Eric Cordian wrote:

...

Still, Nature abhors overcomplexification, and plain old quantum mechanics works just fine for predicting the results of experiments.

Oh yeah? So predict when this radioactive isotope will decay, if you

At 03:21 PM 7/14/02 +0100, Ben Laurie wrote: please. You mean "this particular *atom* will decay". And while QM can't help you with a particular atom, it also doesn't say that its impossible that knowledge of internal states of the atom wouldn't help you predict its fragmentation. Think about tossing tennis balls through spinning propellers. You might think you could only characterize the translucent prop-disk by a certain probability that the ball would get through vs. get shredded. ("Propeller mechanics") But if you could see the phase of the prop as it spun, you could time your tosses and predict which would get shredded. But without that high-speed strobe, you just think there's a disk where there's really a spinning blade.