Locality, Factorizability, and the Maxwell Boltzmann Distribution

Foundations of Physics

Volumn 26, Issue 9, 1996, Pages 1231-1242

  Pitowsky, Itamar ^a   Shoresh, Noam ^b  

^a HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM   (Israel)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0030507439     PISSN: 00159018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02275627     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. M. Planck, Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) 1, 69-122 (1900).
2. There is a quantum field analogue of this problem. Malament (unpublished) considered a free quantum field in the vacuum state and two detectors located in separate positions in space. (A detector is just a system with two distinct states, "ground state" and "exited state".) He proved that if one detector jumps to the exited state then the probability that the second detector will also do so increases, despite the spacelike separation between the two events. This type of nonlocality should be distinguished from the (stronger) notion of J. Bell, Physics 1, 195-200 (1964). On the subject of nonlocality in quantum field theory, see M. Redhead, Found. Phys. 25, 123-137 (1995), and references therein!
3. There is a quantum field analogue of this problem. Malament (unpublished) considered a free quantum field in the vacuum state and two detectors located in separate positions in space. (A detector is just a system with two distinct states, "ground state" and "exited state".) He proved that if one detector jumps to the exited state then the probability that the second detector will also do so increases, despite the spacelike separation between the two events. This type of nonlocality should be distinguished from the (stronger) notion of J. Bell, Physics 1, 195-200 (1964). On the subject of nonlocality in quantum field theory, see M. Redhead, Found. Phys. 25, 123-137 (1995), and references therein!
4. See, for example, Y. S. Chow, and H. Teicher, Probability Theory: Independence, Interchangeability, Martingales (Springer, New York, 1978), p. 186.
5. The derivations of the distribution from maximum entropy considerations fall in the second category. It can be shown that taking maximum entropy is equivalent to assuming total factorizability of the distribution function.
6. L. D. Landau, and K. M. Lifshitz, Statistical Physics, Part 1, 3rd edn. (Pergamon, Oxford, 1980), p. 7.