🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr10.174714.4747@watson.ibm.com> platt@watson.ibm.com (Daniel E. Platt) writes:
>In article <s4htvINNc7f@agate.berkeley.edu>, aephraim@physics (Aephraim Steinberg) writes:
>|> In article <1992Apr9.213832.1911@hellgate.utah.edu> tolman%asylum.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman) writes:
>|>    {DELETED MOST OF EXCHANGE}
>|> readers of this newsgroup any more) what is selected out is a state of
>|> the entire atom+photon system, so if the photon is found to have gone off
>|> in the +x direction, the atom will be found to have recoiled in the -x
>|> direction, conserving momentum.  
>
>Actually, if you calculate the 'in' and 'out' states, and the
>transfer matrices, and calculate the cross-sections for various
>events, the cross-section for events that violate conservation are
>zero...
>
>You have a distribution of possible events in the shape of the
>dumbell, but the recoil that is ultimately detected in any one of
>those directions depends on the direction the photon was detected
>in on an event-by-event basis.

I must be missing something here, but how does that differ from what I
said except for the fact that it wisely avoided the word ``collapse,''
and replaced it with jargon?  We seem to agree that momentum is con-
served, and that this is manifested in nonlocal correlations between
the photon and the atom.




Not meaning to be dense,

aephraim



-- 
Aephraim M. Steinberg                    | "WHY must I treat the measuring
UCB Physics                              | device classically??  What will
aephraim@garnet.berkeley.edu             | happen to me if I don't??"
                                         |       -- Eugene Wigner