User talk:Kevin aylward

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Welcome!

Hello, Kevin aylward, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  Michaelas10 (T|C) 14:32, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Hi

By keeping your discussion of QM interpretations on the talk page, you might benefit others (like myself) who would like to undertand QM interpretations. — goethean ॐ 18:28, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ensemble interpretation talk page

I intend to conduct discusccions on the editing of the page on the talk page as per guidelines.

Please login befoe editing the page, and sign you comments.1Z 17:03, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Overtones

Thanks for your excellent reworking of overtones. The sentence with the word 'cringes' makes me want to rephrase the idea but I'll leave it to you to rewrite it so that the paragraph retains your voice. Binksternet 12:42, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] BJT edits

Kevin: Wikipedia is not a forum to push what you are convinced is 'reality' or 'the truth'. Please see WP:V, WP:NPOV, WP:SOAP, and WP:COI to understand why I reverted your edits. In fact, I recommend that you read WP:NOT in full. The fact is, experts disagree. Citing an EE professor's e-mail response or usenet posting as an authoritative reference to support of edits is simply begging for a revert. Also, when you add an external link to your personal website where you've written an argument about something in the article is a violation of WP:COI. Further, your edits were not encylopedic in tone so please read WP:TONE#Avoid_peacock_and_weasel_terms. Finally, Note that I am not promoting either the voltage controlled view or the current controlled view. Alfred Centauri 15:40, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Kevin, please do not edit my comments on talk pages

Despite my having asked you to stop, you continue to edit my comments by inserting your replies in-line. This is not cool, Kevin, for a variety of reasons. Please stop doing this. Alfred Centauri 15:16, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] User page decorum

Kevin: Thanks for commenting on my EE nitpickery however, I would prefer that you, like others have, place your comments on my talk page instead. Cheers, Alfred Centauri 13:56, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics

Sir Aylward, you might want to incorporate a bit of fact-based quantum field theory into the quantum mechanics ensemble interpretation page. The key thing is that in an electric field of strength above 1.3*10^18 volts/metre, which occurs out to a range of 33 fm or so from the middle of the electron (see equation 359 in http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 or equation 8.20 in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040 ), pair-production occurs spontaneously in the Dirac sea, and the pairs get radially polarized by the electron's core electric field before annihilating back into field quanta (this radial polarization consists of virtual positrons being on average slightly closer to the real electron core than virtual electrons). This polarization shields part of the core charge of the electron, necessitating the renormalization of charge in calculations of things like the magnetic moment of the electron, known accurately to many decimals.

But what's more important, the spontaneous production of pairs of virtual (i.e. short-lived) fermions around electrons at random due to the intense gauge boson (electric field quanta) radiation in strong fields breaking down the vacuum "Dirac sea", will have chaotic effects on the motion of the electron on small scales (although on large scales the chaos will cancel out, just as a large number of random air molecule impacts averages out on large scales to be approximated well by the concept of constant air pressure, but doesn't cancel out on small scales where individual impacts become important, causing Brownian motion of small particles).

It will randomly cause small-scale deflections, each deflection occurring when pair production produces pairs of fermions at random near an electron.

Feynman states on a footnote printed on pages 55-6 of my (Penguin, 1990) copy of his book QED:

‘... I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place: when the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics were first coming out, people still tried to understand them in terms of old-fashioned ideas ... But at a certain point the old-fashioned ideas would begin to fail, so a warning was developed ... If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the [path integral] ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures - adding arrows [each arrow representing the contribution to one kind of reaction, embodied by a single Feynman diagram] for all the ways an event can happen - there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’

Feynman on p85 points out that the effects usually attributed to the ‘uncertainty principle’ are actually due to interferences from virtual particles or field quanta in the vacuum (which don’t exist in classical theories but must exist in an accurate quantum field theory):

‘But when the space through which a photon moves becomes too small (such as the tiny holes in the screen), these [classical] rules fail - we discover that light doesn’t have to go in straight lines, there are interferences created by two holes ... The same situation exists with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that there is no main path, no ‘orbit’; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of intereference becomes very important, and we have to sum the arrows to predict where an electron is likely to be.’

Hence, in the path integral picture of quantum mechanics - according to Feynman - all the indeterminancy is due to interferences. It’s very analogous to the indeterminancy of the motion of a small grain of pollen (less than 5 microns in diameter) due to jostling by individual interactions with air molecules, which represent the field quanta being exchanged with a fundamental particle.

The path integral then makes a lot of sense, as it is the statistical resultant for a lot of interactions, just as the path integral was actually used for brownian motion (diffusion) studies in physics before its role in QFT. The path integral still has the problem that it’s unrealistic in using calculus and averaging an infinite number of possible paths determined by the continuously variable lagrangian equation of motion in a field, when in reality there are not going to be an infinite number of interactions taking place. But at least, it is possible to see the problems, and entanglement may be a red-herring:

‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of spacetime is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’

- R. P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, BBC Books, 1965, pp. 57-8.

Also notice that people like Dr Thomas Love of California State University has pointed out to me via an unpublished manuscript called "Towards an Einsteinian Quantum Theory":

‘The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of of quantum mechanics, which has wavefunction collapse occur when a measurement is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.’

Also see the following statement of Feynman on the hostility towards path integrals from Teller, Dirac and Bohr (who were all prejudiced in favour of crackpot orthodoxy which had no evidence behind it):

“... take the exclusion principle ... it turns out that you don’t have to pay much attention to that in the intermediate states in the perturbation theory. I had discovered from empirical rules that if you don’t pay attention to it, you get the right answers anyway .... Teller said: “... It is fundamentally wrong that you don’t have to take the exclusion principle into account.” ...

“... Dirac asked “Is it unitary?” ... Dirac had proved ... that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron. Dirac could not think of going forwards and backwards ... in time ...

” ... Bohr ... said: “... one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.” ... Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle ...” - Feynman, quoted at http://www.tony5m17h.net/goodnewsbadnews.html#badnews

Cheers, Nigel Cook http://quantumfieldtheory.org/ http://nige.wordpress.com/ 92.5.1.28 (talk) 15:39, 27 March 2008 (UTC)