ABSTRACT
Two ideas anchor our classical picture of the world: locality — nothing influences anything faster than light — and reality — things have definite properties whether or not anyone is looking. Quantum mechanics appears to violate both. Entangled particles behave as one system across any distance, and some textbooks states that measuring one instantly “collapses” the state of the other, in what Einstein dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” Must we surrender locality, or reality, to keep quantum theory's astonishingly accurate predictions? This talk argues that we need surrender neither.
Developed in five papers, we rebuilds the theory of measurement with both principles intact. Locality: when the measuring device and its noisy surroundings are included in the calculation, the long-distance mystery fades — what changes “over there” is not the particle but our knowledge of it, and no message can outrun light. Reality: an entangled pair is not two things but one indivisible whole, so a measurement made here does not reach across space — it reveals which branch of that whole we inhabit. Measurement: collapse is no longer a mysterious instant event but a system's interaction with its environment — a rule that reproduces every quantum. Two deeper questions, including why nature's odds follow the famous Born rule, remain beyond proof. It closes with a proposed laboratory test — entangled particles in tunable environments — that could tell our picture apart from the standard one. Locality and reality, it turns out, were never the problem; the mistake was assuming that a quantum whole is made of separate pieces.
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Everett X. Wang is Principal Investigator and Head of the Digital TCM Laboratory at the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Trained as a particle physicist, he received his B.S. in Nuclear Physics from Peking University (1982) and his M.S. in Theoretical Physics from the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Selected in 1983 as a CUSPEA scholar, he earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 1993.
He worked thirteen years at Intel Corporation (1993–2006), leading the advanced physical-models team behind the strained-silicon, high-k metal-gate, and FinFET process technology. He discovered and modeled the stress enhancement of hole mobility underlying Intel's strained-silicon process, received the Intel Achievement Award, and later served as product manager for thermo-optic switch chips. He subsequently held startup CTO tenures and a distinguished professorship at Guangdong University of Technology (2011–2021), directing the integrated-circuit applications at the electric-vehicle group (2014–2021). More recently, Prof. Wang returns his research interest back to the foundation of quantum mechanics, which has generated a lot of confusions in recent years.
Date & Time
Venue
Chair