Sunday night, the Patriots lost a heartbreaker to the Colts 35-34. The talk of the sports world yesterday was Bill Belichick’s decision to go for it on fouth-and-two on his own 28 yard line when he was up by six with just over two minutes to play. They didn’t get the first down, and turned… Continue reading There’s No Cloning in Football
Category: Quantum Optics
Poll: The Computers of the Future
Today’s Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you’re reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose “bits” can not only take on “0” and “1” states, but arbitrary superpositions of “0” and “1”. Such a computer… Continue reading Poll: The Computers of the Future
Imagine Science Film Festival
Both Physics Buzz and the X-Change Files are noting the Imagine Science Film Festival starting tomorrow in New York City. As the Buzz notes: This is only the film festival’s second year, but it’s already attracted the attention of major sponsors. Last year the journal Nature co-sponsored the festival, and this year the American Association… Continue reading Imagine Science Film Festival
Adventures in OA
The abbreviation here has a double meaning– both “Open Access” and “Operator Algebra.” In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe “coherent states” in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field– something like a laser, which behaves very much as… Continue reading Adventures in OA
Dorky Poll: Photon Operators
Prompted by working on lecture notes for Quantum Optics last night, a Dorky Poll about the mathematical formalism of photon number states What’s your favorite photon operator?(polls) I know it’s hard to pick, but choose only one.
A. O. Scott Is an Ignoramus
Via His Holiness, there is an aggressively stupid paragraph in a New York Times movie review today: Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, “A Serious Man,” some details have… Continue reading A. O. Scott Is an Ignoramus
Swashbuckling Through Quantum Optics
I’m teaching my Quantum Optics class again this term, out of a completely different textbook than last time around– I’m using Mark Fox’s Quantum Optics from the Oxford Master Series in AMO Physics, which is more of a regular textbook. I’ve got six students– four junior and senior physics majors, one senior chemistry major, and… Continue reading Swashbuckling Through Quantum Optics
Dorky Poll: State Manipulation
I’m teaching Quantum Optics again this term, talking about the interaction between light and matter in circumstances where you need to account for the quantum nature of one or both of those. We’re starting on the actual interactions today, albeit with a semi-classical approach (Einstein coefficients and the Fermi Golden Rule), but we’ve just finished… Continue reading Dorky Poll: State Manipulation
Schrödinger’s Virus?
The ArXiV Blog and several other sources last week linked to a new paper titled Towards Quantum Superposition of Living Organisms: The most striking feature of quantum mechanics is the existence of superposition states, where an object appears to be in different situations at the same time. Up to now, the existence of such states… Continue reading Schrödinger’s Virus?
Dorky Poll: Quantum Pictures
I’m feeling slightly better, but still a little wobbly, so here’s what may be the dorkiest Dorky Poll yet: How do you like your quantum mechanics?(trends)