In article <3810B055.3A602B36 at alcyone.com>, Erik Max Francis
<max at alcyone.com> wrote:
>Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
>>> If I remember the report correctly, they used 1.3 microsecond time
>> intervals.
>> So the minimum speed needed to transmit the correlation is something
>> like
>> 11 km / 1.3 microsocnds, or, err... some 28 times the speed of light.
>>You could be talking about one of two things, here. Either you're
>talking about the work of Guenter Nimtz -- who genuinely claims to have
>actually sent information faster than light, although the results of his
>work are in dispute and have not been reproduced in other experiments --
>or plain old quantum tunnelling, where you can talk about "phase
>velocity" being greater than c, but what counts for transmitting
>information is group velocity, which is always less than c.
The issue is neither of those.
The point is this:
What is the essential difference between QM and classical mechanics (CM)?
It is that while in CM the state of a system is defined by a single set of
numbers, whereas in QM the state of a system is defined by attaching a
complex number to all the classical states, superposing the lot, and
allowing this whole mess to evolve in time, each superposed state
separately.
However every so often, for reasons that remain unresolved, a "collapse of
the wave function" oocurs and all these superposed states disappear except
one state.
So how does this relate to the above discusssion? Well the superposed
states can be spread spatially over large distances. Then question then
arises of "what happens if we force the wave function HERE to
collapse?---will someone probing this same state over THERE (where THERE
is, let's say, 1 light year away) immediately see the effects of our
collapse?" The answer appears to be "yes".
This is of interest to physicists because, as stated above, pretty much
everything about collapse of the wave function remains a mystery and any
info experimentation can turn will be greatfully received. If this
collapse does happen immediately", this has implications for the sort of
mathematical structure one uses to describe the world.
Maynard
