Implications of the Precautionary Principle for Environmental Regulation in the United States: Examples from the Control of Hazardous Air Pollutants in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments

Goldstein and Carruth argue that the hazardous air pollutant provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments provide an example of the Precautionary Principle incorporated into US environmental legislation. Evaluating the outcome thus far leads them to the conclusion that utilizing the Precautionary Principle as a basis for legislation can be problematic to public-health goals

Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory

We discuss a recently proposed extension of Bohmian mechanics to quantum field theory. For more or less any regularized quantum field theory there is a corresponding theory of particle motion, which in particular ascribes trajectories to the electrons or whatever sort of particles the quantum field theory is about. Corresponding to the nonconservation of the particle number operator in the quantum field theory, the theory describes explicit creation and annihilation events: the world lines for the particles can begin and end.Comment: 4 pages, uses RevTeX4, 2 figures; v2: shortened and with minor addition

Seven Steps Towards the Classical World

Classical physics is about real objects, like apples falling from trees, whose motion is governed by Newtonian laws. In standard Quantum Mechanics only the wave function or the results of measurements exist, and to answer the question of how the classical world can be part of the quantum world is a rather formidable task. However, this is not the case for Bohmian mechanics, which, like classical mechanics, is a theory about real objects. In Bohmian terms, the problem of the classical limit becomes very simple: when do the Bohmian trajectories look Newtonian?Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, uses latexsy

Are All Particles Identical?

We consider the possibility that all particles in the world are fundamentally identical, i.e., belong to the same species. Different masses, charges, spins, flavors, or colors then merely correspond to different quantum states of the same particle, just as spin-up and spin-down do. The implications of this viewpoint can be best appreciated within Bohmian mechanics, a precise formulation of quantum mechanics with particle trajectories. The implementation of this viewpoint in such a theory leads to trajectories different from those of the usual formulation, and thus to a version of Bohmian mechanics that is inequivalent to, though arguably empirically indistinguishable from, the usual one. The mathematical core of this viewpoint is however rather independent of the detailed dynamical scheme Bohmian mechanics provides, and it amounts to the assertion that the configuration space for N particles, even N ``distinguishable particles,'' is the set of all N-point subsets of physical 3-space.Comment: 12 pages LaTeX, no figure

On the quantum probability flux through surfaces

We remark that the often ignored quantum probability current is fundamental for a genuine understanding of scattering phenomena and, in particular, for the statistics of the time and position of the first exit of a quantum particle from a given region, which may be simply expressed in terms of the current. This simple formula for these statistics does not appear as such in the literature. It is proposed that the formula, which is very different from the usual quantum mechanical measurement formulas, be verified experimentally. A full understanding of the quantum current and the associated formula is provided by Bohmian mechanics.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, revised and more detailed version, to be published in Journal of Statistical Physics, August 9

Trajectories and Particle Creation and Annihilation in Quantum Field Theory

We develop a theory based on Bohmian mechanics in which particle world lines can begin and end. Such a theory provides a realist description of creation and annihilation events and thus a further step towards a "beable-based" formulation of quantum field theory, as opposed to the usual "observable-based" formulation which is plagued by the conceptual difficulties--like the measurement problem--of quantum mechanics.Comment: 11 pages LaTeX, no figures; v2: references added and update

Bell-Type Quantum Field Theories

In [Phys. Rep. 137, 49 (1986)] John S. Bell proposed how to associate particle trajectories with a lattice quantum field theory, yielding what can be regarded as a |Psi|^2-distributed Markov process on the appropriate configuration space. A similar process can be defined in the continuum, for more or less any regularized quantum field theory; such processes we call Bell-type quantum field theories. We describe methods for explicitly constructing these processes. These concern, in addition to the definition of the Markov processes, the efficient calculation of jump rates, how to obtain the process from the processes corresponding to the free and interaction Hamiltonian alone, and how to obtain the free process from the free Hamiltonian or, alternatively, from the one-particle process by a construction analogous to "second quantization." As an example, we consider the process for a second quantized Dirac field in an external electromagnetic field.Comment: 53 pages LaTeX, no figure

Development of optimum clamp combinations for strap-down inertial measuring units with field replaceable sensors

Optimum clamp combinations for strap down inertial measuring units with field replaceable sensor