NEP.CLEVIT%Ames-VMSB@sri-unix.UUCP (01/09/84)
To those of us in North Beach who know him now, Sarfatti is still regarded as "something of a blowhard and an object of amusement". So what. ------
crummer%AEROSPACE@sri-unix.UUCP (01/11/84)
From: Charlie Crummer <crummer@AEROSPACE> It seems rather irrelevant to denigrate Sarfatti on the Physics net. That would perhaps be appropriate on Slander net. The real issue is that his statements about physics are sometimes wrong. His proposed "future machine" is based on a hand-waving and inappropriate application of point-particle quantum mechanics to the extended system consisting of e.g. a pair of protons in a singlet state which have separated in space. In this case quantum field theory should be used because the particle picture breaks down. The Aspect experiment indicates that nature sometimes acts non-locally, i.e. sometimes "acts at a distance". (That is the way Newton thought of gravity and he was right in a way. The distant masses in the universe don't cause the surface shape of the water in a spinning bucket to be curved by exchanging gravitons with it!) Classical electromagnetism also exhibits non-local behavior. The Bohm-Aharanov experiment shows this: an electron beam is deflected when passed crossways by a tightly wound long solenoid. Where the beam is, the E-M field is zero, yet the beam deflects. This does not imply, however, that the deflection effect is transmitted faster than light, i.e. if the solenoid current is varied by a step function, the beam deflection changes according to the conventional rule of causality: the change in the potential field propagates no faster than light. The potentials themselves are not "physical" because they transform under gauge transformation not like vectors but like "linear connections" i.e. hybrid Christoffel symbols. Maxwell's equations, the equations of motion for the potentials, describe the B-A experiment. They are field equations. --Charlie