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From: breuel@h-sc1.UUCP (thomas breuel)
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re: Alternate Universe
Message-ID: <1000@h-sc1.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Mar-86 22:30:14 EST
Article-I.D.: h-sc1.1000
Posted: Mon Mar 24 22:30:14 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Mar-86 05:03:28 EST
References: <10800018@uiucdcsb> <2036@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: breuel@h-sc1.UUCP (thomas breuel)
Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
Lines: 52

||Postulate a new universe with elementary particles that look, smell and taste
||like our electrons, quarks, photons etc.   The difference is that charge
||is a normal random variable in time with mean the same as our mean for
||each particle and a standard deviation of for a particle of charge q,   
||10^-6*q.
||Would such a universe have noticible differences from our own?
|
|The immediate answer is, you've broken charge conservation, so
|atoms would blow apart, etc.  A better answer is, it isn't
|permissible to postulate arbitrary changes like this.  Charge
|conservation is linked to other physical principles; everything
|is deeply intertwingled (to quote Ted Nelson).

I think this reply is untenable. You are extrapolating from current
physical theories into a realm to which they are not applicable anymore.

First of all, it is not clear to me at all that we would, or even could,
rule out experimentally that the unit charge is changing randomly within
a very small standard deviation. It seems to me that all measurements
of charge are purely statistical in nature, due to technical constraints
on measurement setups, and, ultimately, due to the constraints of
quantum mechanics. I am not saying that, in principle, you could not
devise an experiment that limited the standard deviation of the unit
charge arbitrarily; I'm saying that probably nobody has thought about
it or done such an experiment@. I *think*, however, that it is impossible,
*in principle* to prove that the unit charge doesn't vary at all (rather
than just limiting the standard deviation with which it could vary).

Secondly, from a purely theoretical point of view, there is no reason
whatsoever, that our current physics might not be a statistical physics
in the same way that classical thermodynamics or classical mechanics is.

Altogether, I would say that, not only are interesting universes
conceivable whose physical laws include a randomly varying unit charge@@,
there is no reason to rule out that *our* universe is one of those.

						Thomas.

@ before you reply to this point, think carefully whether the experiment
you have in mind really limits the standard deviation of the mean value
of the unit charge, or whether it limits the (possible) standard deviation
of individual unit charges around the measured mean.

However, there are probably good arguments about an upper limit to
the standard deviation of individual unit charges that one can make
on the basis of current experimental facts. If \sigma were 2e, for
example, things would probably start to look wrong even macroscopically...

@@ there are various find points about the meaning of 'random',
'interesting' vs. 'existing' universes, &c. in this statements that
may need some more explanation... perhaps when the misinterpretations
start, we can talk about them...