The Flitting Back And Forth In Time Of Quanglement Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 604, 605):

One of the most direct uses of the idea of quanglement is in certain experiments where a pair of entangled photons is produced according to the process referred to as parametric down-conversion (see Fig. 23.8). …

In one particularly striking experiment, one of the photons (photon A) passes through hole of a particular shape as it speeds towards its detector DA. The other photon (photon B) passes through a lens that is positioned so as to focus it, appropriately, at its detector DB. The position of detector DB is moved around slightly as each photon pair is emitted. The situation is illustrated schematically in Fig. 23.9a.

Whenever DA registers reception of photon A and DB also registers reception of B, the position of DB is noted. This is repeated many times, and gradually an image is built up by the detector DB, where only the positions of B are counted when simultaneously DA registers. The shape of the hole that A encounters is gradually built up at DB, even though photon B never directly encounters the hole at all! It is as though DB ‘sees’ the shape of the hole by looking backwards in time to the emission point C at the crystal, and then forwards in time in the guise of photon A. It can do this because the ‘seeing’ process in this situation is achieved by quanglement. This flitting back and forth in time is precisely the kind of thing that quanglement is allowed to do.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, there is no flitting back and forward in time in this experiment, and it is only the experimenter that 'sees'. The correlations of observations at the detectors DA  and DB is due to probability dependencies in the instantiation quantum potential, not to interactions between the detections of instances (photons).