----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 2:35 PM Subject: Re: The Shooting Room Paradox
> Dan said: > > > Let me answer that question with another question: which slit did the > > photon go through? :-) The real answer to that question is what I > > consider the real answer to this question. > > I'm not sure about that. The interesting behaviour of Young's Slits > comes down to how we have to add amplitudes for experimentally > indistinguishable histories. That's true, and a hidden variable theory could still produce Young's experiment. I'm talking more about worldviews, and how it is impossible to view a photon as either a classical wave or particle. (I was also thinking, of course, of low intensity light.) >A better example of the failure of classical notions of the causal structure of spacetime would be > Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen type experiments. (Although I suppose that's an > example of the breakdown of classical ideas of causality itself - the > link between entangled particles is something stronger than causal > disconnection but weaker than full causal connectiton.) This is a subject I've been interested in from way back, long before it was cool. I worked with the Bell-Wigner interpretation of QM in my foundations of physics class and my work on my grad school minor in the philosophy of science back in the late '70s. I was even able to talk to Wigner about that before he died. > Rich, who often used to daydream about quantum mechanics emerging > naturally from general relativity with time machines. >From what I've heard from John Baez over on sci.physics, there is gonna be nothing that looks the least bit natural about quantum gravity when it comes. Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like its going to be solved with a lot of heavy lifting instead of a few elegant equations. Dan M.
