, write a textbook.