Our previous article “Wonders and Mysteries of Quantum Physics” discusses how Quantum Physics (QP) [1] completely revolutionized our industrial world and our daily lives since its discovery about 100 years ago. Everyday we utilize a variety of products based on Quantum Physics. [2] That article also pointed out that QP introduced many mysteries, such as particle-wave duality, the act of observation can change what we are observing, uncertainty principle, our physical laws can only give us a probabilistic, and not a deterministic, prediction of the future.
These mysteries, especially the probabilistic interpretation, or a superposition of states, led many people to question from the beginning of QP around the mid 1920s whether there is a more fundamental theory than QT that would lead to a deterministic prediction. The most famous critic was Albert Einstein, who made critical comments such as “does the moon exist even when no one is looking at it” and “God doesn’t play dice.” Many people thought that there are probably physical variables that we are not aware of. Because these variables could have different values, and if we can determine their values, then we would have a deterministic prediction.
These are known as “hidden variable” theories. Even though the usefulness of QT became more and more apparent as more and more products based on QT permeated our lives, this debate never went away, partially because no one could think of any experiment that could be done to differentiate the predictions of QT and the predictions of hidden variable theories.
That ended in 1964 when the Irish physicist James S. Bell proved a remarkable but simple theorem (now known as Bell’s Theorem) that shows that Quantum Theory and local hidden variable theories can lead to different experimental results. [3] Therefore, this is no longer an academic debate, but a debate that can be decided by experiments, which is the fundamental concept behind physics. Before we discuss Bell’s Theorem and the subsequent experimental results, we need to make a digression to discuss two precursors of Bell’s Theorem.
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Some Thoughts on How We can Experience and Learn from the Past Virtually
We know that time runs in only one dimension: going forward. What has happened in the past has already occurred and we cannot go back in time to relive that period. The question is whether we can make use of the information from the past, not only to relive past events, but also to make use of that information to learn from it.
We discuss an idea that by combining artificial intelligence (AI), we can utilize the memories of the past that exist in our memories, as well as information we know about the people from the past (that we might have or might not have interacted with) to virtually recreate events and even more importantly to create new events that could lead to new insights or discoveries.
We can virtually recreate past events. For example, we can virtually recreate:
This is like playing back a recorded movie of that event. However, we can do much more than that.
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