User talk:Knotwork

Over the years I have spent huge amounts of time trying to use Wikipedia to penetrate stuff in mathematics and physics that sometimes almost seems so hard to penetrate that it can get tempting to start to doubt goodwill. "There is money in that stuff, could it be some are obfuscating it to make their profession seem more mysterious" kind of thinking.

Finally I have discovered Wikiversity, and found its introduction to Categories seemed very good. But how much did my vast numbers of hours reading huge numbers of Wikipedia pages around categories and category theory help make the Wikiversity material seem so easy to grasp?

Despite seeing such Wikiversity material as I have found so far to seem easy relative to Wikipedia, I have encountered some places where it surprised me to see an item of unexplained notation, unexplained, appear out of nowhere and remain mysterious. Unfortunately I cannot now recall precisely where, but I do recall an 'offending' item of notation looked like an up-side-down capital letter A. I have also seen, though I dont recally falling afoul of it in such "elementary' material as where i found the upsidedown A so surprising, what looks like an upsidedown V. The way they are used, they seem related.

I have just in this latest session of being awake, which has lasted maybe a couple of days or more by now (this kind of exciting discovery of interesting information keeps me awake ;)) material by Joy Christian relating to Bell's mysterious quantum correlations. The way Christian tells it, ad he sounds as if he knows of what he writes, Bell went wring right from the start by trying to treat a powerful geometric/topological entity far more simplistically than it deserved, in a way that an decent mathematician ought to have noticed decades ago and reacted to. In essence rotational geometry stuff implicit in the local data acts as the 'hidden variables', that are in a way maybe only seemingly hidden if one carelessly allows oneself to forget that one is dealing with rotational gemotry not with simple boolean scalars or scalars or even real vectors.

What I seem to get from those poaers of Christian's is that the whole mystification about entanglement involving action at a distance and creating spooky correlations is an illusion, maybe relating to the seemingly common tendency in particle physics of claiming that so called spin actually is not to do with actual rotation, that real world spin/rotation concepts merely offer some kind of vague analogy but do not apply. Contrary to such ideas, those papers of Christian's seem to assert that actually spin is to do with geometry of rotations in ordinary classical space. He even goes so far as to assert that experiments with macroscopic weighted balls can replicate the purportedly spooky correlations.

If he is correct, what the heck does that say about the whole quantum computing craze? Are qubit researchers just kind of playing around with small neural-network type things exploiting the fact that rotational geometry offers more degress of freedom than a standard-computing 'bit'?

What about the weird key schemes of quantum cryptography? I guess it ought to make sense that actual rotational-geometry objects might be able to compute and simulate problems in rotational geometry faster than ordinary bit-type digital computing but things like factoring huge keys, breaking standard crytography? Hmm? How would Christian's insights affect all that stuff?

Knotwork 10:08, 11 May 2009 (UTC)