I write this with a degree of uncertainty as to whether it is ready to share as I cannot yet fully defend it against criticisms that I can fully anticipate. Therefore, I ask that you to consider this a novel thought experiment. It extends a past hypothesis upon which I have written concerning a reimagining of matter/anti-matter pairs as singular particle movement in 4d space-time. Reading that article first will be unnecessary; While I will not fully restate that argument here, we will make the case through illustration. I intend to use this as a rudimentary teaching opportunity on germane aspects of quantum mechanics such that one naïve to the topic might come to grasp my hypothesis as a natural extension of the illustration.
I will start with the assertion that it is very difficult to believe in quantum mechanics (QM). It predicts the universe behaving in ways that seemingly contradict our experience and intuition of the reality that we have all observed throughout our normal course of life. At the heart of much of this, in my opinion, is the concept of local realism.
Local Realism is the assumption that measurement outcomes are well defined prior to and independent of the measurements themselves.
I will give a (bad) example to make this definition more tangible. If we flip a coin and cover it, there is an expectation that the outcome has already been decided in advance of us looking (or not looking) at it. This is a bad example because it implies human observation, but it is of course the corollary to our real life. QM predicts that Local Realism does not exist at the quantum level (particle sized) even if it appears to at the macro level (coin sized). Einstein expressed skepticism on this and asserted, with others, that the theory of QM was incomplete. He believed that a particle has some definite state where its momentum, mass, spin, etc are objectively defined even if these values are hidden from us. If I throw a ball in the dark, one might not know its trajectory, mass, spin, momentum, color, material, etc, but we can all be pretty confident those facts exist before we measure them at the point the ball strikes you in the face! And they do… but this is not true when it is a particle, so argues QM.
Do you really believe that the moon isn’t there when nobody looks?
Albert Einstein
Sparing a rigorous elaboration that is not necessary for our illustration, the well known Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, a fundamental concept in QM, mathematically defines that there is a limit to the precision that one can know about a pair of physical properties. For instance, given a particle, you cannot simultaneously know its mass and its momentum. This is absurd if we consider throwing a ball, and yet holds at the quantum level. Let us not dive deep into understanding this assertion, in fact let’s instead be skeptical of it.
Pulling that all together, the quantum mechanical argument is that if you know one thing about a particle you cannot know another and furthermore both of those properties don’t truly exist until you measure it. It is more than you not knowing what those values are, it is that those values are not yet defined concretely in reality; they can only be described at this point with probability. This is the true nature of Schrödinger’s Cat… it is not that you don’t know if the cat is alive or dead in the box, it is simultaneously both and reality is not defined until it is measured. This is like saying a ball is thrown, its mass and momentum are neither known or are even knowable, you measure its mass, that mass now becomes reality but you are now prevented by the universe in knowing its momentum. Yikes!
In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen constructed the EPR Paradox as a thought experiment that intended to highlight the lunacy of this, or more politely, the incompleteness of the theory to appropriately cover “elements of reality”. It took advantage of the concept of Entanglement, which we will discuss next, to seemingly contradict and violate what we have laid out above.
Entanglement is a process by which particles can share a quantum state wherein QM suggests that state of one particle cannot be described separately from the state of the other particle.
Another (bad) example, I have a ball that I throw. As above, we cannot know anything about the ball until we measure it, until then it is only a probability. I might catch it and see that it is blue, catch another it is red, catch another and it is green. We can say what the probability is that it is any given color, but we cannot predict what it is until we catch it. Now we entangle two balls together using a magic wand and throw the pair. If we catch one and find it is red, QM says that we are guaranteed that when we look at the other ball it will also be red. One might simply and obviously conclude, they were both red when they were thrown, it is just an extremely unimpressive magic trick that I reveal one is red and then find that the other is also red <insert audience politely clapping accented with an awkward cough>… but again, QM says that the color is a probability and that the act of finding the first to be red caused the probability to collapse to reality for both balls and that they were both not certain to be red when they were thrown.
Ok, says the EPR Paradox, well then, if both balls are entangled and I catch one and find it is red you are saying that this instantly “communicates” this “decision” to the other ball faster than the speed of light in violation of relativity, so that other ball “decides” to be red as well. And furthermore if I catch a ball and find it is red, the universe prevents me from telling what material the ball is made from. Well, then, what stops me from catching first ball and finding it is red then catching the second ball and finding it is made of rubber? Since both balls share precisely the same quantum state according to QM, I now have measured a pair of properties on the same ball which is impossible given the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle! Gotcha using your own nonsense against you! QM in fact predicts this paradox, it suggests that if you measure a property of one entangled particle you cannot measure a different property on the other entangled particle and so this apparent paradox stood for the next 29 years outliving its authors.
In 1964 John Bell came up with a way to actually test this experimentally using the polarization of entangled photon and leveraging a clever bit of grade-school level math that is referred to now as Bell’s Inequality. Let’s start by going over polarization and then get into the setup (and results) of the experiment.
A photon can be considered as an electromagnetic wave. While there are more exotic waveforms and important aspects of the relationship between the electric and magnetic components of light, let’s consider this wave as simply a normal sinusoidal wave in a 2 dimensional plane. We would say that this light is vertically polarized because it is in plane with your screen right now.
When a photon is generated though as unpolarized light its orientation is unknown, the act of polarizing it with a filter blocks all waves that are not oriented with the single polarization angle of the filter. This polarization filter is in affect no different than the sort in your sunglasses to reduce glare.
Experimentally we can see that if we take unpolarized light we reduce its intensity by 50% when passing through a polarized filter. If we pass vertically polarized light through a filter that is polarized 90 degrees relative to it, no light passes through.
… every other angle reduces the intensity some amount between 0% and 100%:
The experiment for Bell’s theorem involves emitting a pair of entangled photons and comparing the result of whether they pass through or are blocked by a pair of polarized filter.
What this experiment shows is that if you set both filters to the same angle, they will always have the same result. 50% of the time neither detector detects the photon passing the filter and 50% of the time both are detected. As QM suggests, they will always have the same value because you measured one the other must match, but as we are skeptical, we can simply explain this that they both had the initial value, this arrangement of filters does not answer this question but it does reassure us that the two photons are always measured as polarized identically.
Now if we vary the polarization filters, let’s say one is at 0% and one is at 90%, in that case we find, just as you might expect, that the 50% of the time one detector goes off and the other does not, and 50% the other detector goes off and the other does not. This is really an inverse of the past test, again, validating that the photons are behaving identically as expected.
But what if we add a third angle into the mix such as 45 degrees? Before I share the answer, let’s predict what this value must logically be, which is what Bell’s Inequality is and crux of the experiment.
From the tests above, we can now accept that the polarization of each particle is the same. Let us assume that whether the particle will pass through one of the filters A, B, and C is, as Einstein suggests, determined before the measurement, it is a hidden variable. Then each pair of photons “knows” in advance what it will do when it encounters a filter, and we can express the 8 combinations as such:
| Pass Filter A | Pass Filter B | Pass Filter C |
| Y | N | N |
| Y | Y | N |
| Y | N | Y |
| Y | Y | Y |
| N | N | N |
| N | Y | N |
| N | N | Y |
| N | Y | Y |
Now each one the combinations may not have the same probability, but certainly whatever the test the result is the properties of the photon we are testing MUST be on this list. The experiment involves taking a lot of measurements using a random pair of these filters for each of the entangled photons and counting for each pair how often the measured value is different; meaning I randomly select Filter A and Filter B, what percent of the time does this result in one detector being on and the other detector being off. This may seem like an unusual thing to measure, but using some clever logic these measurements allow us to make a statement about what we should expect to find. This “expectation” is what Bell’s Inequality is. I will represent it visually to make it more intuitive then the math otherwise is:
What I am representing in Region I is the the result of measuring that Filters A and B detect different responses. Likewise Region II for Filters C and B. It should seem rather intuitive that if we add those two results together it should be less than or equal to region III. Similarly obvious is that Region IV using Filter A and C should be less than Region III. This is clearly what we would expect if we were performing this on, what I like as my favorite example, a playground of kids wearing hats, scarves and/or gloves. This would suggest the number of those wearing hats and not scarves (or the reverse) + those wearing gloves and not scarves (or the reverse) must be greater than or equal to the number of kids wearing hats and not gloves (or the reverse). Personally I find the visual above easier to grasp than any cute verbal examples.
So ok, that makes logical sense if you mull it over a bit, but let me share with you now what the results of the actual experiment show. While any filters can be used, the punchline is most evident if you select the filters of A = 0 degrees, B = 45 degrees, and C = 90 degrees.
- Region I (A & B) = ~15%
- Region II (B & C) = ~15%
- Region IV (A & C) = 50%
Using Bell’s Inequality above Region III must be less than or equal to 30% (15%+15%), but Region III must also be greater than or equal to 50%…. uh oh, that is a clear contradiction, Bell’s Inequality is violated! If you spend some time internalizing this you will come to incredible conclusion that there is no way that Local Realism exists because the photons must NOT have their values defined in advance as one of those 8 conditions. This result is of course predicted by QM because again, once you measure one photon you are actively changing the other photon. Here is a comparison between the correlations predicted by classical vs QM. To understand this better (you can ask me to explain) or you can reference some great material out there but the takeaway is that the prediction of QM is what we surprisingly see in the experiment’s results:
Alright, so what did we learn:
- QM governs how very small things interact and that this is often at odds with our experience with large things.
- QM says that properties at this level exist only as probability until they are measured which defies our intuition of Local Realism.
- QM says that if you know one property about something then you cannot know another property about it, also know as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
- Entangled particles allow us to have two quantum-identical copies in which QM predicts measurements of one particle’s property will cause the property of the other particle to become reality even across time and space instantaneously (faster than the speed of light).
- The EPR Paradox was a thought experiment to highlight an apparent contradiction between entangled particles and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and moreover make the case for Local Realism.
- Decades later, an experiment was conceived to perform a test of the EPR Paradox. This test used entangled photons and the probability that they would pass or be blocked by a pair of random polarized filters.
- The results of the test showed that the actual results violated the probability one would expect if local reality existed, name Bell’s Inequality, and instead matched the predictions of QM.
Ok, with that as a QM crash course, we are getting close to sharing my hypothesis. I want to share one more tangible example of QM though which will prove useful. It is called the Three-Polarizer Paradox.
It should seem intuitive that vertically polarized light encountering a horizontally polarized filter will be blocked. It is also not a very big leap to anticipate that vertically polarized light encountering a filter half way between vertical and horizontal (45 degrees) would block half of the light. Sure enough this is easily shown experimentally and supported by QM.
Given what you see above, you might be very surprised to find out what happens if you stick a 45 degree filter between the 0 and 90 degree ones:
While it is intuitive that the light would be fully blocked, it actually only blocks an additional 50%! Meaning that if you take a pair of filters where the light cannot travel through them, and then add an ADDITIONAL filter between them, which you would expect would reduce the light intensity even further, light now passes all the way through!
Let’s give a basic explanation for this behavior. The word Quantum in QM has to due with the fact that scientists observed reactions where there were discreet steps in the energy particles exhibited and not some continuos amount. It would be like having a car that could only drive multiples of 5 mph, if you were driving 10 mph and you accelerated nothing would happen until you instantaneously started going 15 mph, there was no speed in between, it is one or the other. So while we accept that 50% of light is blocked by the 45 degree polarized filter, if we consider each individual quantized photon it can either go through or be blocked and there is a 50% chance of either occurring, you cannot have 50% of the photon go through. If it goes through, it didn’t just “sneak” through as a vertically polarized photon, it is now truly polarized at 45 degrees, it was changed by the measurement. So now unlike a 0 degree polarized photon, when this 45 degree photon hits the 90 degree filter, it is not blocked and again has 50% chance of passing. The fact that measuring the polarization of the photon changes the polarization of the photon is why Bell’s experiment used two separate entangled photons; the surprise being that it still behaved exactly as single photon where measuring one changed the other the same as in this paradoxical example.
Ok, I think we have enough now to present my hypothesis!
As I wrote at length about in a past article, my studies in higher dimensional simulations led me to make the case that antimatter was in fact matter travelling backwards in time. Recently I recognized that entanglement is often (but not exclusively) the result of matter / antimatter interactions which caused me to consider that the resulting entangled particles might also be able to be analyzed as moving in opposite directions in time. To my satisfaction, the results, which I will present, simultaneously satisfy Einstein’s intuition and Bell’s experiment that appears to disprove it. What I find so interesting is that this alternative view is so incredibly simple conceptually and yet results in the same unintuitive predictions of QM.
Imagine that when the two entangled photons in Bell’s experiment are apparently created, that in fact, it is simply setting up a point of reflection in space time; A location in time and space where a photon travelling backwards in time reflects and starts travelling forward in time along with us. Our perception as time proceeds is that there are two photons, but in fact they are the same with one travelling forward in time and the other backwards. It is prudent to not consider them aging or you can easily confuse yourself, and in fact, at the speed of light they are timeless according to relativity. Now, it will seem quite obvious that a change to one must necessitate a change in the other now not in violation of local realism but in fact precisely because of it! Let’s look at a diagram to help illustrate the point:
This illustrates the photon moving backwards in time, through the 0 degree filter, reflecting and then moving forward in time and passing through a 45 degree filter. Our apparent observation would of course be a pair of photons moving forward in time and striking two filters. Now consider the spooky action at a distance that QM predicts and that we saw Bell’s experiment validate: If these were two separate particles, then somehow, faster than the speed of light, and in violation of our intuition of the universe, one particle moving through one filter would change that particle and as a result of entanglement the other particle would be somehow also be mysteriously changed as the probability wave collapsed to reality. Under my hypothesis, there is no mystery or incompatibility with relativity, because causality holds and of course the particle passing through one filter seemingly communicates a decision to the second particle, because they are one and the same with one event simply taking place, from the perspective of the particle, before the other. This is no different than in the triple-polarized paradox where measuring the photon’s polarization changed its polarization and then it passed through a second filter. In that experiment it was more obvious because we were dealing with a single photon travelling forward in time whereas Bell’s experiment involves a single photon travelling in two directions in time.
I was thrilled that I can confidently show the math that supports the same results using my hypothesis as in Bell’s experiment. For me, this view of the universe feels right, it demystifies the magic and protects aspects of reality that I feel strongly about, it simply requires us to view time from a different point of view.
No, I will not address here today the future reflection required to create this time-loop nor that there are other approaches to creating entanglement. I look forward to give it all more though, maybe somehow devising an experiment to test my hypothesis, and applying it to other QM scenarios to see if it continues to hold or breaks down.
Thanks for sticking to the end!
