Solution Washington part 8

"Yes, I'm listening," said U.N. Ambassador. "Let her speak! Let the women's voices rise up so all can hear!"
"Why, just because they're women?" grumped Potus.
"This is a matter of survival for everyone," said Samantha. "Thank you perm rep to the U.N." The ambassador nodded. Sam continued, "This is an extinction level event. ELO is the common acronym. I've given you the background physics. I apologise if it was boring and made you think of sandwiches. But we need to focus on the crisis at hand and find a solution to the problem."
Sam looked around the room and everyone seemed to be paying attention. She continued, "I've spent the last two years investigating what we thought were defects with the solid state devices manufactured by Thorne Industries. Mister Thorne here represents the interests of the controlling family of the corporation. At first we were baffled by the data we were getting back from the quality tests that we run on the electronic systems.  I should back up to explain what solid states are.
"Solid state electronics differ from other mechanical devices such as vacuum tubes, relays or switches, and moving devices. For example, probably the most famous solid state device invented in the 1940's was the transistor. Other solid state devices that you have heard of are light emitting diodes (LEDs), liquid crystal displays (LCDs), and memory devices. Your fancy phones are made possible by solid state electronics." Here Potus covered his breast pocket with his hand and looked fearfully at Johnson. "Solid state devices use a bit of quantum mechanical engineering to move electrons through a substance that typically wouldn't conduct electrons. There could be two forms of electrical motion in solid state devices, a negative electron moving through a substance or the positive pull of an electron 'hole'."
Samantha looked around the room and most of the people's eyes were glazed over. "I apologise for being too technical. It's my job. Where was I? Ah, yes, solid state devices. So Thorne Industries has been manufacturing these devices for global positioning satellite (GPS), memory and disk storage, and other devices in wide use. We have been measuring a lot of anomalies in the output of these devices for a while, and it has been getting worse. Imagine if you have a GPS and it tells you that you are three feet behind where you think you knew yourself to be. The errors were a lot smaller than three feet, obviously. But they were getting worse.
"We also have very precise timing equipment which is vital to the correct functioning of the satellite tracking and positioning systems. Time doesn't really exist, but we need to count how many times a cesium atom oscillates so that we can keep track of how the universe is changing. Imagine you are in a dark room and you can hear a clock ticking. You know that the ticking represents some state where the pendulum is at one end of the swing and that implies it must have moved through an arc so that something is different from before until now. That's what we do to sense the passage of this illusion we call time. Time is just the illusion of the state of saying 'oh, this thing was over there and now it's here.' Clear enough?" she asked. No one seemed very clear on the subject.
"Once again I apologise for being so boring. If you keep up with me, we'll get there I promise. Everyone's heard of Einstein?" A few nods around the table. "Einstein and his friends came up with a counter-argument to quantum mechanics which had just come out around the time. Einstein was happy with his theories of relativity and felt very contented that he had solved most all of the physics problems that might exist. He had certainly explained a lot about what we now call 'classical' physics, and had shown how Netwon's, previously called 'classical', physics was lacking. Suddenly this new theory of quantum mechanics was upturning Einstein's world view which he had just finished nailing down pretty well.
"He and his buddies, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen tried to make fun of quantum mechanics by proposing all sorts of problems that couldn't be solved by the new theory. They had a lot of friends like Schrödinger and Bell. Bell famously came up with a theory that was found to be false. And EPR were collectively shown to be on the wrong side of the fence. People like Heisenburg and Bohr were on the right side of the fence and created what is now called the Copenhagen interpretation, which has been largely upheld with experimental evidence. No one has been able to duplicate Schrödinger's experiments, but Bell has been shown to be wrong on almost every count. Bell's failure is spectacular. Even Einstein had to admit he might have backed the wrong horse, as they say. God doesn't throw dice but he does go to the racetrack, I guess."
"Sacrilege!" cried Potus amid murmurs from the people at the table.
Samantha raised her good hand. "Just a joke. However, as a point of fact, Schrödinger's famous cat was a thought experiment designed to discredit quantum mechanics! It turns out he wasn't wrong and his equations still work for most of the observations we're making to this day. If we take a Copenhagen interpretation of the outcomes we're observing we have three common features that we look for. The three are locality, realism, and freedom. I'll go through each one.
"Locality means that information is contained wholly in the object or surrounding information of the particle or experiment we're working on. One way to make it clearer is to say that a particle is in a state that is self-contained and does not transfer information or state with something else far away. If a photon is polarised at 90 degrees, then that information is available locally. It does not get that information remotely from some other particle or photon far away. Likewise, the particle does not transfer information to some other experiment far away to be retrieved remotely. Everything about the photon is contained locally and tested locally. This agrees with Einstein's aversion to so-called 'spooky', or instantaneous, action at a distance.
"The second part is realism and this is usually described by saying that, 'the moon exists even if you don't look at it'. We like to believe that the universe would clock along in some state without us observing it. Otherwise, things might shift and change when we don't look at them. In fact, a very small fraction of anything is ever seen or observed at all. We would like to believe that the dark side of the moon, for example (which isn't dark at all), is the same as it ever was and will always remain there even if we don't see it from earth. But if we ever sent a space craft up there with people or cameras, we'd hope to always see the same thing. That is realism.
"The third part is controversial, and that is freedom."
"Everyone here is aware of freedom." said Potus. "I'm the leader of all freedom in the world." There were murmurs of approval around the table.
"Yes, it is what I referenced earlier about freedom of choice, but in the opposite direction in this case. Freedom in our interpretation means that the experimenter has the freedom to choose the outcome of an particular experiment and should not be locked into a particular choice due to the setup of the experiment. For example, a photon can behave as either a wave or a particle. It can be either one depending on how we choose to measure it. If we pretend that an experimenter wishes to observe the photon in a wave state, but the photon 'resists' somehow and forces the outcome of the experiment to change that would violate our beliefs in freedom. If the photon, for example, was somehow in a fixed particle state and didn't want to be caught in a wave experiment, it couldn't somehow change the experimenter's choices so that the experimenter decided instead to measure particles. In other words, freedom means that the experimenter chooses whether to measure wave or particle behaviour, not the object under observation."
"Freedom!" said Potus. "The most important part of all this, obviously. Hey, let me ask you something," said Potus. "Let me ask you a personal question in front of all these people since you seem so bright."
"Okay mister, um, I mean, Potus," said Sam.
"Okay," said Potus. "Did you ever imagine that the sun was like a nucleus to an atom and that the planets were electrons, say, going around this atom?"
"Yes, that is a common misconception of lay physics. Every sixth grader who learns about the standard model eventually makes the conflation between an atom and the solar system or a galaxy. But it's not possible is it? Electrons have a spin of one half. Uranus has a tilted axis so its spin is wrong."
"My anus?" asked Potus. "Nobody said anything about my anus." There was laughter all around.