nonlinearities in QFT

From: Blake Winter (blake.winter_at_houghton.edu)
Date: 09/24/04 

Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:12:04 +0000 (UTC)

I was reading a few more papers on arxiv.org:
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0003083
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0006079

In the first paper Johan Hansson proposes that perhaps the
nonlinearities inherent in the nonabelian parts of the standard model
are responsible for the "collapse" of the wavefunction (which would
then, it seems, actually be a deterministic yet nonlinear and
therefore unpredictable occurance). He suggests in the second paper a
possible way to test this; the basic experimental setup is based on
the setups used to detect a chaotic attractor in a dripping water
faucets. He suggests using a small radioactive source and measure the
decay times.
But it seems that this won't work to me; this would be like trying to
find an attractor in the drip times for lots of seperate water faucets
each of which only drips once. The only way this would be a good test
would be if the nonlinear collapse of the part of the wavefunction
which governs one atom also caused the collapse of all the other
atoms. Otherwise, the decay time of one won't affect the other, so I
don't think we would find an attractor even if his theory were
correct.
Does anyone else have any ideas on whether this would be a valid test?