Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

Re:Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilome... by eternalban on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @03:33PM (#12551454)

I think what you are really asking is: what is the substantial reality of 'the thing', if it is merely 'information'.

All following quotes are from the documentary "Atomic Physics and Reality" [1 - 'emphasis' mine.].

John Wheeler:

    Einstein admired Bohr and Bohr admired Einstein. And you
    recall that Einstein felt that 'reality' exists, in effect,
    'out there', something independent of us. And the position
    of Bohr was rather this: that 'reality' is only a word and
    we have to learn what the right way is to use that word.

John Bell:

    Bohr, I think, quite in early in life had decided that
    ordinary concepts such as space and time simply wouldn't work
    at the atomic scale. And it was always a bit unclear what
    Bohr would replace those concepts by, if anything. But
    Einstein was very attached to the space-time description, and
    thought that one should try very hard to extend it into the
    atomic domain.

    And this was the root of the disagreement between the two men.

David Bohm:

    Bohr had developed a view in which he essentially would say
    that 'reality' was unknown or unknowable, or even had no 
    meaning, 'reality' by itself. Reality, except at the large
    scale level of ordinary experience, atomic reality had no 
    meaning, and all that we have are 'phenomena', produced in
    an 'experiment', and that quantum theory deals with the inter-
    relationships of all these phenomena.

Abner Shimony:

    Bohr was not a professional philosopher. How much of the 
    traditional philosophers he read, one does not know. But
    he was an extremely intelligent man and he must have thought
    through some of the issues that professional philosophers had
    thought through very deeply. And certainly one of the issues
    that he had though through considerably, with some help I 
    think from reading, was the Kantian issue of the status of
    'the thing in itself'. The 'thing' as it really is, quite
    apart from Human 'perception' of it. 

    Bohr, like Kant, was very suspicious that one can say anything
    significant, intelligent, controllable, about 'the thing in
    itself'. [Bohr] once said that physics or science in general
    was not about 'nature' but about nature exposed to our 
    'observation'. And that is very Kantian.

[1]: https://youtu.be/BFvJOZ51tmc

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Re:Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilome... by duaneb on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @04:23PM (#12551865)

Actually, I find it very intuitive that reality is just information. It's much easier than setting it apart as ineffable.

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Re:Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilome... by eternalban on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @04:33PM (#12551957)

That's not what Bohr said. He said we can't know -- per Bell "have no right to know" -- what is "[objective] reality" [at the atomic scale].

I am personally not comfortable with using 'information'. I think Bohm's formulation "phenomena" is more appropriate. Note that, for example, the manifestation of wave/particle duality is an actual physical phenomena. The 'information' bit is our observation of this phenomena.

And in case the question is still on the table as to are these distinctions merely a matter of philosophical taste or aesthetics?, from same source cited:

Alain Aspect

   At the time of Einstein and Bohr it was just a theoretical
   discussion. You could endorse either Einstein's position or
   Bohr's position, and it was just a matter of taste. 

   And then there was the great discovery by John Bell in '65 that
   it is not only a matter of taste, because according to the 
   position you have at the subatomic point, you have predictions 
   which are not the same. 

   If you follow Einstein you have a certain type of predictions 
   -- that is to say you have results that are in agreement with
   what is called the Bell's inequalities -- and if you follow
   Bohr's position you have another type of prediction which are
   in contradiction, in opposition, with Bell's inequalities.

Aspect at this point had conducted a series of EPR experiments that proved that the Einstein line of reasoning was in contradiction with the obtained experimental results.

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Re:Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilome... by duaneb on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @06:03PM (#12552677)

Well, I'd put "can't know" squarely in the ineffable.

But yes, I think phenomena are the atomic building blocks of science. The logical positivists at least got that right.

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Re:Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilome... by wamatt on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @07:56PM (#12553303)

> I think phenomena are the atomic building blocks of science

Lacking context, this could seem somewhat opaque.

Would you mind clarifying which definition of "phenomenon" you are intending to convey? (eg Kantian or otherwise)

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