Kalamides entanglement signal design refuted decisively
  • Steve Schultz Well, that's no fun. Guess that means I won't be need to register the radio station letters KFTL...
  • Jack Sarfatti On Jun 12, 2013, at 8:50 AM, Suda Martin wrote:

    Dear all,

    Yes, if one calculates precisely the Kalamidas - expression given in the attachment of the email of CG one obtains exactly
    ...See More
  • Jack Sarfatti Von: CHRISTOPHER GERRY
    Gesendet: Mittwoch, 12. Juni 2013 16:18
    An: nick herbert; Demetrios Kalamidas
    Cc: John Howell; Suda Martin; ghirardi Giancarlo; Ruth Elinor Kastner; JACK SARFATTI
    Betreff: Re: More on the |0>|0> term


    I probably shouldn't jump in on this again, but...

    I can assure you that there's no thorn in the side of the quantum optics community concerning the scheme of Kalamidas. There are only people doing bad calculations. Despite claims to the contrary, our paper, as with Ghirardi's, does specifically deal with the Kalamidas proposal. It is quite clearly the case that EXACT calculations in the Kalamidas proposal shows that the claimed effect disappears. To suggest that it's there in the approximate result obtained by series expansion, and therefore must be a real effect, is simply preposterous. All it means is that the approximation is wrong; in this case being due to the dropping important terms.

    The whole business about the |00> and whatever (the beam splitter transformations and all that) is not the issue. I'm astonished at how the debate on this continues. The real problem, and I cannot emphasize it enough, is this: Kalamidas cannot do quantum optical calculations, even simple ones and therefore nothing he does should be taken seriously. As I've said before, his calculation of our Eq. (9), which I have attached here, is embarrassingly wrong. It's obvious from the expression of the expectation value in the upper left that there has to be two terms in the result both containing the product of r and t. But Kalamidas throws away one of the terms which is of the same order of magnitude as the one he retains. Or maybe he thinks that term is zero via the quantum mechanical calculation of its expectation value, which it most certainly is not. His limits have been taken inconsistently. So, he not only does not know how to do the quantum mechanical calculations, he doesn't even know how or when the limits should be taken. There's absolutely no point in debating the meaning of the results incorrect calculations. Of course, by incorrectly doing these things he gets the result he wants, and then thinks it's the duty of those of us who can do these calculations to spend time showing him why his calculations are wrong, which he then dismisses anyway. My point in again bringing this specific calculation of his is not to say anything about his proposal per se, but to demonstrate the abject incompetence of Kalamidas in trying to do even the most elementary calculations. And if anyone still wonders why I'm angry about the whole affair, well, what should I feel if some guy unable to do simple calculations tries to tell established quantum optics researchers, like me and Mark Hillery, that our paper showing where he's wrong dismisses ours as being "irrelevant?" He doesn't even seem to know that what he said was an insult.

    And finally, the continued claim that the specific proposal of Kalamidas has not been addressed must simply stop. It has been repeatedly. I suspect this claim is being made because people don't like the results of the correct calculations. That's not the problem of those of us can carry through quantum optical calculations.

    CG
  • Keith Kenemer disappointing, but not unexpected...
  • Jack Sarfatti Yes, but here is latest from Nick Herbert - Custer's Last Stand
    On Jun 12, 2013, at 12:28 PM, nick herbert <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.> wrote:

    All--

    Excuse me for being confused.
    Gerry refutes Kalamidas by showing that an omitted term is large.
    Suda refutes Kalamidas by showing that the same term is identically zero.
    What am I missing here?

    I wish to say that I accept the general proofs. Kalamidas's scheme will not work as claimed.
    That is the bottom line. So if the general proofs say FTL will fail for full calculation, then it will certainly fail for approximations.

    The "weak coherent state" is a common approximation made in quantum optics. And dozens of experiments have been correctly described using this approximation. So it should be a simple matter to show if one uses
    Kalamidas's approximation, that FTL terms vanish to the appropriate level of approximation. If this did not happen we would not be able to trust the results of approximation schemes not involving FTL claims.

    Gerry's criticism is that Kalamidas's scheme is simply WRONG--that he has thrown away terms DK regards as small. But in fact they are large. Therefore the scheme is flawed from the outset.

    If Gerry is correct, then it seems appropriate to ask: Is there a CORRECT WAY of formulating the Kalamidas scheme using the "weak coherent state" approximation, where it can be explicitly shown that this correct scheme utterly fails?

    It seems to me that there are still some loose ends in this Kalamidas affair, if not a thorn in the side, at least an unscratched itch.

    It seems to me that closure might be obtained. And the Kalamidas affair properly put to rest if everyone can agree that
    1. DK has improperly treated his approximations; 2. Using the CORRECT APPROXIMATION SCHEME, the scheme abjectly fails just as the exact calculation says it must.

    Why should it be so difficult to construct a correct description of the Kalamidas proposal, with CORRECT APPROXIMATIONS, and show that it fails to work as claimed?

    AS seen from the Ghirardi review, there are really not that many serious FTL proposals in existence. And each one teaches us something-- mostly about some simple mistakes one should not make when thinking about quantum systems. Since these proposals are so few, it is really not a waste of time to consider them in great detail, so we can learn to avoid the mistakes that sloppy thinking about QM brings about.

    When Ghirardi considers the Kalamidas scheme in his review, I would consider it less than adequate if he did not include the following information:

    1. Kalamidas's scheme is WRONG because he treats approximations incorrectly.
    2. When we treat the approximations correctly, the scheme fails, just as the general proofs say it must.

    Gerry has provided the first part of this information. What is seriously lacking here is some smart person providing the second part.

    Nick Herbert
  • Jack Sarfatti On Jun 12, 2013, at 2:07 PM, JACK SARFATTI <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.> wrote:

    Lest anyone be confused. I am not defending Kalamidas's gedankenexperiment. Neither is Nick Herbert.
    I agree, that in contrast to Antony Valentini's strategy, any proposal for stand-alone entanglement signaling that does not violate an axiom of orthodox quantum theory will fail. Furthermore, one must show why such a violation is found in Nature. It's not clear whether John Cramer's experiment is supposed to violate quantum theory or not?
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    Begin forwarded message:

    From: ghirardi
    Date: June 12, 2013 1:33:38 PM PDT
    To: CHRISTOPHER GERRY

    To reinforce the appropriate remarks by Christopher, I want to stress that suggesting that my, as well as Gerry's contributions do not deal with Kalamidas' proposal is an unacceptable position to take. Both of us have PROVED that precisely Kalamidas' proposal does not work and is affected by basic errors that either derive from a mistaken use of general quantum rules or from resorting to unjustified and wrong approximations. That's the story.

    GianCarlo Ghirardi

    P.S. I believe that the debate which is going on, if it becomes known to a larger community of physicists, is seriously damaging the investigations on foundational issues since it puts into clear evidence that part of the people involved is not even capable of using correctly the basic principles of quantum mechanics.

    GianCarlo Ghirardi
    Emeritus
    University of Trieste
    Italy
  • Jack Sarfatti For the record I agree with Chris Gerry below: "On Jun 12, 2013, at 2:03 PM, CHRISTOPHER GERRY <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.> wrote:

    We are both right: the two terms cancel each other out! That the whole expectation value is zero is actually exactly what's in our paper's Eq. 9. This happens because the reciprocity relations must hold. That Kalamidas thought (or maybe even still thinks) his calculation is correct, is at the heart of the matter, that is, that he is either unable to do the calculations or that he can do them but chooses not too because they don't get him where he wants to go.

    The Kalamidas scheme will not work not work on the basis of general principles as we showed in the first part of our paper (see also Ghirardi's paper).

    And again, the notion that an alleged approximate calculation (I say "alleged" because as with everything else there are correct and incorrect approximate calculations) based on a weak signal coherent state somehow trumps an exact computation valid for any value of the coherent state parameter, is, well, just insane. If you want to see where things go wrong just take more terms in the series expansions. Add up enough terms and, viola, no effect! One can't get much more specific than that.

    Christopher C. Gerry
    Professor of Physics
    Lehman College
    The City University of New York
    718-960-8444
    This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it."