Re: quantum teleportation
George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Mon, 04 Jan 1999 16:53:49 -0500
ArvesonPT@nswccd.navy.mil wrote:
>
> Science magazine identified the accelerating expansion of the universe as
> the biggest discovery in 1998. I beg to differ for the following reasons:
>
> 1. Hubble parameter measurements are notoriously poor. If they were
> measurements of something else than the whole universe, they would probably
> not make it out of the observatory. Because humans are fascinated with 'the
> universe', just about any measurements get reported, on the basis that any
> data are better than none. For the past 50 years, measurements of the
> Hubble parameter have been reported, and they varied over a wide range.
> Since the reciprocal of Ho is the age of the universe, this 'age' has
> changed over a wide range too. (This is one of the reasons that YECs have
> used to bring modern astronomy into question).
>
> 2. The press has always sensationalized Hubble parameter measurements. I
> suspect that the astronomers who do this work are more likely to become
> known than those who do other equally difficult kinds of work on variable
> stars, for instance.
>
> 3. Even if the expansion is found to be truly accelerating, what does that
> imply regarding the ultimate fate of the universe? By itself, it implies
> nothing. What if the expansion rate changes with time, or density, or
> something else? We still have not learned what the equation of motion of
> the universe is; we can only extrapolate and speculate.
I would agree to some extent with you about this not being the "biggest"
discovery, but for somewhat different reasons - primarily that it's not quite a
"discovery" but something many have suspected for some time for several reasons - e.g.,
that the ages of some systems seem to be greater than 1/Ho.
Re your last sentence - there's no reason to think the Einstein equations _with
cosmological term_ don't describe the universe at least well after the Planck time.
We know the equations of motion - which for homogeneous & isotropic universes are
relatively simple. But we don't know the constants to put into it to get a specific
model.
> I offer another alternative as the no. 1 discovery of 1998: quantum
> teleportation. This is the first (claimed) application of quantum
> nonlocality, which appears to violate relativity and may have a profound
> impact on future physics.
--
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/