Chapter 12 - By Contradiction

Portent

There is no shortage of proofs that quantum nonlocality cannot be used to send superluminal signals. Eberhard’s paper of 1989 is probably the definitive treatment, comprehensive, succinct and devastating. Randomness defeats any possible combination of measurements, no matter how clever.

But the problem with impossibility proofs is that they require a very strong model, and a strong model is a de facto paradigm. If you are going to go ahead and do the impossible anyway, you are going to have to subvert the paradigm.

Primary Docs

Paradigm Discourse:
Open the Paired Correlations discourse in the next tab

Technical Chapter:
Open the By Contradiction chapter in the next tab

Significance

If multiple realities are an accurate description of quantum reality, what is it that connects them? If quantum superposition is splitting reality moment to moment, and contradiction is pruning those same realities as part of the same dynamic, then quantum mechanics is creating multiple copies of everything (what we thought was the Universe) and simultaneously destroying some of the copies (again, each copy an instance of what we thought was the Universe), in a flagrant excess of creating stuff out of nothing, and then, just as flagrantly, voiding it all out of existence. The scale of this creation/destruction churn is, oh, let’s see now…some 100 orders of magnitude! Makes the classical view of physics as the movement of objects across a vast stage of space, all synchronized by a global clock, as laughably, hopelessly naive. What kind of a reality do we inhabit? Who thought this place up?

We turn to a classic in physics - the thought experiment. In our case, that will typically be implemented as a game, as a quantum game, a toy universe of our own creation where we are in command of the rules. What could possibly go wrong?