X-Message-Number: 14233
From: 
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 13:54:13 EDT
Subject: Re: Identity Of Indiscernibles 

Answer to Message #14219 From: "John Clark" <>

<snip>...
> Another example, I cool
> your two atoms and bring them so close together that their positional 
uncertainty
> overlap and a Bose-Einstein condensation is formed, the atoms merge 
identities. 

Sorry, if you cool down carbon atoms, they form a solid, not a Bose Einsein
condensate. Even if you take atoms that can do that, only paired system are
condensed, the individual atoms are not, they are a different quantum system.

<snip>
>It's more complex than that. The uncertainty is not caused by the wave,
>it's caused by the thing that's waving. If it were just matter that was 
waving
>things could still be as deterministic as a cuckoo clock, but that's not the 
case.
>The thing that's waving is the square root of a probability not matter.

The square root of the probability is simply the wave amplitude, so what you
say is that what is waving is the wave.

Nothing is "waving", wave is simply an outdated way to represent some
properties of the dual vector space of differential forms. In euclidean space
that dual space maps on the vector space, so we can build systems
working with particle and other using "waves" in the same space. The
classical example is the Young's slits experiment.  The slits work in the
form space and the screen behind in the vector space.

Bad vulgarization books write about the dual nature of particles and wave,
in fact the system is simply built over two spaces! (a nice trick for a circus
clown as Young, by the way he was too a GP).

 > >I suggest you look at an elementary differential geometry book to
  > >get some familliarity with these concepts.
>
>Thanks for the advice but I don't believe I need to do that.

I think you need badly that reading :-)

A good book to see, with plenty of drawings is the track one of:
Gravitation by Missner, Thorn and Wheeler, edited by W.H.Freeman.

Yvan Bozzonetti.

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