Ranging and Pioneer

Thus spake Gordon D. Pusch
Oh No writes:
Thus spake "John (Liberty) Bell"
Oh No wrote:
Thus spake "John (Liberty) Bell"

2) I have yet to see an adequately satisfactory explanation of how that
proposed effect can produce a red shift on one side of a galaxy, and a
blue shift on the opposite side, whilst still giving the observed
Pioneer blue shift, on both sides of the Solar System.

What is measured is a shift in the wavefunction corresponding to an
eigenstate of acceleration.


The obvious problem with your above claim is that, even if one assumes that
one _can_ construct a self-adjoint "acceleration operator," an "eigenstate
of acceleration" would almost certainly be unphysical and non-normalizable,
for the same reasons that eigenstates of position or momentum are unphysical
and non-normalizable.

In particular, one may expect that an "eigenstate of acceleration" would be
_completely delocalized_, much as an eigenstate of momentum is completely
delocalized --- leaving one with absolutely no information about position.

By contrast, in "Real World" measurements, one would only be able to observe
position, velocity, and acceleration to _finite precision_, and hence, even if
one believes that "wave function collapse" is a "physical process" rather
than an artifact of the observer's revised knowledge about the state of the
quantum system, the result of a finite precision "acceleration measurement"
will =NOT= in fact be an "eigenstate of acceleration," but rather an
incoherent _MIXTURE_ of eigenstates of acceleration, with an uncertainty
determined by the precision of the "acceleration measurement"...

Of course what you say is correct. I have been guilty once again of
expressing myself in a sloppy manner. What one actually measures is a
shift in the momentum space wave function for each detected photon. At
the time of each measurement we have an eigenstate of momentum (to "real
world" accuracy), not an eigenstate of acceleration.

I am suggesting that, notwithstanding this shift, the classical value of
momentum is unchanged for Pioneer and for an orbiting star, so I refer
to the shift as an "illusory momentum". In the case of Pioneer the
illusory momentum varies, which I interpret as an illusory acceleration.
In the case of an orbiting star the illusory momentum corresponds to an
illusory increase in orbital velocity, which again is interpreted as
illusory acceleration toward the galactic centre.




Regards

--
Charles Francis
substitute charles for NotI to email