Those M&D words: Gating

[Ya Sam]

Thanks. Good to have you around. Be ready to be shamelessly exploited when 
we reach Candlebrow and Gottingen.


>
>After no research whatsoever, I'll put my money on "blatant [and 
>deliberate]
>anachronism." To me it has overtones that make it even more so:
>
>1) in quantum mechanics, one implication of the uncertainty principle was
>virtual particles (including photons and electrons we'd usually interpret 
>as
>energy). What had been the Newtonian "bookkeeping" of conservation of 
>matter
>and energy turns out to have a little wiggle room in it. Anywhere, at any
>moment, particles and their antiparticles can appear out of nothing and 
>then
>annihilate each other, as long as a quantity combining their momentum and
>the time of existence stays below a certain threshold. In this case,
>"repayment" is deferable  -- although not "indefinitely" -- and certain
>observed phenomena can only be explained in <ahem> light of this jittering
>sea of virtual particles.
>
>2) more recently, Hawking radiation: Steven H. showed that if a
>particle-antiparticle pair shows up just at the event horizon of a black
>hole, one can get sucked in while the other flies off (and is promoted to a
>real particle). Until then the dogma had been that absolutely nothing comes
>out of a BH; the consequence of Hawking's idea was that in fact they emit a
>faint "glow," and  -- because on a large scale matter and energy *are*
>rigorously conserved --  they shrink over time (the smaller, the faster) 
>and
>eventually evaporate.
>
>Not quite the _perpetuum mobile_ that dances teasingly through the pages of
>M&D <tick...tick...tick>, but teasingly close.
>

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