hi all.
the dialogue here on everything-list is extremely interesting & I know several subscribers/participants from long ago acquaintances. I was tipped off on this list by "scerir", who posts regularly on qm2 & whom I have a lot of admiration for!! he has some really outstanding credentials but will rarely ever mention them!! the address again http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qm2/ I am not so into the philosophical side of QM, and as soon as wigners friend is mentioned I know I am ready to leave, but let me write a little here for this great audience. by the way, how many subscribers are on this list?? I wrote a paper, quant-ph/9808008, that reveals my directions from 4 years ago. let me summarize my current directions as follows since it impinges on the current dialogue, which Ive hammered out after about a half decade. we have a purely **classical model** version of the double slit experiment for both photons & electrons in the new theory, the "noisy digitizer" interpretation of QM, which stands in contradiction to some of the aspects of the copenhagen interpretation. noisy digitizer --- the atom is seen as a digitizer of incoming light wavefronts. each wavefront causes the atom to "click" or "not to click" (that is the question!!) a click is an energy transition. therefore, collapse of the wavefunction is the same as the way the LSB of a digitizer is in fact a strange combination of noise and signal. the interpretation holds that the click is precisely determined by the internal state of the atom, but that state is "so far" unmeasurable, although I believe there are experiments that reveal this connection but are not being interpreted correctly yet. (bunching and antibunching concepts in the literature). the atom has a "dead" time after a click such that it cannot click within a minimum window. possibly based on a formula relating to planks constant or heisenberg uncertainty eqn. I would be pleased to answer any questions on the "noisy digitizer" interpretation. the collapse of the wavefunction is in fact a mathematical abstraction that is only an approximation of what happens in reality. I will expand on this if others like, it would help if some people are familiar with the quantum formalism. digitizers are now ubiquitous in the cyberspace age & I think a nice new metaphor for quantum mechanics and its future. Ive found a formula called "noise equivalent power" that gives a dark count/efficiency tradeoff for all photon detection apparatuses. it involves the plank constant. its actually a false positive/negative formula that shows an inherent physical tradeoff. I believe bell formula derivations are not properly taking it into account. I believe there may be a derivation that says there can be no violation of nonlocality based on taking into account the NEP of the detector. therefore apparently QM is in fact an approximation of reality where NEP=0, i.e. a detector with no noise. all detectors have noise, NEP>0, and I believe right now this noise is enough to invalidate the existing theoretical/mathematical derivations of the bell inequality. interesting, eh? right now would really like to correspond to someone who understands NEP of detectors. maybe even the original derivation. apparently its very obscure. this is my latest writeup on the subject. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1e0fd315.0209032055.48273d70%40posting.google.com