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Mensa Chat Room is Heating Up

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By Duke Heath

I strongly recommend to all members who have not already joined the chat room to do so. We have been having excellent discussions on many varied topics, from physics to computers to how to shoot a thief and get away with it.

Currently there are ongoing discussions on the history of linguistics and of temperature recordings. One of the reasons I joined this group was because I had no one with whom I could discuss various concepts which deeply interested me but were of absolutely no interest to anyone else I knew.

I no longer have that problem. I can take a computer problem, a legal problem, or any other concept and get immediate response from Mensa level experts in those particular fields.

To join, e-mail Gerry Schultz at gerrysch@yahoo.com and let him know you want to join. He will then guide you through the process.

One word of warning, though, you need to disable the e-mail service which would normally send you every idle thought posted. If you do not disable it, any hot topic could fill your mailbox completely in a day or two. Instead, you simply check the web site to keep up with the discussions.

The following is an example of the level of help available. I was having a problem with a quantum mechanics concept keeping me awake. I simply could not grasp the concept, so, I took it to the chat room.

I received many excellent responses from Mike Emmel, Randy Walker, Joe Barda and others which I do not have room to share. The following plea for help and the response from Bruce Crabtree illustrates why I love this site and this group.

Quantum Talk


I am staying awake at night pondering a concept of quantum mechanics that I cannot visualize. According to quantum theory, two sister particles can be 200 million light years apart, a distance which information traveling at light speed would take 200 million years to go from one particle to the other.

Yet, quantum theory states that if you alter the spin on one particle, the other particle, regardless of the distance, immediately changes its spin even though they may be on opposite sides of the universe. Please help me understand this concept.       
Duke Heath

Duke, what you seem to be pointing at is "Bell's Theorem of Non-Locality." The theorem basically states that two linked particles or particles which had undergone the "Einstein Connection" will reflexively maintain their spin-states regardless of the distance between them-even if it's a distance beyond light-speed communication, like across galaxies, in other words, instantaneously. This implies at the very least, hyper-dimensionality of the universe where space-time distances are only apparent from our limited frame of reference.

Some of the discoveries in Quantum Mechanics are so non-intuitive that not only Einstein couldn't handle it, but other famous physicists as well.
Albert Einstein"s last words will never be known, he spoke them in German and the attending nurse did not understand them.
One problem is that when a person is stuck in a particular perspective, he/she insists on seeing the strange new discovery from that perspective instead of looking around for a new and more comprehensive perspective.

When discovery is warped and squeezed to accommodate the old perspective then, of course, it becomes non-intuitive. I offer a thought experiment to explain. Its purpose is to demonstrate how something from a lesser perspective, in this case, things linked in some unknown manner and changing instantaneously regardless of distance.

So, you are invited to a demonstration room which has two of those huge flat -panel TV screens hanging on the wall. The narrator directs your attention to the screens, each has a Nemo type fish swimming around in some sort of aquarium.

It is obvious from the background that the signal feed isn't just the same camera shot going to two different TV sets. The narrator tells you to look closely, and you see that whenever one fish does anything at all, the other fish does exactly the same thing. The audience begins to murmur about some strange quantum effect going on.

You, of course, being not so gullible, sneak out one door and slip around to the back room following the TV cables. What you discover is this: There are two TV cameras pointed at the tank-one at right angles to the other, so as to represent two different perspectives in two different dimensional planes. Naturally, whenever the fish moves-as viewed from the three dimensional perspective as being one event-from two different two-dimensional perspectives that movement appears as two different events, mysteriously linked somehow.

So you say to yourself. "Aha! The audience was viewing a three-dimensional event from a two dimensional perspective! No wonder it seemed so mysterious." Once I changed my perspective to a higher dimensionality, all nonsense went away. End of Thought Experiment.

Now, apply this insight on viewing from insufficient perspectives to entangled particles at immense distances, which make no apparent sense. Could that be-not because it is un-understandable-but because a hyper-dimensional phenomenon has been viewed from a limited four-dimensional space-time perspective. Is there a perspective from which the event appears both intuitive and obvious?

Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.
Bruce Crabtree

Thanks Bruce, no clearer explanation could be had anywhere.
Duke Heath

Shrimp have more than a hundred pairs of chromosomes, man has only twenty three.