Status: U
Return-Path: <ajp@kzoo.edu>
Return-Path: <ajp@kzoo.edu>
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 12:24:48 -0800
From: AJP <ajp@kzoo.edu>
Reply-To: ajp@kzoo.edu
Organization: Kalamazoo College
To: gat@jpl.nasa.gov
Subject: ajp 15441

Dear Dr. Gat,

Below you will find a copy of the reviewer's report on your manuscript
"Quantum Mysteries Disentangled", our manuscript #15441. As
you can see, this reviewer does not recommend publication, and our own
reading of the manuscript concurs with the reviewer's opinion. Hence, we

have decided not to publish your manuscript.

      Sincerely,

       Jan Tobochnik

Referee report on "Quantum Mysteries Disentangled", by Gat

The author presents a study of a few of the more interesting
phenomena in quantum mechanics,
namely the quantum eraser, and it's relation to the general feature
of entanglement.
I think the manuscript is basically correct, modulo the philosophical
musings at the end
(which can be neither correct nor incorrect since they are really
philosophy, and not
physics, and as such, not really appropriate for AJP [and, I might
add, his philosophical
viewpoint is *not* shared by many physicists]).  However, the overall
tone of the
article is that physicists have been misleading people all along, and
I object to this tone.
There are very many references which do tell the story just as the
author has. In this
sense, there is nothing really new in the present manuscript.  For
example,
the
author should become familiar with a great number of references on these

topics
which basically explain quantum erasers just as the author does.
For example, the first paper by Scully, Englert and Walther (Nature
351, 111 (1991))
explains the phenomenon of fringes and anti-fringes, depending on the
outcome made
on the measurement subsystem.
The papers by Kwiat et al. (PRA 45, 7729 (1992)) and Herzog et al
(PRL 75, 3034 (1995))
demonstrate this experimentally, discuss the requirement for looking
at correlations,
and mention that the early tests of entangled photons were
essentially versions of quantum erasers.
And I think that any reasonable paper on the topic is obliged to
direct the readership to at least
some of the many experiments done.

Also, contrary to the author's claims, entanglement to some
unobserved system does *not*
solve the mystery of random measurement outcomes.  It does account
for the loss of
coherence in the subsystem (i.e., the off-diagonal elements of the
density matrix for
the subsystem vanish); however, this still does not explain *what*
determines which
measurement outcome is observed from among the remaining diagonal
matrix elements.

In conclusion, the present manuscript, while correct, contains no new
information or
insight.  It might be suitable for a different journal, such as the
Foundations of Physics.
--

AMERICAN JOURNAL of PHYSICS
Jan Tobochnik, Editor
Harvey Gould, Associate Editor
Julie Wenzel, Assistant to the Editor
Pam Sotherland, Editorial Office Assistant
ajp@kzoo.edu
www.kzoo.edu/ajp/
Online Journal ojps.aip.org/ajp/
616-337-5802
Kalamazoo College
1200 Academy St.
Kalamazoo, MI 49006