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