A Possible Explanation for Shnoll Effect

Abstract

Shnoll and collaborators have discovered strange repeating patterns of random fluctuations of physical observables such as number n of nuclear decays in a given time interval. Periodically occurring peaks for the distribution of the number N(n) of measurements producing n events in a series of measurements as a function of n is observed instead of a single peak. The positions of the peaks are not random and the patterns depend on position and time varying periodically in time scales possibly assignable to Earth-Sun and Earth-Moon gravitational interaction. These observations suggest a modification of the expected probability distributions but it is very difficult to imagine any physical mechanism in the standard physics framework. Rather, a universal deformation of predicted probability distributions would be in question requiring something analogous to the transition form classical physics to quantum physics. The hint about the nature of the modification comes from the TGD inspired quantum measurement theory proposing a description of the notion of finite measurement resolution in terms of inclusions of so called hyper-finite factors of type II1 (HFFs) and closely related quantum groups. Also p-adic physics -another key element of TGD is expected to be involved.