[lbo-talk] Scientism

Les Schaffer schaffer at optonline.net
Tue Oct 10 06:27:47 PDT 2006


boddi satva wrote:
> Particles which go around a track and are forced to "tunnel" through a
> barrier have been timed moving faster than the speed of light, since
> that speed is not a single velocity, but a distribution.

these can considered anomalous timings, the "particle" is as much a wave as a like a baseball, and all that good stuff. so yea it *looks* like it goes faster than light, but what's that got to do with Charles' point about relativity? he said:

"For example, there's nobody talking about going faster than the

speed of light. There's a lot of certainty today that that's a limit

beyond reasonable doubt."

and the tunneling time conundrum -- interesting as it is to try and interpret -- has hardly become a deal breaker for Lorentz invariance, though it gets terrific press coverage... you know "Einstein proven wrong ..." and all that good stuff.

check out the paper "Why does relativity allow quantum tunnelling to ‘take no time’?" by D. Sokolovski in Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A (2004) 460, 499–506 if you are a ambitious :

http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/ha03eap98l0wum49at33/contributions/h/t/p/l/htplrgu26ace8uv8.pdf

(actually free for a limited time!) or from a different point of view:

http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/publications/papers/'Quantum%20Tunelling%20Time'%20AJP000023.pdf

les



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