crummer%AEROSPACE@sri-unix.UUCP (12/19/83)
From: Charlie Crummer <crummer@AEROSPACE> I can add to Alan Glasser's information about Sarfatti. In the late '60's Sarfatt, as indeed he was known then, was awarded the PhD from the University of California at Riverside. His dissertation had something to do with the application of gauge theory to superfluidity. My advisor, a serious gauge theorist, was on his committee and routinely found fatal flaws in Sarfatt's work. A friend of mine from Cornell says that Sarfatt had been in grad school there too. The whole wild Sci-Fi structure rests on one thing: Sarfatti's belief that a modulation of the efficiency of the Aspect apparatus will allow transfer of information faster than light. This derives from a naive extension of point-particle quantum mechanics into the realm of extended systems where the formalism breaks down. The calculations must be done using quantum field theory. The commutation relations among the field operators preclude such faster-than-light transmission of effects of any kind. (See Bogoliubov & Shirkov' text on quantum field theory) --Charlie