Subject: Re: Yakir Aharonov's book Quantum Paradoxes - Note #1 (Dr. Quantum)
On Aug 22, 2010, at 3:35 AM, Paul Zielinski wrote:
I thought the Heisenberg microscope argument was already undermined by the 1935 EPR paper? Wasn't Bohr forced by the EPR argument to renounce the idea that in quantum mechanics a *physical* disturbance is necessarily responsible for the alteration of the expected value of a physical quantity when any non-commuting quantity is measured?
No, that's not the way I understand the argument. The EPR argument is that without an action at a distance, the Heisenberg principle will be violated at one end of an entangled pair. That is, given an entangled pair A, B if there were no physical disturbance connecting them, even across a spacelike separation outside the local light cones of the local measurements, then one, e.g. could know both simultaneous momentum and position of say particle A in violation of the local Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Of course we still have Shimony's "passion at a distance" that the local quantum randomness defeats any Nick Herbert FLASH scheme to send a message over a spacelike interval that can be decoded without a light cone limited key. Now this corresponds to Antony Valentini's "sub-quantal thermal equilibrium" of Bohm's hidden variables i.e. signal locality limit. However, in post-quantum theory beyond quantum theory we have sub-quantal non-equilibrium in which there is, in my theory, a stable two-way action-reaction (feedback control loop) between the entangled hidden variable "particles" and their piloting quantum potential Q(A,B) that permits signal nonlocality in direct violation of quantum theory's axioms.
Now the idea that a physical disturbance is not necessarily responsible for the alteration of a statistical expectation value of an observable Hermitian matrix is another story logically independent of the above, e.g. Yakir Aharonov's book "Quantum Paradoxes" (Vaidman bomb detector etc) - will come back to this.
A new class of particle beam/spacecraft propulsion super-weapons? No, not yet.
On Aug 22, 2010, at 3:22 AM, Waldyr A. Rodrigues Jr. wrote:
Dear Jack,
In your note you state: " ...although a spatially oscillating electromagnetic radiation far field at rest does not exist in Maxwell’s classical field equations...."
Well, in the summer of 1997 I found some extraordinary sub and superluminal solutions of the free Maxwell equations. In particular I found a solution that can be at rest in a given inertial frame (there are infinite number of solutions of this kind, contrary to a famous Einstein statement…). In that solution E?B! One of my students called that solution the Jedi sword. You can see how I found that solution on page 16 and sequel (see Eq.(3.19)) the attached paper (upwlast1.pdf), which has been originally published in Found. Phys. 27 435-508 (1997).
In reading the paper take notice that I changed my mind concerning some issues discussed there, as it is clear from other papers I wrote on the subject and which are also attached here. I am preparing (since a long time ago) in my free time a book on the subject.
Best regards,
Waldyr
1 Note added: it is important to emphasize that the FAA to the exact solutions of the HWE
(describing sound waves) that have been produced in our experiments are pulses of compact support in the space domain and so have fronts. The fronts of a wave satisfying the HWE (or Maxwell equations) always propagate with the speed parameter that appears in the wave equation. This means,e.g.. that the superluminal motion of the peak of a superluminal X-wave cannot endure forever, it lasts until the peak catches the front. This issue is discussed at lenght in J. E. Maiorino and W. A. Rodrigues, Jr., What is superluminal wave motion?, Science and Technology Magazine 2(4), 1999.
This is a severe limitation for any potential weapon/propulsion application. So once again traditional causality seems to be preserved.