home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: sci.physics
- Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tamsun.tamu.edu!zeus.tamu.edu!dwr2560
- From: dwr2560@zeus.tamu.edu (RING, DAVID WAYNE)
- Subject: Re: Aristotle and the Modern Physicist
- Message-ID: <28JUL199201524569@zeus.tamu.edu>
- News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41
- Sender: news@tamsun.tamu.edu (Read News)
- Organization: Texas A&M University, Academic Computing Services
- References: <24JUL199220140602@zeus.tamu.edu> <151aebINNkmb@agate.berkeley.edu> <mcirvin.712271293@husc8> <152ghlINNs9d@agate.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 06:52:00 GMT
- Lines: 28
-
- aephraim@physics.Berkeley.EDU (Aephraim M. Steinberg) writes...
- >An amusing counterexample. I should've been more careful about what I
- >was saying; I meant that if a box starts with a well-defined center of
- >mass, no evolution that is confined to the box and its contents will
- >turn it into a state with a not-well-defined center of mass, which seemed
- >to me to be the flavor of the original proposal.
-
- I think you also want a well defined momentum. But then there's an
- uncertainty relation... :-)
-
- >%>I'd be slightly
- >%>more inclined to believe that you could superpose two distributions with
- >%>different QUADRUPOLE moments or something like that...
-
- This is in fact what I had in mind. As I recall I worded my post
- carefully to satisfy momentum cons and at the same time not confuse
- the issue. I think the phrase was "move the masses around." Note the
- plural. In hindsight I can see why that would be confusing.
-
- > Certainly, the cat alone is
- >not in a coherent superposition, nor is the radioactive nucleus, taken
- >alone, but together, they are. (Assuming they have not yet interacted
- >with anything else.)
-
- Well, getting a cat into a pure state is quite an achievement! ;-)
-
- Dave Ring
- dwr2560@zeus.tamu.edu
-