Physics – Quantum Physics
Scientific paper
2011-12-17
Physics
Quantum Physics
11 pages, 5 figures
Scientific paper
From the beginning of his research, the Belgian physicist Diederik Aerts has shown great creativity in inventing a number of machine-models that have played an important role in the development of general (mathematical and conceptual) descriptions of the physical reality. These models also constitute an invaluable didactical tool in the hands of the teacher of quantum physics (both at the undergraduate and graduate levels), who can use them to demystify much of the strangeness in the behavior of quantum entities, and allow students to possibly grasp what's going on - in structural terms - behind the quantum scenes, during a measurement. In this author's view, the importance of these machine-models, and of the approaches they have originated, have been so far seriously underappreciated by the physics community, despite their success in clarifying many 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 the so-called Geneva-Brussels school on the foundations of physics, 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.
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