On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 01:01:29PM -0400, Stephen Paul King wrote: > Esteemed Prof. Standish,
You're sounding German here: "Sehr Geherte Herr Professor Standish". Its how they broke the enigma code, you know! At least I'm not the "Very Estimated Professor Standish". > > Thank you for that correction. ;-) But you are missing the point that I > am trying to make here! :_( I wasn't really missing the point, just not commenting on your point. I don't think it fair to combine a technical correction with a critique. I think you were trying to use the non-Abelian nature (lack of commutability) of observables to make some statements about ordering of events, however you were confusing this with the nonordered property of complex numbers. More seriously though, given that the experience of time is a 1st person thing, the ordering of observables is chosen, so there is a definite ordering to experienced time. My TIME postulate assumes this ordering, for example. Noncommutability of observables surely can only effect the possibility of ordering of 3rd person events, which I suspect nobody here has given much thought to (least of all, me). Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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