Science > Physics > Causation/Causality, Memory, and Convolution 11: Heisenberg and Superluminal
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Science > Physics |
| User: |
"OsherD" |
| Date: |
22 Feb 2006 02:49:31 AM |
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Causation/Causality, Memory, and Convolution 11: Heisenberg and Superluminal |
From Osher Doctorow
A few arXiv papers have already appeared on superluminal speeds in
2006, including J. N. Pecina-Cruz' (U. Texas-Pan American, Edinburgh
Texas) "Tachyons or antiparticles?", physics/0601066. Pecina-Cruz has
coauthored with Ne'eman in 1994, etc.
Pecina-Cruz says that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (HUP) permits
a particle wandering near the light cone to suddenly tunnel from the
timelike to the spacelike region, the tunneling being defined by
acquiring superluminal speed, but the claim is that in this region the
Cause-Effect relation collapses.
Probable Influence/Causation (PI) agrees with Heisenberg on the
underlying idea here, but not with the violation of Cause-Effect, and
this is a good illustration of how two "opposite" theories of Causation
can yield similar results. Readers of my previous threads will notice
that quantum fluctuations have a much simpler interpretation than
Heisenberg's in PI, namely that Rare Events (events with probabilities
less than .05 on a 0 to 1 scale of probability, although some
researchers take this to be less than .01 and a few others use slightly
different decimals) have more Probable Influence/Causation than other
events/processes.
Readers can see this from:
1) P(A-->B) = 1 + P(AB) - P(A)
so that when P(A) < .05, we have -P(A) > -.05, and 1 - P(A) > 1 - .05 =
..95, so that:
2) P(A-->B) > .95 + P(AB)
where P(AB) < .05 by monotonicity of probability (that is, P(AB) < =
P(A) since AB is a subset of A except for sets of probability 0).
Therefore:
3) P(A-->B) > .95 when P(A) < .05, that is for Rare Events A.
Notice carefully that I and Pecina-Cruz and Heisenberg agree that
superluminality is possible in the small neighborhood of the light
cone, and that although our reasons differ, the difference really boils
down to different "mechanisms" involved in PI and HUP, namely Probable
Causation/Influence versus "Conjugate" Uncertainties or
Complementarity/Indeterminism. Pecina-Cruz' does not quite realize
this, since he tries to argue that the "mechanism" is equivalent to
different observers observing things in different order in the various
timelike vs spacelike regions. In PI, there is no such thing as a
different Causal order in these scenarios, since the set/event (A-->B)
does not change from equations (1) to (3) and similarly with processes.
Indeed, different time order observations are logically paradoxical
and simply don't occur with the PI formalism, which is an advantage.
Although this might disappoint Einstein himself, nobody has ever
produced two human beings who have seen events in opposite time orders,
and while observation/experiment is not necessarily the ultimate test,
there is a deep intuitive argument that time reversal is important
enough to require that somebody actually sees it on a macroscopic level
in relationship to theories that have macroscopic components like GR or
SR.
Of course, if (A-->B) didn't remain the same from (1) to (3), somebody
might argue that we could "pretend" that macroscopic human observation
could be ignored. But the combination of (A-->B) being unchanged (and
certainly not reversed) and intuition on time reversal and macroscopic
or partly macroscopic theories seems like a powerful combination.
Osher Doctorow
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Causation/Causality, Memory, and Convolution 11: Heisenberg and Superluminal |
22 Feb 2006 02:53:37 AM |
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Although this might disappoint Einstein himself,
***************
I kinda doubt it. Not now anymore.
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| User: "OsherD" |
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| Title: Re: Causation/Causality, Memory, and Convolution 11: Heisenberg and Superluminal |
22 Feb 2006 03:17:52 AM |
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From Osher Doctorow
donstockba typed:
I kinda doubt it. Not now anymore.
You might be right. Also, I think that one difficulty with the light
cone physicists is their impression that the light cone, which
supposedly is in general different for different people or objects or
observers, is a "fundamental" type of geometric object that really
divides space and time and light into very different regions (timelike
inside the cone, spacelike outside, lightlike on the cone). Sir Roger
Penrose's Penrose diagrams and Kruskal diagrams add to this impression.
But if either the speed of light is infinite or if what is called the
finite speed of light c is actually the largest visually perceived or
perceivable speed (perceived by vision or by light sensitive
instruments), then in the first case the 3 regions are largely trivial,
and in the second case it isn't space and time and light that are
divided by perceptual speed boundaries but human or animal or
light-sensitive machine perception!
So where are superluminal objects if we can't see them? Well, Sir
Arthur Stanley Eddington as long ago as 1922 (I've referred to his
views of the Mathematical Theory of Relativity, Cambridge University
Press) pointed out that superluminal and subluminal regimes could both
exist even if they can't intercommunicate. In those days, it was
thought that such intercommunication was impossible. Now, with
Pecina-Cruz' paper, we don't think that anymore.
If superluminal objects exist, I suspect that we'll eventually stumble
on some sense or some machine that can "sense" them. In an era when
mini-black-holes and wormholes seem plausible to difficult to find,
that shouldn't dissuade us from studying them even in "black box"
scenarios.
Osher Doctorow
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