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Article #4808Re: Quantum Zeno Effect, Part 1.
From: John C. Baez
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1992 17:21
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1992 17:21
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In article <1992Oct6.120707.14830@sei.cmu.edu> firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) writes: >In article <1992Oct6.024752.20086@galois.mit.edu> jbaez@riesz.mit.edu (John C. Baez) writes: > >>Oh-oh, not this again. The point, as I have argued earlier, is that no >>physically reasonable process can give EXACTLY exponential decay; very >>general arguments show that there is a short "plateau" before the curve >>approximates an exponential. > >Yes, there are several models of the decay process that predict a plateau. >However, last time I checked, all of them predict that the length of time >spent on this plateau is smaller than hbar/delta-E, which means the >plateau is unobservable. If that's not so, I'd appreciate a correction. Hmm, that's a new twist. We would have to know how we were going to "observe the plateau" before we could figure this out.
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Newsgroups: sci.physics Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!galois!riesz!jbaez From: jbaez@riesz.mit.edu (John C. Baez) Subject: Re: Quantum Zeno Effect, Part 1. Message-ID: <1992Oct6.172142.25567@galois.mit.edu> Sender: news@galois.mit.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: riesz Organization: MIT Department of Mathematics, Cambridge, MA References: <1992Oct5.123002.13912@sei.cmu.edu> <1992Oct6.024752.20086@galois.mit.edu> <1992Oct6.120707.14830@sei.cmu.edu> Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 17:21:42 GMT Lines: 15