In a Search and Discovery news item (Physics Today, September 2009, page 16), we are faulted for not couching our work of the early 1980s “in terms of the then-nascent decoherence theory.” Well, we’re sorry about that, and can only offer the excuse that the term “decoherence” hadn’t yet been coined. We called it “quantum damping” and “tunneling friction.” The reader may agree that those are perhaps not such bad descriptions.
Anyone bothering to read the articles 1 , 2 or those we have written since 3 will find the solutions to Hund’s paradox and the ideas presently in circulation concerning decoherence, like “decoherence by the environment,” clearly and quantitatively explicated.
The situation is amusingly reminiscent of the case of Ramses II. Apparently, some people claim the pharaoh couldn’t have died of tuberculosis 4 because the disease wasn’t discovered until the 19th century.
