There is persistent heterodoxy in the physics literature concerning the
proper treatment of those quantons that are unstable against spontaneous decay.
Following a brief litany of this heterodoxy, I develop some of the consequences
of assuming that such quantons can exist, undecayed and isolated, at definite
times and that their treatment can be carried out within a standard quantum
theoretic state space. This assumption requires hyperplane dependence for the
unstable quanton states and leads to clarification of some recent results
concerning deviations from relativistic time dilation of decay lifetimes. In
the course of the discussion I make some observations on the relationship of
unstable quantons to quantum fields.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figures, revised with added references, section 4 revise
