Carol. L. Herzenberg
Caroline L. Herzenberg | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Speculative cosmological model of the quantum-classical transition |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Argonne National Laboratory |
Caroline L. Herzenberg (listed as "Carol. L. Herzenberg") is an American physicist known for a speculative proposal that cosmological expansion plays a role in the transition of matter from quantum to classical behavior. She is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Career
Herzenberg is a physicist who worked at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. Over her career she worked in areas including low-energy nuclear physics, instrumentation development, arms control, and emergency preparedness, and she served as a principal investigator for the analysis of lunar samples returned by the Apollo program. She is a past president of the Association for Women in Science and a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also the author of historical works on women in science, including Women Scientists from Antiquity to the Present and (with Ruth H. Howes) Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project.
Alternative cosmology work
In a series of papers published in Physics Essays and posted as preprints, Herzenberg proposed that the presence of Hubble expansion within extended physical objects could drive the transition from quantum to classical behavior in ordinary matter. Related papers include "Becoming Classical: A Possible Cosmological Influence on the Quantum-Classical Transition" (Physics Essays, 2006) and "The Role of Hubble Time in the Quantum-Classical Transition" (Physics Essays, 2007). She also applied the approach to questions such as the origin of cosmic rays and dark matter, and wrote a popular non-technical exposition, "Why our human-sized world behaves classically, not quantum-mechanically."
These proposals lie outside the mainstream account of quantum decoherence and have not been adopted by the wider physics community; they represent Herzenberg's own conceptual line of argument rather than an established result.