Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Distinct Configurations - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 April 2008 04:42AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 April 2008 07:19:07AM 2 points [-]

Pearson, my guess is that the natural spread of the mirror's particles over configuration space, and the natural spread of the photon's momentum, is greater than the momentum the mirror's particles gain from the photon bouncing. As a result, the blobs of amplitude in configuration space mostly overlap. Remember, in the real world, all of this happens in a continuous configuration space with a differentiable amplitude distribution.