Spooky Action at a Distance at Google [Video]
My book talk at Google
By George Musser

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  1. beware: recall Feynman’s dictim: if anyone says they understand quantum mechanics, they don’t understand quantum mechanics.

      1. I am about halfway through Spooky Action and keep hitting my head against the same conceptual barrier— A chicken versus egg/mathematical equation thing. If an equation doesn’t “work“, does that mean that the reality it seeks to describe doesn’t exist? Here is an example from chapter five. “Indeed, the whole reason that … Faraday and …Maxwell introduced the electric and magnetic fields… was to guarantee locality “. Huh??

        As a layperson, perhaps I am rebellious against the need to make theories fit into math. I am a Faraday without a Maxwell.

        1. Good question, which opens up the whole issue of scientific realism. If an equation doesn’t “work”, we can assume that its premises have some logical inconsistency that the act of writing in mathematical form has revealed. Math provides a highly precise language that lets us think with the utmost clarity. Alternatively, the premises might be perfectly consistent logically, but happen not to describe our world, in which case the role of math is to facilitate the comparison between theory and experiment.

          The example about Faraday and Maxwell involves a different issue: namely, the motivation for field theory. By “introduced” I simply meant, “hypothesized”. What led Faraday and Maxwell to hypothesize fields? This choice was not dictated by the data.

          Does that clarify? Feel free to follow up.