I don't find any reference to Afshar or his experiment on the
Harvard web site or on arXiv.org?
Brent Meeker
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jeff Bone [mailto:jbone.domain.name.hidden]
>Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 6:27 PM
>To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
>Cc: Fabric-of-Reality.domain.name.hidden
>Subject: Many Worlds invalidated?
>
>
>
>Hot off the press, via Boingsters:
>
>
>http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/26/many_worlds_theory_i.html
>
> Many Worlds theory invalidated
>
>Kathryn Cramer breaks the story on a to-be-presented
>Harvard talk on an
>experiment that appears to invalidate both the "Many Worlds" and
>"Copenhagen" theories of quantum mechanics. Kathryn is
>the daughter of
>John Cramer, a physicist whose "Transactional Interpretetation"
>hypothesis is the only one left intact by the
>experiment's findings.
>
>It has been widely accepted that the rival
>interpretations of quantum
>mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds
>Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional
>Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by
>experiment,
>because the experimental predictions come from the
>formalism that all
>such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment
>demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a
>loophole in
>this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with
>the formalism,
>then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment
>falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires
>the absence of
>interference in a particle-type measurement. It also
>falsifies the
>Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no
>interference
>between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that
>correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole
>or the other.
>Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)
>
> http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000530.html
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 26 2004 - 16:31:33 PDT