trc@hou5a.UUCP (09/01/84)
A crackpot notion hit me, and I just thought I'd toss it into net.physics to see what sort of ripples it makes: Suppose that radioactive materials "normally" decay almost instantly - in their *own* time - but that their time somehow passes much slower than the time we normally perceive. That is, think of a tiny almost black hole - with the radiation process underway, but time "warped" so that from our perspective, it appears to be going on *much* much slower. Then, if we assume that some form of external event is able to inject weak influences, which act on the matter to increase the rate of decay by some amount, by "speeding its time up" by a miniscule fraction. This process is "pseudo-random" - IE it is not normally feasible to measure the its exact influences, or to correlate it to some macroscopic quality. EG motion of other particles around the matter. (But bash another particle into it really hard, and it is more likely to decay.) Eventually such influences build up and the particle decays far enough to destroy its "time warp" effect, causing an apparently instantaneous, event in our time, without any warning we can yet detect. The result is an apparently random distribution of radiation events in our timeline - but in fact is totally deterministic. This crock could also be used to explain how matter could simultaneously be "solid" and "wave-like" - it acts like a "frozen wave" in some cases, and in some special cases, its wave nature is still important. Its "frozen" nature explains why it interacts - two light waves can apparently pass through each other, but matter (which is "frozen" light waves) interacts - IE it tries to accommodate to the other matter, but in its own time line, it isnt fast enough. Electric fields are due to light frozen in such as way that the electromagnetic fields done cancel out. Oh well, this crock is getting wilder by the line. Tom Craver hou5a!trc or hou4b!trc
crummer%AEROSPACE@sri-unix.UUCP (10/01/84)
From: Charlie Crummer <crummer@AEROSPACE> The Aspect (EPR) experiment is similar to the double-slit experiment except that the scatter diagram that shows the correlation is divided into its two pieces, one at one analyzer system and the other at the other. The correlation information can only be extracted when the two diagrams are brought together and, of course, the results of the experiment do not indicate that it is possible to bring the two diagrams together at speed > c. The at-a-distance effect of one analyzer setting on the results detected by the other is mysterious but does not violate Einstein causality. It is also mysterious that even so-called "classical" gauge fields cause non- local interactions, i.e. macroscopic action at locations where the field is vanishingly small. (See the Bohm-Aharanov experiment with the electromagnetic field and Mach's principle.) These effects are not propagated FTL. Perhaps the most important result of the Aspect experiment is that it buries once and for all the hope that "hidden variable" theories can be used to explain all quantum mechanical phenomena. These theories must obey Bell's inequality which is clearly violated in the experiments. --Charlie