Solution experiment part 4

"If you insist on being a child, I'll treat you like one. In fact, children aren't allowed to work. Given that you act like a child and children aren't allowed to work, maybe I will fire you," Sam said.
"I'm sorry Ms. Griffen," Mark pleaded.  "My dad would kill me if I didn't intern with you. He had to pull some strings with Mathiason and I'll be in deep sh..." Mark trailed off and corrected himself, "Doo-doo. I'll be in deep doo-doo if I get fired."
"Mathiason did send you!" said Samantha and she crossed her arms.
"No, they didn't send me. I requested this position. I've heard good things. My father says that Micron U is the best comp-sci campus and that you are the top investigator in theoretical modeling. I really want to work on those algorithms your interns have been publishing." He begged again, "Please."
Sam considered his plea. Then she said, "I don't know if I believe you or not. It's just crazy enough that you actually do want to work on this project. But you've been very disrespectful so far. And you also have an entitled air about you. I'd actually love to get back at a Thorne for what Julian did to my father." Sam uncrossed her arms. She continued, "But I don't have a lot of time to complete these tests. I need to go to CERN next week. I need some results before I go there. I can fire you after that."
"Thanks," Mark said. "I really appreciate it."
"Thanks for being fired?" asked Sam and laughed.
"Yes. I mean, no. I mean, thanks for the second chance. I know I can do better."
"Okay, let's go back to the lab," said Sam. She turned and walked back toward the stairwell.
Mark chased after. "What about the freaky sh... Spooky action in the lab?" he asked.
"The data will tell us," she said to the air in front of her as she marched up the stairs.
Back inside the lab, the computer was still displaying an hourglass that endlessly turned over, refilled, emptied, turned over, and refilled.
"What would we look for?" asked Mark.
"First, the amount of light captured from the front-split beam will tell us how long the laser was on and how much light should be captured by the back sensors. The left and right counts should add up to something close to the front-split amount. Whenever we see an equal amount, we would know that the experiment was configured correctly. If we see a bias on either the right or left amounts, we can probably guess that the mesh was incorrectly placed."
"What about when the mesh disappears completely?" asked Mark.
"I have some documentary evidence for that," said Sam. "There's also a camera above," here she pointed up to the ceiling, "that records the experiment from above. We just fast-forward the video to the point where the alarms were going off and look at the camera."
Mark looked up. "Oh," he said. "Speaking of alarms, doesn't that mean the sensors were recording an imbalance?"
Sam nodded. The computer flashed a green prompt and displayed a screen with several application icons. Sam touched the screen in a sequence and brought up a directory folder containing several files all listed by date. She finger-swiped to the bottom of the list and tapped the last item with a date and time from a few minutes earlier.
She said, "See here is the beginning of the replay." An overhead view of the table appeared. It showed a very symmetrical set of green lines dancing in a series of triangles and straight lines.
Sam swiped forward until Mark's head could be seen leaning into the visible table area from above. "You have a bald spot," Sam announced. Mark winced. She swiped forward again but more slowly. A graph with several lines splayed across it. The differently coloured lines bobbed up and down as the back of Mark's head moved and his hands pulled at the mesh, moving it forward. "And... here," said Sam.
The video froze and showed the table with Mark's left shoulder turned three-quarters to the table and his head looking over his right shoulder.
"What's that?" Mark asked, pointing.
Sam nodded. A green line along the bottom of the screen (the right-side from the laser) pointed off in at a strange angle, clearly breaking the neatly formed symmetry in the design of the table. Sam leaned closer and traced the line. She glanced at the graph with the coloured lines on the side. "You see here," she said, moving her finger. "The right-side count is zero. So that's all it was, the laser was moved off the lens and the incidence of the angle allowed those photons to be counted as left-side photons. Here the total count in yellow is just slightly higher than the left-side count in red. The right-side count in green is zero."
Mark nodded. "You can't see the mesh," he noted.
"You can never see the mesh," said Sam. "The camera is aimed from above. So it looks like a line."
"There's no line," he said, squinting.
"It's hard to see," she admitted.
"If the mesh is a meant to emulate the diffraction pattern at the back, and the diffraction pattern were to collapse, then the light should be blocked by the mesh," Mark said.
"Light takes all possible paths," Sam said. "So it goes through the pinholes, around and bypassing the mesh, and continues on."
"If you rewind a bit," said Mark pointing, "You can see the mesh here.. stop," he said.
Sam nodded.
"And the right-side mirror is correct," he said.
Sam swiped forward keeping her finger on the screen. The silver line marking the mesh flickered in slow motion, waved slightly as if bending, and then disappeared. At the moment it started waving, the green light on the right side mirror angled abruptly out of alignment.
"Holy sh..." said Mark, mumbling the last word.
"Hm," said Samantha.
"The camera is another observer to the experiment. The fact that you were recording the video of the experiment means there were three observers. That changes everything," said Mark.
Samantha laughed. "Yes, the camera is an observer. So are all the photon sensors. Everything we use to measure the universe is an observer."
"So that proves it," said Mark.
"No, no," said Samantha still laughing. "Quantum mechanics can't go back into the camera or back into time to change the records retroactively. The camera doesn't see anything that we don't see or can't see.
"Einstein was upset about quantum theory because he couldn't abide by the fact that the universe wasn't deterministic. In classic terms, everything is deterministic. He fought for the fact that if you knew the exact starting position of every particle in the universe, you could deterministically predict everything in the universe. He must have lost his mind when Bohr and Heisenberg were proving that wasn't the case. Not only is it not the case that you can't know all the starting conditions of the universe. But you also can't know the outcome of every interaction at the quantum level. It's completely random. He went crazy trying to tear quantum theory apart."
"Isn't that chaos theory?" asked Mark. "The fact that small changes in initial conditions changes the outcome?"
"Yes, but that's just an expression of the underlying quantum interactions. Everything is completely random and the universe refuses to allow us to predict the outcomes of anything at the quantum level."
"So we can never reproduce the initial conditions of an experiment the same way twice?"
"Never. In classic physics, things are averaged out well enough that, say, rolling a ball downhill is roughly the same every time. But the better your instrumentation gets, the more you need to account for strange effects like thermal expansion, humidity, friction from different spots on the ball and ramp, and so forth. Even those are classic parameters. Imagine trying to setup the rolling ball experiment and trying to line up all the atoms with the same orientation, energy levels, and so forth."
"I agree," said Mark. "Einstein should have been smart enough to figure that out."
"The difference is that Einstein couldn't accept that it wasn't possible. He thought it should be theoretically possible. He figured that the Copenhagen analysis was incomplete at best, or wrong at worst. EPR, that is, Einstein Podolsky, and Rosen, made fun of the guys working on quantum theory. Einstein and all his believers were wrong. They were flat, broken, bald, and dead wrong."
"They weren't wrong," said Mark.
"Einstein was wrong. He wasn't some great saint. He had a very good theory in relativity which has been shown to work in all of the classic frames of reference. Newton couldn't have done experiments that involved relativity. Einstein, and everyone else, believed he had correctly rewritten the entire summation of physics in one fell swoop. Unfortunately for Einstein and everyone else, the universe was playing magician, showing how the trick is done and coming up with another stumper.
"Einstein was wrong," Sam repeated. "He was humiliatingly wrong. Like all men, he was wrapped up in his own idea of how things were and wouldn't listen to anyone else."
"'God doesn't play with dice,' he said," Mark quoted.
"The quote is 'God doesn't throw dice,'" Sam said. "But of course God throws dice. He is omnipotent. He can do anything. How can God not throw dice? He created the dice and He throws them all the time."
"Sacrilege," joked Mark.
"Of course," smiled Samantha. "It's something I think about all the time. Einstein was wrong. I must be wrong a lot more of the time. We should all be careful about what stands we make and where we plant our idealism."
"I'm not wrong," said Mark. "I saw the mesh disappear and it's on the camera too."
"There is a simple answer," Sam said. "There must be. You can count on people making mistakes. You can count on people being wrong. Whole careers are made of people who do nothing but show off other people's mistakes. I've seen it all too often."