Massimiliano Sassoli de Bianchi
From the beginning of his research, the Belgian physicist Diederik Aerts has
shown great creativity in inventing a number of machine-models that were used
to unravel many of the mysteries of the quantum world. These machine-models,
apart from the role they have played, and continue to play, in providing
powerful heuristics for the development of general mathematical and conceptual
formalisms for the description of reality, also constitute an invaluable
didactical tool in the hands of the teacher of quantum physics, who can use
them to demystify much of the "craziness" in the behavior of quantum entities
and allow students to really grasp what's going on - in structural terms -
behind the quantum scenes, during a measurement. In this author's view, the
importance of Aerts' machine-models, and of the approaches they have originated
(like his hidden-measurement approach and creation-discovery view) have been so
far seriously underappreciated by the physics community, despite their success
in clarifying many conceptual challenges of quantum physics. To fill this gap,
and encourage a greater number of researchers, teachers and students to take
cognizance of the important work of so-called Geneva-Brussels school on the
foundations of physics, of which Aerts is one of the founders, we shall
describe in this paper two of Aerts' historical machine-models, whose
operations are based on simple breakable elastic bands. The first model, called
the spin quantum-machine, is able to replicate the quantum probabilities
associated to the spin measurement of a spin-1/2 entity. The second model,
called the connected vessels of water model (of which we shall present here an
alternative version based on elastics) is able to violate Bell's inequalities,
as coincidence measurements on entangled states can do.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4045
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