Is there another layer of reality beyond quantum physics? I think, yes. Also, I have been directing attention for several years to subquantum realms. This article in Nature magazine appears to lend some further support to another of my thesis. (See at bottom of page.)

R. N. Boyd

© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2001

29 November 2001

PHILIP BALL

Albert Einstein never liked some of the counterintuitive predictions of quantum theory, arguing instead that there was a further, hidden layer to reality it failed to describe. But since the 1980s, Einstein's objections have been largely ruled out.

Now Karl Hess and Walter Philipp of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provide evidence that Einstein may have been right to be skeptical - there may indeed be another set of rules underlying quantum theory1.

Quantum theory describes the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles and says that their energy is 'quantized': it can be altered only in discrete jumps. Although Einstein himself made seminal contributions to quantum theory, he famously disagreed with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr about how it should be interpreted.

In 1935 Einstein, together with the physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, concocted a 'thought experiment' in which quantum theory seemed to permit 'spooky' action at a distance, whereby a measurement made on one particle instantaneously determines the properties of another particle, no matter how great the distance between the two particles.

Uncomfortable with this bizarre outcome, Einstein suspected that a still more fundamental theory underlies quantum mechanics (just as quantum mechanics underlies the older 'classical mechanics' of Isaac Newton). He invoked 'hidden variables' - quantities that do away with things like quantum uncertainty, but which cannot be measured directly. Bohr disagreed, arguing instead that we simply have to resign ourselves to the fact that quantum theory is counterintuitive.

There the argument floundered until the 1960s when Irish physicist John Bell showed that hidden variables could have observable consequences. He demonstrated that the outcome of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment differs if hidden variables do or don't exist.

When it became possible to perform EPR experiments for real in the 1980s, the results showed that, provided Bell was right, there were no hidden variables. They seemed to show that Einstein was wrong and Bohr was right.

Hess and Philipp find that EPR experiments don't necessarily rule out hidden variables at all, and there may, indeed, be another layer to reality. They argue that Bell overlooked a large class of possible hidden variables whose behaviour is consistent with the existing experimental findings.

They find that if hidden variables have properties that change over time, yet are related to each other, the predictions change. For example, the hands of a clock in London and a clock in New York circulate periodically and do not directly influence one another, but nevertheless the different times shown by each are correlated with one another.

If hidden variables are 'time-correlated' in such a manner, Bell's theory breaks down. The researchers show that in such a case, the results of EPR experiments can be explained without needing to invoke the spooky action at a distance that Einstein considered so unlikely. This does not mean that hidden variables exist, just that they cannot be completely ruled out.

References

1. Hess, K. & Philipp, W. Bell's theorem and the problem of decidability between the views of Einstein and Bohr. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, advanced online publication, DOI:10.1073/pnas.251525098 (2001).

[R. N. Boyd]:

Here, I want to add that the topological basis of space itself may be changing with time, which of course, will result in the circumstance that various space-dependent properties will change over time, in correlative relation to each other. Then, of course, the various space-dependent predictions must also change. Reference this data to the topics of Uniqueness, and the anisotropy of space. It appears to me that it is possible that both of these qualities may also have some topological basis. In my view, the topological basis is that we are occupying one of an infinite number of infinite volume 3D spaces which live in an infinite volume 4D space, which may live in an infinite dimensional space. I have speculated that the various 3D universes may be in relative motion to each other, and in motion relative to the 4D space, resulting in continuous variations of the structure of space itself, lending another source of anisotropy to the vacuum. Over large spans of time, such topological behaviours in the vacuum may be considered as the "personality" of space, in other words, a set of "hidden variables". I would expect that conditions resulting from this kind of hidden variable would be macroscopically irreversible on a topological basis. I would also expect other kinds of "personality"-based correlations should occur over spans of time.

(It springs to mind that each epoch of human history has unique personality qualities that cannot be accounted for, only on the basis of changing esthetic human tastes and technological advancements. In other words, we can compare the general "flavor" of life during various periods of time, such as by comparing the styles of the period from 1890 to 1910, with the styles of the period of 1910 to 1930. Why were the expressions of these times so globally pervasive? Clearly, this is sheerly speculative, but maybe there is some kind of correlation in this having to do with time, relative to the personality of space itself.)