[time-nuts] Precise Pendulum

[Attila Kinali]

On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 12:45:05 +0000
"John Moran, Scawby Design" <john at scawbydesign.co.uk> wrote:

> They quote - “At the other end of the scale, gravity dominates over very long distances, 
> while quantum effects vanish entirely at these distances.”
> 
> I thought quantum entanglement was valid over any distance - Einstein’s “spooky action at a 
> distance”. Thus offering the possibility of instantaneous transfer of information over 
> stellar distances.

I guess you are refering to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (thought) experiment.
The EPR experiment is based on entanglement, which is not a force. You create
two particles that share a "property". And this property does not change, no
matter how far the particles are appart. But, while it is true that this "affects"
particles at a distance, it does not mean one can transfer information at superluminal
speeds. The whole thing is very weird and my understanding of it is limited, so please
excuse me for not explaining it.

> This is one of the problems they are trying to sort out with the incompatibility of
> the two conflicting hypothesis.

They are not conflicting[1]. Both quantum theory and general relativity are proven and
well working theories. The problem with them is that they apply to different scales
of size. I.e. we have one theory that works well for large objects and one that
works well for small objects, but none that works well for all objects. The
"Grand Unified Theory" is the one that suppowed to bridge the gap between the two.
With the discovery (or rather verification of existence) of the Higgs boson, we are
a large step closer to that lofty goal, but by far not finished. There are still
a lot of corner cases that could be explained differently. And that's why physicists
come up with new experiments to see what happens when... and see whether they can
find a "problem" with a theory.

In this sense, the run of the LHC, although generally regarded as a great success,
has also been quite boring. Every experiment returned results that were in accordance
to current theories. For a lot of phenomena we now have better data, but nothing out
of the ordinary that would require new explanations.

> To then dismiss one of the ‘strange’ properties of quantum mechanics where there is an 
> apparent overlap, right at the beginning, seems a bit strange.

No not really. Quantum-gravity experiments have been quite common in the last decades.
You have to imagine scientists like sitting in a large and dark room with lots of
stuff in it. They don't see anything but what their tiny candle illuminates. So they
slowly walk from one object to another, drawing a map of things and try to see whether
there is a pattern somewhere. Whenever there is something that is not explaint to
everyones satisfaction, you'll find someone that looks at it from a different direction,
from a different angle, to see whether he can gleam new insights.

			Attila Kinali


[1] If two theories have contradicting predictions for something, the whole world usually
gears up and tries to find an experiment that shows which one is the right theory.
Once, this question has been answered, the one theory that got disproven is either
completely discarded or changed to account for that experiment. 

-- 
Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious 
after they are explained. -- Pardot Kynes