🚀 go-pugleaf

mitsu@nic.cerf.net (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) writes:
>I don't think anyone fully understood the import of the communication from
>Dr. Jack Sarfatti I posted a few days ago.  Let me summarize it first.

Really, sir, I did read it.  I just didn't think it was worth
respondiing to.

>It has widely been asserted that the non-local correlations evinced in the
>EPR paper and most recently verified conclusively in the Aspect experiments
>in France, though very strange, cannot be used for communication.  However,
>the demonstrations to this effect rely on non-unitary behavior of the
>detectors (i.e., probability current is not conserved).

wha?  They do nothing of the sort.  As was best said by somebody else,
operators separated by spacelike intervals commute.  They can't
influence each other.  QED.  (that's quod erat demonstratum, not
quantum electrodynamics)

> [Sarfatti quote] the transmitter photon retarded wave arrives at T and is
> detected. Information on the setting of the transmitter at event T is
> sent backwards-in-time by an advanced transmitter photon wave. The
> advanced wave arrives at S just as the photon pair is being emitted.
> This is what Fred Hoyle calls a "loop in time" between events S and T.

This is meaningless.  What is an "advanced photon wave"?  I think 
Sarfatti is trying to talk about advanced and retarded in the sense
of potentials in electrodynamics.  As we have probably all beaten to
death, even though you can use the advanced potential, which is
seemingly non-causal, to do calculations, causality is never actually
violated.  Hell, in the Coulomb gauge the potential propagates
instantaneously, but it doesn't allow instantaneous communication.
(The fields are limited to lightlike propagation.  See Jackson,
especially problem 6.19, nyuk nyuk.)  I hate to say this, because he
was so distinguished, but it is becoming impossible to treat anything 
Fred Hoyle says with any respect.  He is an example of the tragic
results of failing to accept that you can be wrong.

> [Sarfatti again]  I have algebra based on Feynman rules to back
> up every detail of what I am talking about intuitively here. This is
> not handwaving.

And I'm the King of England.

Ben Weiner
("Weiner" is not a particularly Hanoverian name.)