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-------Original Message-------
From: Jerry Levy
Date: 3/26/2007 15:56:01
Subject: [OPE-L] advances and ongoing debates in physics and statistical mechanics? > Having checked your reference it appears that these debates
> were an early investigation as to whether Angels followed Fermi-Dirac
> or Bose-Einstein statistics, and as we now know, the latter
> has some pretty damned weird consequences.
Hi Paul C:
OK, I'll a couple of bites: a small and a large bite:
[putting aside the Estimation of the Magnitude of the Spatial
Concentration of Angels Question:]
small bite: what are the "pretty damned weird consequences"
of B-E statistics?
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The most famous are superfluidity of liquid helium and superconductivity, more recently the demonstration that matter can be made to interfere like light. The point about Bose Einstein statistics is that the more bosons you have the more likely that they are all to be in the same place and behaving the same way. Thus the helium atoms in liquid helium follow these statistics, as do the cooper pairs in superconducting currents. In both cases you get bulk behaviours in which the atomic character of the particles seems to vanish.
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Large bite: what advances and ongoing debates in physics have
Occurred in the last 30 years which Marxians interested in
Political economy should be aware of?
------------------------------------------- The relevance to the TP is that the assumption of a degnerate rate of profit amounts to assuming that capitalism follows B-E statistics with all capitals moving in lockstep in the same direction. I suspect that the apparently unsatisfactory nature of Klimans models stem from him needing to assume this kind of lockstep condensed behaviour by all of the capitals. In my opinion the only plausible target for such a behaviour in economics is not capitalism but a planned economy - which is what stands behind Samuelsons suggestion that prices of production are the approrpiate regulator for socialist economies.
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