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Re: particle position



As it seems less and less progress is being made as this discussion
continues, I won't bother the list for much longer with it. But there are
several inaccuracies in Arnulfo Castellanos Moreno's last post that I want
to respond to.

And this is what I find in the papers cited by R. Ebert. Each one of them
is
very careful and they do not establish that Santos' objections are solved.

Did I say Santo's objections are *solved*? I think not. I said:

in the case of LHV models, this, in fact, is being done with experiments
already carried out or proposed which will address most if not all of
Santos' objections.

Just
a few examples to see:

P. Kwiat et al., Phys. Rev. A 49, 3209 (1994) say in page 3215: "A
loophole-free
experiment still seems feasible, although detectors need to be improved
somewhat.", and the title of the paper say PROPOSAL FOR ...

I SAID some of the references were proposals for experiments. See above.
They have yet to be carried out.

On the other hand the arguments against these approchs is maintained.
See for example:

Physics Letters A 10 (1996)

There isn't enough information in this reference to find it without a lot
of unnecessary work, which I'm not willing to do.

Optical Soc. Amer B, 15, 1572 (1998)

Santos, Marshall and Casado claim they have a local hidden variable model
that this optical parametric downconversion experiment proves. The trouble
is, while protesting the assumptions used in other Bell inequality
experiments (as Santos has in the past), they introduce at least one
questionable one of their own in the analysis of this experiment. Namely
the interaction of photons with zero-level vacuum fluctuations. And this is
after admitting in the paper that no one knows why calculations of vacuum
fluctuations give us a energy density of infinity! If we don't understand
vacuum fluctuations well enough to calculate reasonable energy densities,
how can they be used as an incidental part of a quantitative experimental
calculation?

Found.Phys. 27, 765 (1997).

It would save effort on the part of anyone who looks up your references if
you would be accurate. It's page 1765, not 765.

It's odd that you've used this paper as it doesn't support your point of
view. The authors discuss collapsed-induced nonlocality and conclude:

What our preceding discussion seeks to highlight is that at a level deeper
than that of gross averages, i.e., at tile level of individual events, an
instantaneous action at a distance appears to be entailed by the quantum
mechanical formalism in conjunction with the postulate of physical wave
function collapse. In particular, this argument underscores the fact that
contrary to some prevalent views, such a nonlocal action cannot be avoided
by merely adopting the ensemble interpretation of the wave function.


Ron Ebert
ron.ebert@ucr.edu
*****************
Physics is the attempt to look at things as they really are.
Urs Lauterburg - Tap-L list