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Rather than comment on the experiment I will suggest that I do not understand the experiment.

Consider that the shortest pulse possible would consist of a single photon. One could not make a pulse shorter than that!

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I don't know about a short pulse; what I was thinking of was successively pinpointing the location of the electron repeatedly in as short a time as possible.

The position of an electron can be pinpointed with little uncertainty, as long as we accept a high uncertainty with regard to the electron's velocity.

You are right that the very act of measuring the position of the electron changes the position and energy of the electron, but I disagree with your conclusion that this means we cannot know where the electron was. I don't know how physicists determine the location of a quantum particle, but the uncertainty principle allows for the position to be determined with precision in exchange for knowing very little about the velocity.

If such an experiment were to show the electron following a path it wouldn't be a "natural" path like the one an electron follows when left alone, but it would still provide valuable information. And it would be especially interesting if the electron was located at two different points within such a short time period light would not have had time to span that distance.



Also, by changing the wavelength/frequency of the photons being used to probe the electron you also change the energy the photon carries. This energy can be calibrated to promote the electron into a particular orbital. If a highly unstable orbital is chosen the electron will immediately emit a photon and return to a more stable orbital. If the orbitals are chosen correctly it may be possible to have the electron drop into a more stable orbital so quickly that the photons never catch it in the excited state, and only yield information about the photon in one particular orbital.

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Meade DS-2130AT w/ GOTO
Nikon 12x50AEs


Without judgement what would we do? We would be forced to look at ourselves...

-Death

Edited by Dane B (07/14/08 06:14 AM)

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