From: utzoo!utcsrgv!donald
Newsgroups: net.space
Title: quantum and FTL
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.499
Posted: Thu Aug  5 10:31:20 1982
Received: Thu Aug  5 10:46:06 1982


I hate to bring up the old quantum mechanics debates again, but
quantum tunneling IS instantaneous, at least in some sense of the
word.  A particle which appears on one side of a potential barrier
at a particular instant can be detected on the other side at some
future instant which is arbitrarily close to the first instant.
(for you diehard quantum theorists out there, I know I'm over-
simplifying, but bear with me...)
There is no "transmission" across the barrier in the usual sense of
the word, not even of "wave function" waves (!) as was suggested in a
previous article.
However, it would appear that as a real FTL mechanism this is useless
because no information can be transmitted.

Sometime ago a French physicist named Aspect was planning an experiment
to test the Bell inequality which might demonstrate the existence of
"correlated space-like events" (sorry for the technese).  This might be
interpreted to represent superluminal (FTL) information transfer between two
points.  Does anyone know how it turned out?

(What do supernovas and gravity propagation have to do with FTL???)

						Don Chan