🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep29.062215.18619@asl.dl.nec.com> terry@aslws01.asl.dl.nec.com (Terry Bollinger) writes:

)How about the non-trivial issue in my same email -- that is, whether
)my quantum/non-quantum bullet analysis is correct or not?  Anyone?

I thought that was a pretty thought-provoking piece.  A couple of
thoughts:

1)  I think you were right on about the usefulness of talking about actual
experiments.  I was surprised at the amount philosophical differences
hindered the previous attempts at discussing QM on the net h ere.

2)  Rather than looking at information 'left behind' might it not be
just as good to look at disturbance of the bullet?  So rather than to regard
the culprit behind not being able to measure the wave function of a bullet
when light was hitting it as an 'information' problem, one could say that it
was the disturbance of the photons that made the difference.  This would also
be more quantitiative, IMO (see point 3).  Also, it would mean that Fenyman
wasn't so wrong :-) :-).

3)  Gravity doesn't seem to affect interference fringes of particles - why
should it affect the interference fringes of bullets?  It seems that someone
suitably vessed in the arcane art of QM could figure out whether gravity was
theoretically 'enough' of a disturbance or not.

4)  Has anyone done interference effects with molecules?  I know there is
a technique called 'molecular beam epitaxy' that involves creating 'beams'
of molecules.  (The technique is simple too - you just heat something up
to a low vapor pressure in a vacuum - unless of course it's more complex
than that :-)).  Anyway, there might be a way to do actual experiments with
relatively large particles such as molecules - and maybe it's been done, I
really don't know.