From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Wed Jan 08 2003 - 14:53:45 MST
[Damien Broderick]
It goes backward as an anti-particle. Does it follow precisely the same
trajectory? If so, it annihilates with its earlier self. If not, it hits
some other particle in the general vicinity and annihilates. One or more of
the by-products of that small catastrophe might then pass through the other
slit, but the temporal symmetry is lost (I think).
Admittedly a photon is its own antiparticle. What happens then?
The Wheeler-Feynman-Stuckelberg theory, circa 1940, saying that
antiparticles are particles going back in time is not generally
accepted. The situation is completely messy as you can realize
reading these msgs (links below) posted to sci.physics.research
see the long thread "mathematical expression for antiparticles
are particles going backwards in time" here
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=it&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=mathematical)
+expression&meta=group%3Dsci.physics.*
see also the thread "antiparticles" at
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=it&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=sci.physicsΠη)
research
Anderson's great discovery of the positron rested entirely on the
fact that he knew which direction his positron was going. He placed
a lead plate in his cloud chamber and saw the particle losing energy
and curling up after it went through the lead plate. A positron is
not a 'normal' electron travelling toward the past. If it were ....
it would have to 'gain' energy crossing the lead slab, imo.
Btw, the factor 'time' (i.e. time reversal) is one of the best
possibility we have to check the MWI versus the 'collapse'
interpretations. That is because in MWI the splitting, the
branching creates (i.e. in the double slit exp.) a 'second'
particle, which can interfere with the first particle, untill
we perform a measurement.
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