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seven days a week...why?

LOL. In your dreams my boy!!!

Cells need to rest.

ever heard of Prophase and Anaphase?

Well, you're unconcious 8 hours a day. If you never got tired, you'd could dance the night away... or something. C'mon, your'e a physicist, think of something. I was referring to all-nighters I see in the future (not that i never spent many of those in high school).

edit: (quick google) what, rel, you mean mitosis? You get almost as much rest from plain rest as much as you get from sleep. "tiredness" comes from the circadian rythm that comes about through chemical levels that are balanced during REM sleep. Go to bed on sleeping pills five nights a week and see how well rested you become You supply your neurotransmitter levels such that you dont go insane from lack of sleep, and you're no longer tired. Rest, to get rest.

that much unconsciousness a day. (And what I'm doing right now doesn't count as that either.) Physics *majors* may benefit from that pill, however.

That sorta pill would be awesome... But then work places may start to "require" it of people... you know, "Oh, you say you have no time? Here's a no-sleep pill, work on it tonight.". And also, humans require sleep for other reasons, not least because most of us, especially teenagers, would become very bored very quickly. (What would you do if you were always awake?

You gots a point. More time in the day though is some kind of human fantasy I guess, but yeah, I'd probably end up sitting on my ass watching TV after 2 weeks of staight all-night partying/studying.

Quote:As for LooseCaboose's question (and I may have gotten some capitalization wrong there), I've tried to avoid a single area of expertise at the expense of knowledge in anything else. (To quote Robert Heinlein, AKA, Lazaus Long), "specialization is for insects.") I did my master's research in atomic spectroscopy and I've been working for the past 19+ years in various aspects of microwave/radio frequency/light propagation, transmission, reception, and related topics.

Don't worry about the capitalisation, I really couldnt care less, its only an screen name. Thats an impresive list there (you sorta lost me after the word research though ;-)). Im currently intending to go through and do either a Masters or Doctrate degree in computer science. I could never wrap my brain around calculus or physics properly though, I like nice linear mathmatics, boolean logic and set theory.

OK, I am not talking about anything traveling faster than light.

But the book says that two photons coming from an unstable atom with a spin of zero will have a spin of zero, and if you measure the spin of one, the spin state of the other automatically collapses into the opposite spin due to the conservation of mass and energy principle, and this occurs instantaneously. Before measurements, both photons individually have any possible spin at the same time..

from an atom (involving two "dipole transitions"), they'd have to have opposite spins. Whoopie. But if your book says that that any such process occurs instantaneously, well, you should really quit trying to learn physics from a comic book.

And even if it did occur instantaneously, to somehow use that process for communication, in addition to the problems of controlling the process (which you don't seem to have thought out either), you'd have to have some way of observing the process. What observational process were you going to use? Is this going to involve *looking* at something? Doesn't *looking* involve, for example, light? Does any form of electromagnetic radiation go from point A to point B in zero time?

You're not the first person, Agamemnus, who spent five minutes reading a book and thinking he's ready to reinvent physics. You aren't going to get any further than any of the others.

No, wrong again. Instantaneously, AFTER you measure the spin, somehow.

but the moving of the photons without disturbing them... that is generally a problem.

BUT!

Say you have the atom emit two photons and they travel without impediment for thousands of light years until one of them happens upon an atom and an observer. The observer then forces the spin of the photon to be equal to the spin of the atom, somehow.

The other photon far, far, away changes accordingly, and you have an exchange of information..er... :roll:

This is a book that tries to explain the basis of quantum computers but so far (I'm not talking about this example), it has tried to use stupid metaphors that don't make sense, and it says something like "it's real hard to figure it out w/out metaphors, but we'll do it anyways".

So, anyways, these quantum computers must be possible (since they already factored 15 or sumthin'), but I really have a vague idea that the superposition of spin states in electrons magically creates the most likely answer, which is somehow the RIGHT answer... and I'm half way through the book.