Counter teleportation and TGD

Tuomas Sorakivi sent links to interesting articles related to the work of Fatim Salih (see this). Salih is a serious theorist and the recent wormhole simulation using quantum computer scandal (Sycamore) is not related to him.

Salih introduces the concept of counter teleportation. It is communication that does not involve classical or quantum signals (photons). Counterfactuality is a basic concept: the first web source that one finds tells “Counterfactuals are things that might have happened, although they did not in fact happen. In interaction-free measurements, an object is found because it might have absorbed a photon, although actually it did not.”

The example considered by Salih is as follows.

1. Consider a mirror system consisting of a) fully reflective mirrors and b) mirrors that let through the horizontal polarization H and reflect the vertical polarization V. The system consists of two paths: A and B. In the first mirror, which is type b) mirror, the signal splits into two parts, H and V and which propagate along A and B. At the end the signals meet in a type b) mirror and H goes through to detector D1 and V is reflected and ends up to detector D2.
2. The polarization H going through b) mirro at the first step travels along the path A. It contains only one fully reflective mirror and the beam reflected from it ends up in the downstream mirror of type b) as H type polarization and goes to the detector D1.
3. In the first step, the reflected V travels along the path B. The path B contains many steps and with each step the polarization is slightly rotated so that the incoming polarization V transforms into H at the end but with a phase opposite to that of H coming along A. It interferes to zero from A with the future contribution and detector D2, which registers V and clicks.

I’m not sure, but I think that in the B-path mirrors, the polarization directions H and V are chosen so that nothing gets through. Hence “counterfactuality”. There is no interaction with photons: only the possibility of it and this is enough.

Salih realizes that this is something new that standard quantum physics cannot describe. Such a situation leads to a paradox. Salih considers many options, starting from different interpretations of quantum measurement theory.

1. “Weak measurement”, as introduced by Aharonov and his colleagues, is one option presented. In the name of honesty, it is necessary to be politically incorrect and say that this model is already mathematically inconsistent.
2. “Consistent history approach” is another option that was hoped to solve the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. It gives up the concept of unitary time evolution. Also this model is mathematically and conceptually hopelessly ugly. A mathematician could never consider such an option, but emergency does not read the law.
3. Wormholes as a cause or correlate of quantum entanglement is the third attempt to describe the situation. The problem is that they are unstable and the ER-EPR correspondence has not led to anything concrete even though there are scary big names behind it. Salih also suggests a connection with quantum computation but this connection is extremely obscure and requires something like AdS/CFT.

Here, however, I think Salih is on the right track: it has been realized that the solution to the problem is at the space-time level. The ordinary trivial topology of Minkowski space is not enough. The question is how to describe geometric objects like this experimental setup on a fundamental level. In the standard model, they are described phenomenologically by means of matter densities, and this is of course not enough at the quantum level. What does TGD say? TGD brings a new ontology both at the space-time level and in quantum measurement theory.

1. In addition to elementary particles, TGD brings to quantum physics the geometric and topological degrees of freedom related to the space-time surfaces. A description of the observed physical objects of different scales is obtained: typically they correspond to a non-trivial space-time topology. Spacetime is not a flat M^4, not even its slightly curved GRt variant, but a topologically extremely complex 4-surface with a fractal structure: space-time sheets glued to larger space-time sheets by wormhole contacts, monopole flux tubes, etc…
   1. The system just considered corresponds to two different space-time topologies. Photons can travel a) along path A (blocking) or b) along both paths A and B simultaneously (no blocking).
   2. Bob has a spacetime the competence of a topology engineer and can decide which option is realized by blocking or opening channel B by changing the spacetime topology.
   3. Describing this operation as a quantum jump means that Bob is quantum-entangled with the geometric and topological degrees of freedom of channel B. The initial state is a superposition of open B and closed B. Bob measures whether the channel is open or closed and gets the result “open” or “closed”. The outcome determines what Alice observes. Monopole flux tubes replacing wormholes of GRT serve as correlates and prerequisites for this entanglement.

   The controlled qubit (channel B open or closed) is macro- or at least nanoscopic and cannot be represented by the spin states of an elementary particle.

Note that the experimental arrangement under consideration corresponds logically to cnot operation. If channel B is closed, nothing happens to the incoming signal and it ends up in D1. If B is open, then the signal ends up at detector D2. cnot would be realized by bringing in Bob as the controller that affects the space-time topology. This kind of control could make possible human-quantum computer interaction and if ordinary computers can have quantum coherence in time scales longer than clock period (in principle possible in the TGD Universe!), also human-computer interaction. As a matter fact there is evidence for this kind interaction: a chicken gets marked to a robot and the behavior of the robot begins to correlate with that of chicken! Maybe cnot coupling with the random number generator of robot is involved!

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.