Can I just tighten up my...

[peter]

.....understanding of what exactly the inferences of radiactive decay are. I have two things in my head that you guys could either confirm, or correct me on.

First, I see nuclear decay as alongside the Big Bang, the only event in the Universe that is not subject to the laws of cause and effect as to when it occurs. ie when a radioactive nucleus emits an alpha particle, a beta paricle or a gamma ray it gives no prior warning that it is going to do so, there is nothing occuring that can be said to be causing the event to occur at time a rather than time b, and there is nothing whatsoever that can predict when any given nuclei is going to decay [of course en masse they have theit half lives, but this is just coin-spinning]. So there is no cause-effect process going on here at all.

Second. This is another manifestation of 'uncertainty'. We have one kind of uncertainty with the uncollapsed/unobserved states of the quantum description of the Universe - but here we have another. The uncertainty of when the decay event will occur [liberated as it is from the usual chain of cause and effect that lends predictability to all non-nuclear decay events {exepting the Big Bang}].

Am I correct in my understandings here?

Sorry if I've asked these questions before guys - put it down to spongiform decay of the grey matter. But as an aside, a girl newly started at work yesterday who expresses an interest in physics, pulled the breath from my body by asserting that Einstein stole his relativity matereal from Tesla. In my ensueing apoplexy I was unable to find words fitting....

[Cord Hurn]

But as an aside, a girl newly started at work yesterday who expresses an interest in physics, pulled the breath from my body by asserting that Einstein stole his relativity matereal from Tesla.

Tesla himself apparently claimed Einstein borrowed heavily from the ideas of Croatian Roger Joseph Boskovich (1711-1787).

www.plasmacosmology.net/tesla.html


www.gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Essa ... nload/4236

[peter]

Shoulders of Giants as Newton said......

(Interesting articles!)

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Here is the base article on radioactive decay, which is also a well-known example of quantum tunneling in some cases such as alpha decay. The tunneling explanation describes how it is possible for an alpha particle to overcome the strong force and escape the nucleus.

Yes, decay is an excellent example of uncertainty--you cannot predict when an individual nucleus is going to undergo any sort of decay.

No, decay does not violate causality; check the section on the theoretical basis of decay phenomena.

The decay process, like all hindered energy transformations, may be analogized by a snowfield on a mountain. While friction between the ice crystals may be supporting the snow's weight, the system is inherently unstable with regard to a state of lower potential energy. A disturbance would thus facilitate the path to a state of greater entropy: The system will move towards the ground state, producing heat, and the total energy will be distributable over a larger number of quantum states. Thus, an avalanche results. The total energy does not change in this process, but, because of the second law of thermodynamics, avalanches have only been observed in one direction and that is toward the "ground state" — the state with the largest number of ways in which the available energy could be distributed.

Such a collapse (a decay event) requires a specific activation energy. For a snow avalanche, this energy comes as a disturbance from outside the system, although such disturbances can be arbitrarily small. In the case of an excited atomic nucleus, the arbitrarily small disturbance comes from quantum vacuum fluctuations. A radioactive nucleus (or any excited system in quantum mechanics) is unstable, and can, thus, spontaneously stabilize to a less-excited system. The resulting transformation alters the structure of the nucleus and results in the emission of either a photon or a high-velocity particle that has mass (such as an electron, alpha particle, or other type).

I had never heard that Einstein borrowed from other people, including Tesla. It makes sense, really, since most scientific work is never done in a vacuum--no one reinvents the wheel by himself. Einstein would have been correct to borrow from Tesla, though--if we could recapture only one scientific mind from the 20th Century it should Nikola's.