From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Jan 19 2003 - 02:21:52 MST
On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 09:13:27PM -0500, ABlainey@aol.com wrote:
> I began thinking about experiments that have
> shown strange things happening with electrons travelling through very thin
> wires or PCB tracks.
> In cases where the wire is thin enough, the electrons sometime vanish or jump
> impossible distances to nearby wires. Thus breaking conventional laws. I am
> not sure who noticed this behaviour. Hopefully one of you will have some
> links or a better idea of exactly what happened.
Isn't this just the usual quantum tunneling? Since particle positions
are not exact on sufficient small scales, the electrons can jump across
insulating voids where it classically would have been forbidden. It is a
well understood effect and not particularly spooky compared to much
other quantum stuff (the Aharonov-Bohm effect - *that's* spooky!).
The effect doesn't involve jumping across universes even in the many
worlds interpretations; there the electron simply does travel another
way in different universes and sometimes we find ourselves in the
slighly unlikely but still possible universe where it tunneled.
The problem with using "nearby" universes where the other invisible
universe contains useful stuff like superconductors or superfast
transistors is that in reality such possible universes are extremely
remote compared to the myriad of universes where you have a copy of your
device with a slighly different thermal noise. So even if particles did
jump across universes (which they don't in the MWI, at least not unless
you have some kind of meta-superspace model) they would interact with
other processors similarly lacking parts.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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