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Perturbations in the Space-Time Continuum in Mass-Transport: 1. Why Public Transport Sucks

Occasionally, one has the privilege to be involved in a truly remarkable piece of research; a piece of research that will revolutionise the world in which one lives. It is with immense pleasure that the researchers at The Mill (YSA's research laboratories) present their latest work.

Quantum Dynamic Effects

By way of introduction to this subject, the late, great physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was asked to provide some insight:¹ "QDE theory is the most important sociophysical discovery since QED theory, and that won me a Nobel Prize!"

One of the most interesting examples of this phenomenon in real life is the Quantum Tunnelling of Buses (QTOB). Although everyone has experimented with this effect at some stage in their lives, most people will be unaware of the theoretical basis behind QTOB, which we present here for the first time. Initially, let us consider the sort of quantum tunnelling that is now well known to physicists.

Quantum tunnelling is a phenomenon that has no classical equivalent, so let us first consider an analogy. If you rolled a ball up one side of a hill with enough energy to get over the crest, you would expect that the ball would go up, over the top and roll down the other side. If you did not give the ball enough energy to go over the top of the hill, it would never make it over the crest. With the extremely small particles usually examined in the world of quantum mechanics, there is a chance that the ball would just "appear" on the other side of the hill, whether or not it has the energy to travel over the hill. The ability to get over a barrier (in quantum terms an "energy barrier") is described as quantum tunnelling, and is understood and used widely by physicists. In fact, the little laser-LED that is in your CD player works only because of this principle. The importance of the research conducted by The Mill is that this phenomenon has never been observed in anything bigger than an atom... until now.

The experimental procedure for the analysis of QTOB is quite simple: stand at a bus stop on a route with a frequency of 20 minutes or better and wait for a bus. Whilst waiting for a bus that is going in the direction you are travelling, you will invariably see between 3 and 5 buses travelling in the opposite direction. As we must obey the Law of Conservation of Buses,² it becomes clear that we must use QTOB to explain this observation. Under this theory, the buses are able to use the force³ (the QTOB Force, to be precise) to move instantaneously (or quantum tunnel) from one end of the route to the other, thus explaining the absence of any buses travelling in your preferred direction.

This principle may also be applied to trams, although the theory must be expressed differently due to constraints imposed by travelling along rails. The restriction of the tram tracks allows us to look at the wave nature of the tram in more detail (quantum mechanics tells us that everything is made of little waves, including trams). Quantum mechanical waves are like water waves: they can be superposed (added together). This means that if the crests of two waves meet, you get a bigger wave, but if a crest meets a trough, you get a flat spot. Different waves are often called states.

Early last century, Erwin Schrödinger proposed a "thought experiment"⁴ in which a cat would be placed in a sealed box together with a bottle of cyanide, a radioactive source and a geiger-counter (radiation detector). When the radioactive source decayed, the geiger-counter would detect the emitted radiation and break the bottle of cyanide, killing the cat. Once the box was closed, we would have no idea whether the cat was alive or not. In quantum terms, the cat has entered a superposition of two different states: dead and alive. It is not until we open the box again that we can determine what state the cat is in. The act of observing the cat forces it into either the dead or alive state.

Much like Schrödinger's Cat, we are proposing a Schrödinger Tram. Initially, a set of trams moving along a tram route may be considered to be in a superposition of states (adding together two crests gives a bigger ripple [a tram]; a crest and a trough gives a flat spot [no tram]). Once a tram has been seen somewhere on the route, the state of that tram has then been determined. This means that the tram is no longer a superposition of states; it is in one, well-known state. The immediate consequence of this is that all other instances of the tram on that route disappear. The result of this is that if you just miss a tram (arriving in time to see it travelling off into the distance without you) another one will not arrive for a very long time.

New Fundamental Particles

In addition to this groundbreaking research, researchers at The Mill are delighted to announce the discovery of a new fundamental particle. This particle appears to be closely related to the QTOB Force described earlier and, as we will see, represents an important finding. For years, physicists have believed that fundamental particles belonged to just two families: the quarks and the leptons. Quarks are the particles that make up things like protons and neutrons, while electrons and neutrinos are leptons. Here, we report the first evidence for a new family of particles: the transportons. While quarks and leptons are used to make up normal matter, transportons are the building blocks of transport vehicles.

Specifically, we have discovered the taxion and the anti-taxion - the particles from which taxis are made. Most significantly, we have found that these new particles have the same characteristics as the other fundamental particles, and are involved in pair creation and mutual annihilation events as follows. When a taxion and an anti-taxion meet, they destroy each other (mutually annihilate), releasing a lot of energy (which manifests itself as loud noise at traffic lights). Similarly, a pair-creation event may occur where a taxion and an anti-taxion are spontaneously generated out of a large amount of energy. The experimental evidence to support this theory includes the vast excess of anti-taxions in the city at 3am on a Saturday or Sunday morning. The large number of anti-taxions leads to a deficiency in taxions, which is why you can never get a taxi at that time.

Conclusion

Clearly, there is still some work to be done before the Quantum Tunnelling of Buses is fully explained in terms of the new transporton class of particles. We believe that the discovery of the taxion indicates the importance of this burgeoning field of research; with continued development, we hope to be able to discover more particles (like the busion and tramion) and ultimatelygain a more complete understanding of their properties. With such knowledge, we will be able to manipulate the vehicles of mass transport to the point where they may even run to the places we want to go and at the times we want to travel.

themill@ysa.org.au

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The Researchers at The Mill are interested in hearing about your unpublished research or new and interesting theories. If you have something in which you think our team would be interested, send it to us by email or snail mail to your YSA Chapter. Prizes will be awarded to good contributions as judged by the senior researchers.

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Last Modified: Monday, 08-Sep-2003 10:24:09 EST