Re: determinism, Bohm, Bell

From: bz (bz+sp_at_ch100-5.chem.lsu.edu)
Date: 03/23/05 

Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 12:46:00 +0000 (UTC)

RP <no_mail_no_spam@yahoo.com> wrote in news:3ace1mF68pc1rU1
@individual.net:

>
>
> Ron Baker, Pluralitas! wrote:
>
>> I was just reading:
>> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/
>>
>> "...
>>
>> It seems Bell was a proponent of Bohm.
>> It seems that Bohm said that a particle actually
>> has a certain position and momentum even
>> if it can not be determined with certainty.
>>
>> Is 'hidden determinism' viable?
>> Is it true that we can't prove that the universe
>> is not deterministic?
>> Is it true that we can't disprove that there is
>> a hidden mechanism that determines exactly,
>> say, when a radioactive nucleus will decay?
>
> Given that we can generate a decay event at will, seems that the
> answer is obvious, eh? If that U-238 atom waits around for nature to
> send a slow neutron its way, then there might seem to be a random
> element involved, but then this is random only in the sense that it is
> too complicated to calculate in advance. The event is however no more
> random than the purposeful bombardment with neutrons in the controlled
> fission reaction. Bell was either full of it, or his premises were
> nonsense. I'm in favor of the latter. No experiment has ever proven
> FTL communication, and the first one that does will immediately
> invalidate SR, and causality. OTOH, without causality, there would be
> no cause for inequality that Bell suggested, because given truly
> random interchanges it would be impossible to express the argument in
> mathematical terms. No algorithm can provide random output, which is
> why the C64 random generator caught such hell from critics; it was
> provably not-so-random.

Since free neutrons only have a half life of about 11 seconds, your
conjecture would imply that an isolated U-238 atom would NEVER fission.

It would also imply that, as the fission neutrons are too high in energy to
cause fission, normally, that a mass of U-238 enclosed in a material that
absorbs ALL neutrons, reflecting none and allowing none to enter from the
outside, such a mass would not display any decays.

I suspect this can be tested experimentally and would prove to be wrong.

It also may be that random 'thermal movements in the neucleus' of
'unstable' atoms occasionally arrange the protons and neutrons in a
configuration such that splitting (fission) represents a LOWER energy state
than remaining together, so the neucleus splits.

Of course, a passing neutrino might just as well 'kick things off'. 

-- 
bz
please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an 
infinite set.
bz+sp@ch100-5.chem.lsu.edu   remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap

Relevant Pages

  • Re: BRD-Autoindustrie klagt =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=FCber_Absatzeinbr=FCche?= 2007
    ... Der Akku speichert Energie, ... Letzeres ... macht z.B. die Bennstoffzelle, ...
    (de.etc.fahrzeug.auto)
  • NW5.1 User Lizenzen
    ... ich kann NW5.1 Erweiterungslizenzen nicht mehr kaufen? ... Gruss Uwe ... TIMECRAFT Personaldienstleistungen GmbH ...
    (de.comp.sys.novell)
  • Bildschirm tauschen bei iBook G3
    ... dann tut sich zu ein 3-5 mm tiefer Spalt zwischen Display ... und Rahmen auf. ... Bils siehe unter ... Display fällt immer wieder aus, ist dann schwarz oder spinnt rum. ...
    (de.comp.sys.mac.misc)
  • Re: On 8/1945 A-Bombs
    ... > This is because U-238 does not spontaneously fission? ... smaller nuclei, and _two_ free neutrons. ... >that does spontaneously fission were used to "drive" the reactor.) ... A successful implosion bomb is a non-trivial engineering ...
    (soc.history.war.world-war-ii)
  • Re: fission question
    ... BTW, I slipped up on the decimal point here. ... be 7.1E10 neutrons, and a fission rate of 7.1E18 fissions/sec. ... for which there is a higher fission cross-section. ... > makes the critical mass a sixth power of the linear dimension). ...
    (sci.physics)