ozwi

Strangely, no-one has mentioned Bohm. Little doubt the over-whelming professional view today would be that we live in an indeterministic world because QM appears to be inherently indeterministic. However, despite Von Neumann claiming to have proved that a hidden variables-based deterministic universe was impossible, he was shown (by David Bohm) to be wrong. Bohm was furthermore able to actually develop a hidden variables deterministic model that was consistent with all the experimental findings of QM. This 'Bohmian mechanics' (BM) model has been criticised on various grounds but as far as I know it remains a possible model. I think that it may make some predictions that are in conflict with the Copenhagen model/interpretation (& the others) but testing this would require precision that is not likely to be available in the foreseeable future. There are various possibilities. eg I understand there is a version of BM that is inherently indeterministic. Of course, the deterministic models cannot be used in practice to predict the future with any useful precision (see chaos theory, etc etc). My final thought is that the jury is out on this intriguing quesion of determinism - & seems likely to remain out for some time to come!

Lightning EMP This morning where I live in NZ there was a thunder storm & as I lay in bed I was seeing the occasional flicker of lightning through my generally closed eye-lids as I lay resting, followed by thunder claps a few seconds later. I lay there quite relaxed with my eyes closed and my head looking into the sheets and away from the window and after perhaps five minutes with no thunderstorm activity I suddenly experienced a very bright transient image of a light in my head that came and went in a fraction of a second and not at all like the flickers of lightning i had sensed previously. It was followed by a massive thunderclap about three of four seconds later. Perhaps understandably, I believe it is extremely improbable that the image and the thunder were not tied to the same event. However, I also feel strongly that the image was something other than my seeing (through my eyelids) a broad flash of light entering the room from a lightning strike. It had a completely different character. I feel that I could have experienced this equally had I been in a light-proof room. (I'm not saying Faraday cage, just *light* proof.) Now had this been a sound (a 'pop', say) rather than a mental image, I gather I would be on safe physics ground, as I believe an EMP can have an associated sound which is coupled to the EMP and thereby is carried along at the speed of light, c (not propagating as a sound wave at c of course). However, I did not experience a sound, only the mental image as described above. So my tentative hypothesis at present is that I experienced a lightning EMP by virtue of a direct effect it had on my brain as it passed through it (somewhat as it might have had some effect on any nearby electric circuit that it might also have passed through). And my brain rendered this experience as an intensely bright (but painless) white light which was transient and pulse-like, more or less round and of limited size (that is, it did not flood across my full field of vision). I wonder if anyone can comment on this or has had a similar experience?