Re: how do you make WHITE?

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 11:40 AM 3/7/99 -0600, brian whatcott wrote:
> This was a truly splendid offering. It offered insight.
> It offered experimentally verifiable prediction.
> It was great!

Thanks.

> That's what makes it such fun to nit-pick.   :-)

OK, but I get to pick back....

> The problem lies in the last sentence. It's a physicist's sentence.
> John believes he is talking about a physical mechanism which can
> provide a force field environment which holds charged particles in
> place.
> But what he actually SAYS, is a methematical construct.
> "To immobilize a charge, you need localization of the electron
> wavefunction."

I recognize a difference in degree but not a difference in kind between my
terminology and the suggested improvement.

I concede that people were not born knowing about wavefunctions.  But by
the same token, they weren't born knowing about force fields, either.  I
don't see how one can be considered more physical or less mathematical than
the other.  One is perhaps familiar to more people in the world right now,
but this list doesn't go to the whole world.  I thought it went to people
who had at least some acquaintance with wavefunctions.

In my message about light-wave physics, I don't see why the tangential
remark about electron-wave physics should be considered a "problem".

--- jsd