Anachrony in decoherence

February 2010, page 10

In a Search and Discovery news item (Physics Today, September 2009, page 16), we are faulted for not couching our work of the  early 1980s “in terms of the then-nascent decoherence theory.” Well, we’re sorry about that, and can only offer the excuse that the term “decoherence” hadn’t yet been coined. We called it “quantum damping” and “tunneling friction.” The reader may agree that those are perhaps not such bad descriptions.

Anyone bothering to read the articles^1,2 or those we have written since³ will find the solutions to Hund’s paradox and the ideas presently in circulation concerning decoherence, like “decoherence by the environment,” clearly and quantitatively explicated.

The situation is amusingly reminiscent of the case of Ramses II. Apparently,  some people claim the pharaoh couldn’t have died of tuberculosis⁴ because the disease wasn’t discovered until the 19th century.

References

1. R. A. Harris, L. Stodolsky, J. Chem. Phys. 74, 2145 (1981) [INSPEC]; Phys. Lett. B 116, 464 (1982) .
2. R. A. Harris, R. Silbey, J. Chem. Phys. 78, 7330 (1983) [INSPEC].
3. L. Stodolsky, in Quantum Coherence: University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA, 14–16 December 1989, J. S. Anandan, ed., World Scientific, Hackensack, NJ (1990), p. 320; in Time and Matter: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on the Science of Time, I. I. Bigi, M. Faessler, eds., World Scientific, Hackensack, NJ (2006), p. 117, also available at [LINK].
4. J. R. Searle, N. Y. Rev. Books 56(14), 88 (2009).

Robert A. Harris

(raharris@berkeley.edu)

University of California, Berkeley

Leo Stodolsky

(les@mppmu.mpg.de)

Max Planck Institute for Physics

Munich, Germany

Anachrony in decoherence

References

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