crummer%AEROSPACE@sri-unix.UUCP (04/24/84)
From: Charlie Crummer <crummer@AEROSPACE> All that stuff about Sarfatti's PhD, being published, doing research for $$, etc. is irrelevant. Either what he says can be supported (ultimately by experiment) or it cannot. He drops so many buzzy phrases and words that one is suspicious immediately that there is nothing underneath. Real breakthroughs in science are usually elegant and simple. To begin to see for yourself, get a copy of Feynman's 3-volume set on elementary physics and read the description of the double slit experiment. The apparatus is as follows: a source of radiation, a screen with two slits, a target screen. Turn on the source and look at the target screen. You see a diffraction pattern. Cover one slit and the pattern goes away. Next uncover both slits and put a particle counter (if the source emanates light this is a photon counter) behind one slit to see if a given particle from the source goes through or not. Voila, you can tell which slit the "particle" goes through but the pattern is destroyed sort of like you had covered one slit. Now comes the tricky part. Sarfatti says that he will modulate the SENSITIVITY of the counter and watch the diffraction pattern. Information is now represented in the sensitivity modulation just like an AM or FM radio signal. What S now claims is that the effect on the diffraction pattern, a pattern - nopattern modulation, occurs instantaneously even though the counter is separated from the screen. The 4-D interval between the modulation event and the pattern event (See! It's already getting fuzzy!) is spacelike. If you buy this little gedankenexperiment then you have bought the farm because S now generalizes to ANY spacelike interval, e.g. from here-now to the remote past. This is where he gets the self-generation conjecture. The C-3 argument follows since, I suppose, the bad guys aren't part of the coherent system that S conjectures, (more fuzz!) The problem is, and I think that Sarfatti owes us this much, that his ruminations are based on point-particle quantum mechanics and the situation he posits is clearly spread over some distance. This is why quantum field theory is needed; it can handle "spread out systems" and contains point- particle QM as a subset. To make these calculations is very time consuming and no amount of glibness can take their place. To paraphrase a famous Quantum Electrodynamicist: "Just because Einstein said that causation is a local phenomenon doesn't mean it's not." Sarfatti and his true believers better just make one of these FTL machines and cut all this stuff short. --Charlie
gwyn@BRL-VGR.ARPA (04/24/84)
From: Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn@BRL-VGR.ARPA> Right! I don't think this topic has advanced beyond the EPR paradox. All that showed is that conventional point-particle QM can conflict with causality `a la special relativity.