Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings gets credit for inspiring two posts today with his proposed Murphy’s Law experiment and this one, about an unrelated issue in quantum measurement. This is an analogy suggested by a colleague a couple of years ago, comparing the projection of a quantum wavefunction in the measurement process to the lottery. The […]
Tag: quantum
Measuring Temperature by Counting Atoms: “Suppressed Fluctuations in Fermi Gases”
When one of the most recent issues of Physical Review Letters hit my inbox, I immediately flagged these two papers as something to write up for ResearchBlogging. This I looked at the accompanying viewpoint in Physics, and discovered that Chris Westbrook already did most of the work for me. And, as a bonus, you can […]
Quantum Mechanics Is Square: “Ruling Out Multi-Order Interference in Quantum Mechanics”
This week’s big story in physics is this Science paper by a group out of Austria Canada (edited to fix my misreading of the author affiliations), on a triple-slit interference effect. This has drawn both the usual news stories and also some complaining about badly-worded news stories. So, what’s the deal? What did they do […]
The Physics of the Imbecile: Chopra Interviews Kaku
I don’t remember who pointed me at this transcript of Deepak Chopra interviewing Michio Kaku, but if I remember who it was, I fully intend to hate them. DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now? MK: In principle. What we’re talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the […]
Quick Impressions of Bohmian Mechanics
I get asked my opinion of Bohmian mechanics a fair bit, despite the fact that I know very little about it. This came up again recently, so I got some suggested reading from Matt Leifer, on the grounds that I ought to learn something about it if I’m going to keep being asked about it. […]
The Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time Is…
Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of lasers). The […]
Amazing Laser Application 11: Frequency Combs!
What’s the application? An optical frequency comb is a short-duration pulsed laser whose output can be viewed as a regularly spaced series of different frequencies. If the pulses are short enough, this can span the entire visible spectrum, giving a “comb” of colored lines on a traditional spectrometer. This can be used for a wide […]
So You’d Like to Learn Some Physics…
Via Twitter, Michael Barton is looking for some good books about physics. I was Twitter-less for a few days around the period of his request, and this is a more-than-140-characters topic if ever there was one, so I’m turning it into a blog post. The reason for the request is that he’s going to be […]
What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics
I gave a talk today for a group of local home-school students and parents, on the essential elements of quantum physics. The idea was to give them a sense of what sets quantum mechanics apart from other theories of physics, and why it’s a weird and wonderful thing. The title is, of course, a reference […]
Entanglement Happens
There have been a bunch of stories recently talking about quantum effects at room temperature– one, about coherent transport in photosynthesis , even escaped the science blogosphere. They’ve mostly said similar things, but Thursday’s ArxivBlog entry had a particular description of a paper about entanglement effects that is worth unpacking: Entanglement is a strange and […]