Re: Science News - article on Quantum Crypto

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 9:28 PM 2/18/96, jim bell wrote:

>I love to be picky about such things.  Yes, I think bosons _DO_ interact
>with each other.  Before all you physics nerds flame me, hear me out:

I won't "flame you," just correct you.

It is well-known that photons are affected by gravitation...from the
Mossbauer effect to the bending of light by the sun (seen in eclipses) to
the gravitational lensing effects.

....
>Thus, presumably photons self-gravitate, and thus, SOME bosons "interact,"
>although admittedly this kind of interaction is a few dozen orders of
>magnitude lower than what you probably intended when you said "Bosons don't
>interact with each other at all."

What is being referred to is a term of art related to Bose-Einstein
statistics (the origin of the term boson, as contrasted to fermions, which
are affected by the Pauli Exclusion Principle, while bosons are not).

No list relevance that I can see, but then neither do nuclear triggers have
anything to do with the list.

--Tim May

Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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