George Mikeladze es el director de la Asociación de Residencias y Servicios de Atención a la Dependencia (ARSAD), y director de la residencia L’Oreneta, en Casteldefells.
ARSAD es una asociación sin ánimo de lucro en la que se aglutinan todas aquellas entidades que desarrollan servicios y/o recursos con un objetivo común: mejorar la calidad de vida a las personas con dependencia.
Gracias al apoyo de la administración local y diversas entidades sociales y económicas, ARSAD cuenta con más de 15 años de existencia, sirviendo a las personas más vulnerables y aportando valor al tejido asociativo y económico de Castelldefels.
* El siguiente texto es representativo de nuestra conversación con el Sr. Mikeladze y su reciente entrevista con el canal de televisión, TV3. Se puede consultar el video de su entrevista aquí o más abajo en la imagen de video.
1. ¿Nos puedes contar un poco sobre ARSAD y su misión, visión, y valores?
Claro que sí. Primero, ARSAD es una asociación sin ánimo de lucro en la que se aglutinan todas aquellas entidades que desarrollan servicios y/o recursos con un objetivo común: mejorar la calidad de vida a las personas con dependencia.
Nacimos a partir del año 2007, cuando varias residencias de la zona comenzamos una serie de encuentros con el objetivo de discutir temas relacionados con nuestra labor en este sector. Todos los participantes veíamos que cada vez es más difícil responder al creciente número de exigencias (personal, proveedores, acreditación, sistemas de gestión de la calidad, etc.). Vimos las ventajas de establecer alianzas que nos permitieran hacer frente a estos retos. Por tanto, concluimos que existía una necesidad de seguir adelante con estas reuniones y consolidarnos como una asociación.
Hoy en día, nuestro sector sigue viviendo una etapa difícil debido a la reciente pandemia, y también por razones de la puesta en marcha de la Ley de la Dependencia. Ahora más que nunca es importante unir esfuerzos y estrategias que nos ayudarán a adaptarnos a esta nueva situación.
Gracias al apoyo de la administración local y diversas entidades sociales y económicas, ARSAD cuenta ya con muchos años de existencia.
En cuanto a nuestra misión, es de dar contenido y sentido a nuestras reflexiones, darnos a conocer y formar parte del tejido asociativo y económico de Castelldefels, con el objetivo final de servir mejor a las personas con dependencia y sus familias.
And then the other thing he said and that that everybody probably has heard is that he didn’t like so-called spooky action at a distance, which he identified as one of the features of this standard interpretation. And they’re connected because if something random happens here, okay, maybe that happens, but it’s not merely that something random would happen here but in virtue of it happening that physically things would change everywhere, and this was the so-called collapse of the wave function. So if a spot forms on a screen somewhere, I can say, well gee is there some reason it formed there rather than somewhere else? You might have thought that yeah because there was a particle headed toward the screen that hit it there. And Bohr and company would say no, no, no, that’s not right. Really, there was some chance that that spot formed anywhere on this screen. And then Einstein said, but wait a minute, so when a spot forms here you’re then telling me that instantaneously there’s no longer any chance that one will form anywhere else. And that that’s a physical change, right? A moment ago, there was a chance and now there isn’t. And he objected to that, so he raised those objections already back in the middle 20s using examples with just a single particle, like hitting a screen. And then in 1935 he and Podolsky and Rosen wrote a famous paper where he expanded that to cases where you have a pair of particles that are created in a certain kind of quantum mechanical state such that doing an observation on one of them allows you to make a perfect prediction about how the other one will behave. And even though the initial state does not determine how either of them will behave, it does determine that their behaviors will be related to each other…
So Einstein objected to this as spooky action at a distance and um he wrote that paper in 1935. It had a very deep impression on Schrodinger. Bohr tried to respond to the paper but in a way no one can really quite understand what he’s claiming and it sort of stayed that way um for decades until John Bell came along.
Ok, that brings us up to John Bell. What is Bell’s inequality?
Bell’s inequality basically says if you have a local theory of any kind, the correlations you would see in these widely separated laboratories are restricted by a certain number – and it turns out less than or equal to two for one particular number – and quantum theory predicts, no, you’ll see stronger correlations. And so, if that were true, if the quantum mechanical prediction were correct, what Bell would have proven is that you should give up looking for a local theory because no local theory can reproduce these phenomena. And this is not particularly about quantum mechanics. I mean you could throw away quantum mechanics. It doesn’t matter. If you go into the lab and you see these correlations between these two sides, no local physics will be able to explain that. And that was what Bell proved and then that set the table for the experimentalists to go check.
What role did Clauser, Aspect, and Zellinger play in this development?
Unfortunately, you know, Bell died unexpectedly and rather young, so if he had been alive, of course, he would have gotten the Nobel Prize for the theoretical work. But he’s not and the prize was finally given to John Clauser, who did kind of the first lab experiments checking this, and Alain Aspect, who then made the experiments more sophisticated in certain ways and Anton Zeilinger who then made them even better um there have been improvements in detector efficiency and the distance between these labs and so on so there’s been a steady stream of making these experiments cleaner and cleaner but the main point is that they consistently show what quantum mechanics predicts namely that you’ll violate Bell’s inequality and if that’s true then you should just give up on locality because you can’t have a local theory that’ll predict that.
Can you explain the common misconceptions regarding the work of Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger that even the Nobel Prize committee has fallen prey to?
Yes, so the irony is, what many people have said, even what is reported by the Nobel committee that gave the prize, is that what these experiments ruled out was not locality, it was something called hidden variables. And the idea of hidden variables, this goes back to what I talked about with Bohr before. Bohr said this quantum mechanical description, a mathematical description, a thing we call a wave function, tells you all there is to know about a system. Two systems described by the same wave function are physically identical in all respects. And Einstein said, “Why should I believe that? Maybe there’s more to the system than is represented in the wave function.” And that’s what the EPR paper was all about, it was basically saying, to save locality, you better accept that quantum mechanics is incomplete.
And any theory that postulates more to a physical system than is represented in the wave function has gotten the bad name “a hidden variables theory”. Now Bohm’s theory, or Bohmian mechanics, or the pilot wave theory that that Bell read about is a hidden variables theory. And then people report that what these experiments did was they ruled out hidden variables theories, which is just nonsense because it was a hidden variables theory that Bell realized made this prediction. So the experiments didn’t rule it out, at all, and in fact Bell was a big supporter of this pilot wave theory. He wrote a very beautiful article called “On the Impossible Pilot Wave”, telling physicists to pay attention to this theory. And then the Nobel Prize committee says oh these experiments showed that the theory is wrong. No, not at all. Not in the least.
Can one object that the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics says absolutely nothing about averting the possibility of extinction?
Yes, one might well worry that if you thought all the outcomes are going to happen no matter, why am I deliberating. You’d wonder what’s the point of deliberation if all the outcomes are going to happen.
